Vizetelly Was Translating 'horrid French Novels' Into English

By Author: Christ Pual
Total Articles: 55
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And earlier in the period, the Spectator had declared that fiction in France 'depends on relations between men and women which English books never mention' making it 'scarcely possible to give in the English language... an accurate account of any of its more characteristic productions' without becoming unsuitable for 'family perusal'. But while Smith was not unusual in believing that French novels threatened childhood guilelessness, the potential for harm that he imagined far surpassed the misfortunes which earlier concerns had evoked. Where Mallock's fictional society girl reads 'horrid French novels' in French making her abuse dependent on linguistic competence Vizetelly was translating 'horrid French novels' into English, supposedly extending the real-life threat to the less well-educated daughters of the urban poor for whose safety the NVA feared. And if translation was indeed the issue at stake in the Spectator article, which implied that even to summarise a French plot was to Replica Omega risk disclosing to children the otherwise hidden nature of ...
... 'relations between men and women', the consequences of premature revelation were at least confined to the 'family'. Smith, in contrast, blamed Vizetelly for 'the shocking state of the streets of London'; his concern was urban space, not domestic space. So while the MP's fear of Zola resembled traditional English disquiet at French fiction, its focus was far broader, owing to the presumed expansion of the audience for translations after 1870.

If it still seems disproportionate, though, for Smith to have focused his Commons motion against indecent literature on translations of Zola, and not on more nakedly pornographic material, there is further explanation to be had in Vizetelly's marketing, which rendered the publisher vulnerable to the MP's allegation that he exploited 'the taste for putrid literature'. For example, his Omega Speedmaster Replica Watches advert for Nana (1880; trans. 1884) 'THE ONLY UNABRIDGED TRANSLATION OF ZOLA'S FAMOUS MASTERPIECE' shows how much Vizetelly invested in the novel's illicit quality. To those readers who did not know the book, Nana's fame would most likely have consisted of the English articles that had registered shock at its depiction of cross-dressing, lesbianism, prostitution and syphilis. Though Vizetelly did abridge Nana23 (and subsequent Zola translations, as we shall see) he undoubtedly sought to profit from whatever curiosity such reports may have aroused. For example, on opening the novel, the reader first found an illustration of the eponymous heroine astride Muffat, followed by Zola's opinion on the state of English fiction:

He greatly deprecates our circulating library system. The English novel, he says, is dying under the yoke. It confines the novelist to telling stories fit for family reading. Vizetelly's innovative practice of issuing new novels in single volumes was intended to circumvent this 'circulating library system', which owed its economic supremacy and its consequent ability to sanitise English fiction in the manner that Zola suggested to the convention of three-volume publication. Generally unable to sell a costly 'triple-decker' directly to the public, novelists and their publishers depended on bulk sales to the libraries; and rejection by Mudie's, the most successful library as sometimes happened, on grounds of impropriety could herald financial catastrophe. In such circumstances, Vizetelly's provocative decision to cite Zola's remarks at the beginning of his translation of Nana served to remind readers that a Vizetelly & Co. title laid beyond the range of Mudie's moral policing. Furthermore, as Nana was the first in a series of 'M. Zola's Powerful Realistic Novels', Vizetelly implied that it was racier than anything in his existing list of 'Popular French Novels', which he advertised as 'books that may be safely left lying about where the ladies of the family can pick them up'.