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If the rise and fall of the comparative method and the ushering of a new era of cultural relativism may be well-known anthropological narratives, Sloan is admirably attuned to Lang's nuances and complexities within that debate, including his willingness in later work to challenge the privileging of race in ethnographic accounts of progress. When Thomas Hardy ironically referred to Lang's objections to Tess of the D Urbervilles (1891) as the work of a critic of "innate gentility," he was aware that Lang's classical training and previous academic positions gave a particular kind of cultural authority to journalistic pronouncements that Lang claimed were simply personal taste (Tess of the D'Urbervilles [James К. CAROLINE SUMPTER ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at Queen's University Belfast.
Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect, by John Sloan; pp. ix + 285. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, £78.00.
Andrew Lang was so prolific that the New York Times was not alone in joking that he was a syndicate ("Andrew Lang as a Syndicate" [14 Jan. 1899], 24). He was indefatigable, his publications ranging across Homeric and folklore scholarship, anthropology, journalism, psychical research, Jacobite history, English and comparative literature, poetry and popular fiction. The latter alone included authored fairy tales, the edited colored fairy-tale books (in collaboration with his wife, Leonora), and less successful attempts to pull off contemporary fiction and romance. Almost as an aside, John Sloan credits Lang as an originator of the true crime genre. It might seem surprising, then, that it was his biography of the Conservative politician Stafford Northcote that "threatened to overwhelm him." When Sloan surmises that Lang may have accepted the task before realizing "the huge amount of work life-writing entailed," readers can't help but reflect on the considerable work entailed in the biography in their own hands (129). Before sleuthing in numerous archives, lesser biographers might have quailed before the library stacks alone: Lang's prodigious output of books and articles could threaten to overwhelm any biographer, who might be fearful of going the way of Leonard Bast.
Lang may have wished that someone else was tasked with doing Northcote's biographical "hoeing," but Sloan's tilling of the soil of Lang's life and work is clearly a labor of love (qtd. in Sloan 129). He is open about the challenge of writing a biography of a subject who asked recipients to burn letters on receipt, and whose wife, on destroying his papers after his death, complained that "her wrists ached for weeks" (viii). Lang claimed to be the first "psycho-folklorist," seeing the unconscious as the root of creativity ("Protest of a Psycho-Folklorist," Folklore, vol. 6, no. 3 [1895], 236). There is, however, no projection of the hidden impulses that characterize psycho-biography here: instead, primacy is given to the shaping contexts of Lang's Scottish and English cultural milieux, and to thatimmense body of work. The significance of Lang's Oxford daysis particularly well delineated: Sloan's delving into university magazines reveals the intellectual lineage of much of the verse that followed. While his subjects range makes it impossible for every publication to be explored in depth, the rigorous attempt to capture the multiple intellectual cross currents of Lang's writing is the book's most impressive feat. Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect is, first and foremost, an intellectual biography, a history of Lang's ideas as much as a chronicle of his life.
Sloan's cogent analysis of Lang's position on totemism might be taken as a case in point: this is clear and thoughtful and has a lot to offer historians of folklore and anthropology. We see Lang intellectually wrestling with Max Müller, deeply offending James George Frazer (the latter pleaded to see no more of Lang's letters), and meeting his match in Alexander Goldenweiser, a disciple of Franz Boas, in the first decade of the twentieth century. If the rise and fall of the comparative method and the ushering of a new era of cultural relativism may be well-known anthropological narratives, Sloan is admirably attuned to Lang's nuances and complexities within that debate, including his willingness in later work to challenge the privileging of race in ethnographic accounts of progress. The latter, Sloan reveals, drew admiration from Theodore Roosevelt.
This biography doesn't disguise Lang's difficult persona. His subject adopted, Sloan notes, "the Oxford manner of saying frankly what one thinks to friends" (206). Lang, however, clearly alienated a good number of them, and his Oxford manner may have symbolized something more than intellectual acuity to those who had to make their names in literature without the benefits of Oxford's cultural networks. When Thomas Hardy ironically referred to Lang's objections to Tess of the D Urbervilles (1891) as the work of a critic of "innate gentility," he was aware that Lang's classical training and previous academic positions gave a particular kind of cultural authority to journalistic pronouncements that Lang claimed were simply personal taste (Tess of the D'Urbervilles [James К. Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1892], ix). It was not just Marie Corelli and Hardy but Lang's erstwhile friend Edmund Gosse-whom he privately declared "no scholar"-who could feel stung by his words (Lang qtd. in Sloan 115).
Sloan's sympathies lie largely with Lang in these controversies. He does, however, fully acknowledge the extent to which Lang's impressive academic and literary achievements were initially given a helping hand by his Selkirk family's academic connections and by wider university networks of influence. It is entirely to this biography's credit that the quality and generosity of the research open a conversation on Lang rather than seek to have the last word on him. If there is plentiful archival and contextual material provided here that might be used to critique rather than support Sloan's thesis about Lang's "democratic intellect," the book provides a stimulating and thoroughly engaging starting point for that debate.
Lang certainly worked innovatively at the interface of disciplines and moved seamlessly between academic and popular writing-characteristics that have inspired his recent critical renaissance among academics who are now rewarded rather than looked down upon for doing the same. He used an anthropological framework to give cultural value to the popular romance literature that he enjoyed; as Sloan shows, his writing could be witty, accessible, and ingenious. It was Benjamin Jowett, however, rather than Lang, who thought English literature was a subject that could be taught.
Here, Lang is presented as a social conservative who studiously attempted to avoid politics; whether he entirely did so remains an open question. Sloan offers fascinating insights into the notorious reputation of Lang's grandfather as one of the most brutal figures in the Highland Clearances, but not all readers may sympathize with Lang's decision to accept a commission for a Dictionary of National Biography entry on him in which he appeared to launder that history. Lang's late fears of a revolution ("the middle class should have made a volunteer army, long ago" [qtd. in Sloan 220]), are presented by Sloan as the "irrational . . . anxieties" of a man a few months from his death, but Lang seems far from straightforwardly democratic at earlier junctures, too (220). Itis not necessary to warm to Lang's persona or to his politics to share Sloan's appreciation of the intellectual importance of his writings, however. Nearly eighty years after Roger Lancelyn Green's critical biography, Sloan is to be applauded for making an impressively wellresearched case for why we should still be reading Lang. One suspects that his subject would have enjoyed entering the fray in our current debates over his legacy.
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