ABSTRACT
In 1889 English translations of Zola published by Henry Vizetelly were banned from sale on the grounds of obscenity; but throughout Britain copies of the original French could still be freely sold. This disparity is the more striking because the Vizetelly versions had been bowdlerized before publication. Henry’s son Ernest, who did some of the work, recalled that on being confronted with proofs of the translation of La Terre (1888, published in France in 1887) was worried by “the boldness of Zola’s story” and “deemed certain excisions and alterations advisable”. The character named Hyacinthe was nicknamed ‘Jésus Christ’: this would shock English readers and would have to be expunged. He suffered from “a nasty infirmity” which “though it might be true to life, it would also give offence to people who no longer read Sterne, and who knew little or nothing of Rabelais.” In all, the Vizetellys “struck out or modified a very large number of passages”. But evidently not enough. After the judgement, as Ernest put it, “all who knew French were privileged to read Zola verbatim, whereas those who did not know that language were not allowed to peruse expurgated renderings of
his books” (Vizetelly 1904: 254-56, 276). This was not an oversight on the part of the courts, but an instance of
the pragmatic character of Victorian obscenity law. As Lord Chief Justice Cockburn had opined in the case of Regina v. Hicklin 1868: “I think the test of obscenity is this: whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” (Kendrick 1987: 120). The question that mattered to lawyers was not whether a publication was obscene in an absolute sense, but whether the people who were likely to buy it, or come across it once it had been bought, were liable to be harmed. In the words of one historian of the matter, the law enshrined “the recognition that because cultural abilities are unevenly distributed, obscenity is variable or circumstantial. It thus required a flexible not a uniform mode of regulation” (Saunders 1992: 157). The courts, then, were required to form a view of who was open to ‘immoral influences’, of which people had been scanted in the distribution of ‘cultural abilities’. In general, these turned out to be lower middle-class and working-class people. Pillars of the establishment like Tennyson’s friend Lord Houghton, who could afford high-priced erotica in limited editions, were safe from interference by the law. Obviously, not only the rich could read French. But the point appears to have been that, like high prices, linguistic foreignness kept a book out of general circulation. (The underlying assumption, that the wealthy and the skilled in languages were less prone to depravity and corruption than anyone else, is an odd if enduring aspect of British social prejudice).
