Between 1910 and 1921, Arthur Machen produced nearly 700 articles for the Evening News. This position with the London paper provided the writer with his longest period of sustained employment, and yet, it also dealt him great misery. Ironically, the publication of The Bowmen in the pages of the Evening News gave Machen his greatest claim to fame in his lifetime. Yet, Machen abhorred journalism. Driven by necessity, he soldiered through these long years and thereby created a substantial corpus of work which remains largely untapped and unstudied.
Assigned to write on the widest possible gamut of topics, Machen never put away those qualities which defined him as a master storyteller. Machen the journalist remains Machen the mystic and stylist. Each banal subject is treated as an opportunity to preach his gospel of ecstasy and mystery to the daily reader. Only Machen can turn a dismal report on the dearth of skilled gardeners into a meditation on labor as an instrument for good or evil. In the face of “Controlled Beer,” he asks what good is drink if it cannot inebriate and deify mankind? What of the roar of cannon fire, if an unexpected chorus of birdsong brightens a January day? Machen never “dialed it in,” but always worked to transfigure the common column space of a newspaper into a sliver of paradise.
Simply put, Arthur Machen accomplished alchemy.
Each Thursday, an original article penned by Machen will be posted in this space in order to make this segment of his work more accessible and better known to readers. Most of Machen’s news articles are listed in the seminal bibliographical account by Adrian Goldstone and Wesley Sweester, an invaluable resource. Instances in which a posted article is not listed in G & S will be noted with an asterisk.
The Weekly Machen – 2022 (50 Articles)
The Weekly Machen – 2023 (52 Articles)
The Weekly Machen – 2024 (45 Articles)
From the Evening News:
1/2/25: A Strand Meditation * (4/30/1913)
1/9/25: The Last Dread Sentence (3/16/1911)
1/16/25: Let Us Sing of War (8/18/1914)
1/23/25: In Time of War (8/25/1914)
1/30/25: The Ceaseless Bugle Call (9/17/1914)
2/6/25: The War Song of the Welsh (11/2/1914)
2/13/25: The Light That Can Never Be Put Out (2/14/1916)
2/20/25: The Exiles (9/8/1914)
2/27/25: A Nation in Exile (10/17/1914)
3/6/25: Little Sights of London (9/24/1918)
3/13/25: Clotted Nonsense (9/25/1918)
3/20/25: A Real Roly-Poly Pudding (9/26/1918)
3/27/25: Dishevelled Children (9/28/1918)
4/10/25: London’s Tree Tyrant (9/30/1918)
5/1/25: Quicker Than Thought (10/3/1918)
5/8/25: The Domestic Hun (10/4/1918)
5/15/25: Sacred Turnip (10/7/1918)
5/22/25: Anything Good Enough! (10/10/1918)
5/29/25: Little Men and Little Pleasures (10/16/1918)
6/5/25: Democracy of Poets (10/30/1918)
6/12/25: Wasted Van Power (10/31/1918)
6/19/25: No Cattle Shows (11/4/1918)
6/26/25: How We Lost Our Tails (11/21/1918)
From the Evening News:
7/3/25: Looking Backward (12/30/1913)
7/10/25: The Rare Gift of Literary Individuality (1/2/1911)
7/17/25: Unanimity Among the Conversationalists (1/7/1911)
7/24/25: Literature for the Boy at the Tail of the Van (1/14/1910)
7/31/25: The Shirt (9/8/1920)
8/7/25: Hornsey House of Nightmares (2/16/1921)
8/14/25: The Rackety Ghost Still Busy (2/17/1921)
8/21/25: Two Unsigned Articles on the Hornsey Saga (2/18 – 19/1921)
8/28/25: The Racketty Ghost Breaks Out Again (2/24/1921)
9/4/25: Bertie’s Banging Ghost (2/25/1921)
9/11/25: We Could Have Won the War in 1915 (12/9/1919)
9/18/25: The New Village (6/4/1919)
9/25/25: Huns in Holy Places (4/23/1919)
10/2/25: Gossip About Books and Authors for 1/12/1918
10/9/25: Gossip About Books and Authors for 10/20/1917
10/16/25: Gossip About Books and Authors (7/13/1918)
10/23/25: Gossip About Books and Authors (5/19/1919)
10/30/25: Gossip About Books and Authors (7/1/1919)
11/06/25: Patsy-The Bad Boy (7/26/1919)
11/13/25: Through a Door Off Oxford-Street (5/14/1919)
11/20/25: A Strawberry Idyll (6/18/1919)
12/4/25: Six Weeks’ Drought (6/19/1919)
12/11/25: Folk-Lore, Water Babies and Mermaids (12/5/1910)
12/18/25: Scrooge 1920 (12/28/1920)
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The vivid descriptions of the Quest in ‘The New Beer’ reminded me of Mary Vivian (‘Molly’) Hughes account of life in th neighborhood of Enfield not so much later in A London Family Between the Wars (OUP, 1940).
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David, your remark about the Hughes book prompted me to get it from the library. I’ve just begun reading it, & it’s a truly enjoyable book. It looks like Hughes’s Cuffley is 30 miles from Machen’s Amersham on the M25 today. Hughes says she can see St. Paul’s 15 miles from her home.
I wonder what Machen thought of the opening of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, in which it’s a long walk from somewhere in the country into London (just before the Woman appears). That opening could almost be the beginning of a Machen story.
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