The Reason For The Nva's Fear Of Vizetelly

By Author: jimmy geagon
Total Articles: 11
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Although the emergence of this mass audience was the reason for the NVA's fear of Vizetelly, it was also the reason why the group could campaign so effectively for his prosecution. Mass literacy changed the aims of parliamentary debate, as Samuel Smith understood. So when the MP condemned Vizetelly in his 1888 Commons motion against 'demoralising literature', it was of no consequence that only forty colleagues heard him speak. (This is perhaps unsurprising, given that he did not begin until after 10 p.m.)39 It mattered little because, as Smith argued in his memoir, an MP's 'real object' in addressing the House was 'not so much to Replica Cartier influence the... members that hear you' as to rouse the country to great issues, and through it to enforce on Parliament the need of legislative... changes [and] ensure... discussion all over the country, for a thousand papers report the debate the next morning, and millions of readers have it brought to their attention. Then the weekly and monthly magazines are sure to take it up.

The power held by the post-1870 'new electorate' ...
... was not confined to literary culture, then. It could also be harnessed to party-political ends. Smith's appreciation of how to use the 'thousand papers' to his advantage recalled the argument of the Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead in an essay titled, appropriately, 'Government by Journalism' (1885). Buoyed by the recent success of his own lobbying for the Criminal Law Amendment Act, Stead had boasted that newspapers exercised more political leverage than politicians themselves.41 'While the member [of Parliament] addresses half-empty benches', he wrote, the editor prints every word [of his speech], and spreads it Cartier Replica Watches abroad before his vast congregation And it is not in one man's ears, but in his neighbour's and his neigh bour's, until the whisper of the printed word seems to fill the very air.

Such power was an eifect of mass literacy. Ironically, therefore, the existence of 'millions of readers' was not merely the reason why the NVA urged that Zola represented a 'gigantic national danger': these same readers also provided the means with which to foment panic. Since the NVA believed that 'wickedness' could be 'driven off... only by opinion', it was obliged to exploit the new promiscuity of print to its own advantage. Conveniently, two of the NVA's founder-members reigned at two of the more influential contemporary publications: the aforementioned Stead edited the evening newspaper the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 to 1890, while Percy Bunting edited the monthly Contemporary Review from 1882 until his death in 1911. Both men promoted the NVA agenda. For instance, just before Smith condemned Vizetelly in the Commons, Stead printed an incriminating interview in which the publisher admitted that he had decided to issue cheap translations of Zola only after having failed to sell 'well-printed', 'perfectly unobjectionable' translations of the 'very best examples' of French fiction. This was a gift to Smith, who subsequently supported his accusation that Vizetelly pandered to 'the taste for putrid literature' by reference to what he called the publisher's 'public confession'.