ABSTRACT
Vizetelly and Company was a large and influential publishing house in late nineteenth-century London.1 It specialised in the translation and publication of French novels, and played a major role in introducing English readers to such writers as Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, as well as figures less well known in our own time such as Fortuné du Boisgobey and Émile Gaboriau. The most lucrative publications for Vizetelly were undoubtedly Émile Zola’s novels: the company boasted that it would ‘reckon it a bad week’ if the sale of its Zola translations fell below a thousand volumes.2 Even though Zola’s works did not lead to formal legal censure in his native
country, they were not uncontroversial amongst French readers. French critics accused the author of championing subjects unfit for respectable fiction, and described his work as ‘garbage’, ‘decay’ and ‘pornography’.3 Popular caricatures of Zola in the French magazines of the period depicted him as a giant pig, a visualisation encapsulating the double senses of sexual smuttiness and lack of physical hygiene in the French word cochonnerie. Louis Ulbach’s critique of Thérèse Raquin in ‘la littérature putride’ discussed in the previous chapter not only parodied the rhetoric of science in the text, but also made use of these popular metaphors to inveigh against the purported filthiness of the novel, describing it as ‘mud’ that was not fit for the reader’s consumption.4 French novels, especially those by Zola, were also coming under increasing
moral scrutiny in England in the final decades of the century.5 The metaphors in
more positive reviews in England shared this vocabulary of disgust. Zola became the focal point of a more general concern about the influence of French fiction on English readers. One of Zola’s harshest English critics was W.S. Lilly. In his review of Nana, he contended that Zola would never rise ‘above the mud’, because it was ‘his native element’.6 He concluded that the French writer did no more than reduce his characters to ‘the bestial, or something lower’.7 In a similar vein, George Saintsbury accused Zola of being a ‘dirt compeller’.8
