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Chosen by:
Professor Brian Nelson,
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Faculty of Arts
In 1888 and 1889 the publisher Henry Vizetelly (1820-1894) was twice convicted of obscene libel for issuing two-shilling English translations of Zola’s novels. On the second occasion he was imprisoned for three months.
Vizetelly’s publishing house, Vizetelly & Co, brought out (among much else) eighteen Zola translations between 1884 and 1889. One of Henry’s four sons, Ernest Alfred (1853-1935), translated many of the Rougon-Macquart novels for his father’s firm. He was a devoted disciple of the novelist, and became Zola’s British business representative. He was to look after Zola during his visit to England in 1893 and, five years later, during his months of exile in South London at the time of the Dreyfus affair (see Ernest Vizetelly, With Zola in England, Chatto & Windus, 1899).
The prosecution of Henry Vizetelly was instigated by the National Vigilance Association, a social-reform group which lobbied for Government intervention on the grounds that the open sale of cheap English editions of Zola’s novels compromised metropolitan security. The Association blamed Vizetelly’s translations for some of the most infamous crimes then being committed – principally child prostitution, but also the Whitechapel murders of 1888 – though it acknowledged that Zola could not take all the blame.
Ernest Vizetelly’s translation of La Terre (The Earth) in 1888 led to a debate in the House of Commons, during which a motion was carried “deploring the rapid spread of demoralising literature”, initiated by Samuel Smith MP. Henry Vizetelly was stigmatised as the “chief culprit”. The press joined in the denunciation. A private summons was taken out, which the Government took over. Vizetelly was committed for trial in the autumn of 1888. He was fined £100 for publishing “obscene libels”, especially Nana, Pot-Bouille and La Terre. The following year, having continued to sell other Zola translations, some freshly expurgated by Ernest, he was prosecuted again. He was sent to Holloway prison for three months. The book trade stopped handling the firm’s publications, and it had to be put into the hands of creditors. Ernest Vizetelly claimed that the sentence hastened ill-health and his father’s death in 1894.
Vizetelly’s bankruptcy was a provisional victory on the part of forces determined to maintain control over cultural production. This was threatened by the spread of literacy, as a result of the Education Act of 1870, and by the technological advances in printing and distribution that both created and catered for a mass public. The pursuit of Vizetelly by the National Vigilance Association was not simply a risible display of Victorian prudery. Rather, its campaign to suppress translations of Zola was an extreme reaction to the emergence of a new, and therefore unpredictable, mass audience for fiction in English. The Vizetelly affair both emerged from, and deepened, the divisions between mass and elite readerships that the 1870 Education Act had opened up. The National Vigilance Association argued that the Education Act’s beneficiaries – “the lower classes” – needed protection from the explicit descriptions of sex contained in novels like La Terre.
The terms of the resulting suppression – Zola was prohibited in English, but not in French – revealed how far literary value was contingent on a work’s presumed audience, rather than on its specific content. The ability to read French was used as an indicator of social class, which, in turn, was presumed to be an index of both literary taste and some sort of moral inoculation. In the original French, the circulation of Zola’s novels was presumed to be restricted to students of Continental literature, who could be trusted, the thinking ran, to respond impassively to Zola’s notorious emphasis on sex. The Vizetelly rulings implied that “literature” was the natural preserve of an educated elite, in whose unpoliced hands it could safely exist.
Adapted from Anthony Cummins, 'Émile Zola's Cheap English Dress: The Vizetelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value', Review of English Studies 60 (2009): 108-132.
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