Alexander Hay Japp

Alexander Hay Japp

Dr Alexander Hay Japp LLD, FRSE
File:Japp, Alexander Hay.jpg
Born	1837
Died	1905
Residence	National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, SW
Occupation	literary
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow left 1900 last listed elected_AI 1900.05.29 clubs National Liberal Club societies Royal Society of Edinburgh

Notes

House Notes

proposed 1900.05.15

Notes From Elsewhere

Alexander Hay Japp (1837–1905) was a Scottish author, journalist and publisher.

Born Dun, Forfarshire; died Coulsdon, Surrey. He had a mixed career, starting as clerk in various offices but moving into journalism, publishing and writing. Many of his works were published under a range of pseudonyms. Some of his work is apparently less than reliable. In the 1900 AI list of Fellows, he is down as having an LL.D. It is not clear where he received this.

Publications

External Publications

Select poems. With a preface by A. H. Japp Unknown Binding – 1907

Japp was versatile and prolific writer, writing under pseudonyms such as "H. A. Page", "A. F. Scot", "E. Conder Gray", and "A. N. Mount Rose" as well as in his own name. In his own name he issued in 1865 Three Great Teachers of our own Time: Carlyle, Tennyson, and Ruskin, which Ruskin found perceptive. He issued a selection of Thomas de Quincey's Posthumous Works (vol. i. 1891; vol. ii. 1893) and De Quincey Memorials: being Letters and other Records here first published (1891).[1]
As "H. A. Page" he published:[1]
· The Memoir of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1872; with several uncollected contributions to American periodicals);
· an analytical Study of Thoreau (1878); and
· his major work, De Quincey: his Life and Writings, with Unpublished Correspondence (supplied by De Quincey's daughters) (2 vols. 1877; 2nd edit. 1879, revised edit. in one vol. 1890).
Japp tried many genres. Under a double pseudonym he issued in 1878 Lights on the Way (by "the late J. H. Alexander, B.A.", with explanatory note by "H. A. Page"), which was semi-autobiographical fiction. There followed:[1]
· German Life and Literature (1880; studies of Lessing, Goethe, Moses Mendelssohn, Herder, Novalis, and other writers);
· three volumes of verse: The Circle of the Year: a Sonnet Sequence with Proem and Envoi (privately printed, 1893);
· Dramatic Pictures, English Rispetti, Sonnets and other Verses (1894);
· Adam and Lilith: a Poem in Four Parts (1899; by "A. F. Scot");
· Animal Anecdotes arranged on a New Principle (by "H. A. Page") (1887); it attempted to show that the faculties of certain animals differ in degree rather than in kind from those of men;
· Offering and Sacrifice: an Essay in Comparative Customs and Religious Development by "A. F. Scot" (1899);
· Some Heresies in Ethnology and Anthropology dealt with under his own name (1899);
· · Our Common Cuckoo and other Cuckoos and Parasitical Birds (1899), a criticism of the Darwinian view of parasitism; and
· · Darwin considered mainly as Ethical Thinker (1901), criticism of the hypothesis of · natural selection.