Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Vandam, Albert Dresden
VANDAM, ALBERT DRESDEN (1843–1903), publicist and journalist, born in London in March 1843, was son of Mark Vandam, of Jewish descent, district commissioner for the Netherlands state lottery. Before he was thirteen he was sent to Paris, where he was privately educated and remained fifteen years. According to his own story, he was looked after in boyhood by two maternal great-uncles, who had been surgeons in Napoleon's army, had set up after Waterloo in private practice at Paris, enjoyed the entrée to the court of the second empire, and entertained at their house the leaders of Parisian artistic society. Vandam claimed that his youth was passed among French people of importance, and that he, at the same time, made the acquaintance of the theatrical and Bohemian worlds of the French capital (Vandam, My Paris Note-Book, pp. 1-3). He began his career as a journalist during the Prusso-Austrian war of 1866, writing for English papers, and he was correspondent for American papers during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Settling in London in 1871, he engaged in translation from the French and Dutch and other literary work, occasionally going abroad on special missions for newspapers. From 1882 to 1887 Vandam was again in Paris as correspondent for the 'Globe,' subsequently making his home anew in London.
Vandam's 'An Englishman in Paris,' which was published anonymously in 1892 (2 vols.), excited general curiosity. It collected gossip of the courts of Louis Philippe and the second empire of apparently a very intimate kind. Vandam wrote again on French life and history, often depreciatingly, in 'My Paris Note-Book' (1894), 'French Men and French Manners' (1895), 'Undercurrents of the Second Empire' (1897), and 'Men and Manners of the Second Empire' (1904), but he did not repeat the success of his first effort. He translated for the first time into English, under the title of 'Social Germany in Luther's Time,' the interesting autobiography of the sixteenth-century Pomeranian notary, Bartholomew Sastrow, which he published in 1902 (with introduction by H. A. L. Fisher). He died in London on 25 Oct. 1903. He married Maria, daughter of Lewin Moseley, a London dentist.
Other of Vandam's works, apart from translations, included:
- 'Amours of Great Men' (2 vols.), 1878.
- 'We Two at Monte Carlo,' 1890, a novel.
- 'Masterpieces of Crime,' 1892.
- 'The Mystery of the Patrician Club,' 1894.
- 'A Court Tragedy,' 1900.
[The Times, 27 Oct. 1903; Who's Who, 1903; Vandam's My Paris Note-Book and French Men and French Manners, 1894; private information.]