What Is Looked Like A Stumbling Block In The Nva's Campaign To Have Vizetelly Prosecuted?

By Author: linda clinton
Total Articles: 11
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The Pall Mall Gazette could not reliably offer unconditional support to the NVA, since Stead's interests as an NVA member did not always coincide with his interests as a newspaper editor. Though he willingly supported the campaign against Vizetelly, he was rather more reluctant to endorse an initiative that sought to prevent the press from publishing the 'disgusting details' of divorce-court trials. When Samuel Smith urged the Home Secretary to consider the effect of such Replica Breitling reports on 'the morals of the young' the Pall Mall Gazette disparaged his Endeavour as 'a perilous enterprise' that took no heed of the 'great public good' to be had from broadcasting such proceedings.

At stake in this disagreement, of course, was the authority to censor. While Stead gladly used his newspaper to campaign for the legal restriction of literary freedom, he was unsurprisingly less inclined to believe that his own journalistic liberty required such regulation. A similar consideration affected the literary press as it contemplated the implications of the NVA's ...
... pursuit of Vizetelly. For example, the Saturday Review hesitated to support Smith, wanting first to 'find out exactly what he means by corrupting literature' even though it loathed Zola and despaired that his novels were 'openly translated and advertised' by a publisher who 'appeals to... the taste of obscene scribbling'.48 Any unwillingness to assent was due, no doubt, to the reluctance of the Saturday Review to relinquish its own power as a prestigious arbiter of literary value. If it had no qualms in the case of Zola's novels the Saturday did not 'profane the name of literature by applying it to such nauseous rubbish' it nonetheless held Breitling Replica Watches reservations about the potential consequences of letting the law decide what was and was not acceptable, as the NVA demanded. Why let a jury pass judgement As the paper wryly observed, some may 'find the rather butcherly pugnacity of Mr. RIDER HAGGARD's stories corrupting; and [the temperance campaigner] Sir WILFRID LAWSON would doubtless apply the adjective to much cheerful verse'.

This problem of definition what is literature what is obscenity looked like a stumbling block in the NVA's campaign to have Vizetelly prosecuted. But, legally, such questions were in fact relatively straightforward. By 1888, the year of Vizetelly's first trial, English law defined obscenity as: The tendency of the matter charged... to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to... immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.