Turning Historian

Abstract In the years from 1894 to 1900, Lang caused a stir with his defence of the saintly Joan of Arc against the charge of imposture or delusion and with his sympathetic biography of John Gibson Lockhart at the expense of Blackwood’s Magazine. Lang’s ‘Pickle’ books, identifying the notorious spy for the Hanoverian government at the time of 1745 Jacobite uprising to be a respected Jacobite clan chief, outraged many in Scotland. Lang’s own loyalties were tested in writing the DNB entry on his grandfather, Patrick Sellar, and the part his grandfather had played in the Sutherland Clearances. More contentious still, Lang’s evidence in The Making of Religion for ‘high gods’ and belief in an ‘All-Father’ among ‘low races’ succeeded in offending both rational secularists and Catholic theologians, and brought him into dispute with the Folklore Society and anthropological circles. He continued to divide his time between combative scholarly works and the calmer waters of popular literature and journalism, collaborating with A. E. W Mason on a Jacobite thriller, Parson Kelly, penning a weekly causerie for the Illustrated London News, and giving rein to his cross-disciplinary interests in a bi-monthly ‘Notes on New Books’ in the newly launched Cosmopolis magazine. In 1899, after a delay caused by the Boer War, he published the first volume of his revisionary History of Scotland.