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LANG, JOHN (1817-1864), first native-born Australian novelist, was born at Parramatta, probably in 1817. He was educated at Sydney College, and is mentioned in the chapter “My School Days” in Rolf Boldrewood’s In Bad Company and Other Stories. Lang could hardly, however, have been at the school with T. A. Browne (“Rolf Boldrewood”), as Browne was not born until 1826. Lang went to Cambridge in 1838 and after qualifying as a barrister returned to Australia. In 1842 at a public meeting he seconded a motion proposed by W. C. Wentworth, that the Crown be petitioned to grant the colony a representative assembly. A few months later he went to India and was successful as a barrister. He became a journalist and in 1845 established a paper, the Mofussilite, at Meerut. He also wrote some novels which appeared serially in the Mofussilite and in Fraser’s Magazine. These began to be published in book form in 1853, The Wetherbys and Too Clever by Half appearing in that year, followed by Too Much Alike (1854), The Forger’s Wife (1855), Captain Macdonald (1856), Will he Marry Her (1858), The Ex-Wife (1858), My Friend’s Wife (1859), The Secret Police (1859), and Botany Bay; or True Stories of the Early Days of Australia (1859). Some of these were very popular and were often reprinted, the twelfth edition of Too Clever by Half appearing in 1878. Botany Bay has been reprinted several times, sometimes under the titles of Clever Criminals, or Remarkable Convicts. Fisher’s Ghost reprints 10 of the 13 stories of Botany Bay. Lang also published Geraldine, A Ballad in 1854, and in 1859 Wanderings in India and other Sketches reprinted from Household Words. He visited London in 1859, and was for a short time at Calcutta where he issued the Optimist. He died at Mussoorie, India, on 20 August 1864.
Source: Dictionary of Australian Biography.
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British India has been glorified by the deeds of many great statesmen and heroic and skilful generals, but her list of eminent literati is comparatively short. A man, therefore, of literary fame, or even of literary notoriety, cannot pass that bourne whence no traveller returns without calling forth something beyond the common obituary record in a country like British India, in which an author of any pretension is still a rara avis. The death of John Lang has furnished a subject for columns of biographical memoranda and an editorial comment in the Indian papers. His name was not altogether unknown even to English readers; for his various novels — “The Wetherbys,” “The ex-Wife,” “The Forger's Wife,” “The Secret Police,” “Too Clever by Half,” “Will He Marry Her?” “Too Much Alike; or, the Three Calendars”—originally published as serials, some of them in Fraser's Magazine, and others in the Mofussilite, are all printed in a cheap form for railway reading; so that travellers in every part of the kingdom who have cast their eyes over the bookstalls are all more or less familiar with the name of the author and the titles of his works, even when they may not have read a page of their interiors. Mr. Lang was the author of a play called “Plot and Passion.” It was pruned and revised by Douglas Jerrold and Tom Taylor, and was brought out at one of the London theatres. John Lang was the son of an officer of the 50th Regiment, Military Secretary to General Lauchlin, Governor of New South Wales, where the subject of this sketch was born in the year 1816. He was originally educated for the bar, but he had a strong fancy for the sea, and was for some time a midshipman on board the Warspite, a line-of-battle ship. He subsequently resumed his legal studies. In 1837 he went to England to finish his education at Cambridge. At the age of twenty-four he went to Australia, where, it is said, he for some time held the acting appointment of Attorney-general. In 1842 he went to India, and endeavoured to get into practice at the Calcutta bar; but, to the best of our knowledge or remembrance, he was for some reason or other unsuccessful. Though a very sharp and clever man undoubtedly, we are inclined to think he never had any real liking or peculiar fitness for his profession, which demands a steadiness of purpose, and a closeness of application to dry details, which were not amongst his characteristic qualities. We give no credit to the story that Lord Dalhousie was “so extremely partial to him” that his lordship expressed a desire to recommend Mr. Lang for an Indian judgeship; and the friend who narrates this anecdote admits that the idle free life which Mr. Lang had led unfitted him for such an appointment. It is added that he had the impudence to ask his lordship of what particular offence he had been guilty that so degrading an offer should be thrust upon him. Another story of a similar character, and equally apocryphal, is told of him. When the State prisoner Moolraj Mooltan was prosecuted, the Government, it is said, asked him to plead for the accused; he demanded a fee of two lakhs. The Government offered one lakh. Mr. Lang declined it, adding that he was a professional barrister-at-law, and not a cats-meat-man, who might be beaten down in his charges. These were, perhaps, mere after-dinner anecdotes from Mr. Lang’s own lips. There is not always truth in wine. Mr. Lang felt himself more at home when he deserted the bar for the press, and became editor of the Mofussilite. Here he was eminently successful. His articles were spicy and piquant, and personal and powerful. He purchased the Mofussilite, and soon made the paper a valuable property; but it is said that latterly he so neglected it, and left the editorial department so much to feebler hands, that its subscription list was reduced from 2,000 to 200. His contributors were quite as venomous and personal as himself, but they had no share of his ready wit and freshness and force of style. Mr. Lang was once punished for a malignant libel by a heavy fine and a month's imprisonment in the Calcutta jail. His most partial friends must admit that he was a bad-natured writer, but he is said to have been a good-natured man, though passionate and impulsive, and always getting into awkward scrapes and personal disputes, in which he was generally in the wrong, because he was rash and reckless; and if he was very warm-hearted, he was, also, very hot-headed. We never heard of but one success of his at the bar, and that was the famous case of Lalla Jotee Persaud, the Government commissariat contractor. The Government, unwilling to pay his heavy bill for supplies, had the meanness to attempt to evade the debt by charging the Lalla with fraud and conspiracy. The case was a simple and easy one, and Mr. Lang undertook and carried it through with complete success. The Government was compelled to settle the account against it, and the grateful Lalla Jotee Persaud presented Mr. Lang with a fee of two lacs of rupees.
Mr. Lang’s novels are light and amusing, excellent railway reading, but they give him no station in the literature of his country. But for a sort of brilliant flippancy, and for gay and easy humour, and forcible satire, and pungent personality, his editorial writings were unrivalled in British India.
Mr. Lang has left a wife and three grown up children. His wife was the sister of Mr. Justice Peterson, of the Calcutta High Court. His eldest son is a lisutenant in the Royal Artillery. Mr. Lang died at Mussoorie, in his forty-eighth year, The immediate cause of his death was an attack of bronchitis, but he had long been reduced to a skeleton, and, latterly could not write an article or undergo any physical effort without stimulants, and pouring gurrahs of cold water on his head. At a post mortem examination (which Mr. Lang had himself desired in the event of his death), the fact was elicited that his brain, though healthy, was nine ounces less in weight than the average weight of the brains of ordinary men. This fact is curious, for John Lang, though he may not have been a man of genius, was, unquestionably, a man of very remarkable powers and great readiness and versatility of mind. He was not, however, what some of his admirers describe him to have been, “a man of gigantic intellect.” He seems, with all his failings, to have been very warmly beloved by many intimate friends, and though he had obtained by his fierce personalities, when he had the editorial pen in his hands, the character of a most unamiable writer, he is said, in private life, to have been a warm-hearted and generous companion—
“The best-natured man with the worst-natured muse.”
It would be unjust to his memory if we were to pass over the anecdote of his having plunged into the sea on his passage out to India to save a little child that had fallen overboard. He saved the child’s life, but not without great risk to his own, for he was a quarter of an hour in the water, and was not, as we have heard, a good swimmer.
Source: Allen’s Indian Mail - Thursday 20 October 1864.