The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on May 23, 2008
The Review of English Studies 2009 60(243):108-132; doi:10.1093/res/hgn074
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press 2008; all rights reserved
Émile Zola's Cheap English Dress: The Vizetelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value*
London
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Abstract |
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In 1888 and 1889 the publisher Henry Vizetelly was twice convicted of obscenity for issuing two-shilling English translations of Zola's novels. This controversial episode in late-Victorian literary history both emerged from, and deepened, the division between mass and elite readerships that the 1870 Education Act had opened up. Vizetelly's prosecution was the result of pressure from the National Vigilance Association, a social-reform group which argued that the Education Act's beneficiaries 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. Forward-looking authors and publishers who championed freedom of expression—including Gissing, Gosse, Hardy, Heinemann, Meredith and Symons—could therefore accommodate the apparent legal threat to their artistic autonomy simply by turning away from post-1870 readers. As such, the debate about the Vizetelly translations established enduring principles of literary regulation, with Zola emerging as a symbol of mass/elite cultural division.
* The Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the doctoral research from which this article emerged. My thanks go also to those who kindly read drafts: Jo McDonagh, Beth Palmer, Seb Perry and Jonathan Wild.