FIRST THOUGHTS: Persecution and prosecution in Zola and the Victorians

EMILE ZOLA is perhaps not as widely read today in English as he was in the past, less familiar to us now as readers than his friend and contemporary Gustave Flaubert.

However, in his day, his series of Rougon-Macquart novels, produced between 1871 and 1893, were hugely influential.

During this time, each of these novels made Zola progressively more and more popular, often written to articulate vehement indictments of the social ills of his time.

His were innovative and boldly realistic works, making him one of the most controversial figures of his time in his own country.

Added to this, Zola’s staunch defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the wrongly accused Jewish staff officer, made him even more celebrated or infamous, depending on your point of view.

Crucially, Zola published an open letter in defence of Dreyfus to the President of France, Felix Faure, in January 1898, opening with the words, ‘J’Accuse’.

This letter earned him a great deal of public antipathy, may have prevented the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Zola and, it was rumoured, might even have been a reason for his death from carbon monoxide poisoning four years later.

In Victorian Britain, his novels, particularly his 1880 tale of prostitution and corruption, Nana, were received with equal parts delight and attack.

The Irish novelist George Moore was one of his strongest defenders, his own fictions directly influenced by Zola’s bold, even revolutionary use of the novel to interrogate and expose the ills of society.

In this study, called Zola and the Victorians, Eileen Horne focuses in particular on the persecutions endured by Zola’s English publisher Henry Vizetelly, a man of Italian descent responsible for bringing these innovative works to the attention of the Victorian reading public.

The literary establishment in Britain was not prepared to countenance such radically challenging fiction and eventually Vizetelly was brought to trial.

This study opens in April 1888, as Zola prepares to write his new novel in his country villa in Medan, shifting to London to follow the dramatic unfolding of the case against Henry Vizetelly.

A public campaign against Zola’s works, spurred on by reforming MPs and The National Vigilance Association, led to trials and tribulations for Henry Vizetelly over the next five years.

Horne makes the decision to dramatise this fascinating story rather than presenting it as a straightforward historical study and each chapter alternates between the increasingly fraught life of the Vizetelly family in London and Zola’s equally dramatic domestic life.

Henry Vizetelly is clearly both hero and tragic victim of this sorry tale of censorship and legal prosecution, and Horne paints a realistic picture of the moral climate of the time and a chilling account of Zola’s lack of interest in the fate of his persecuted English publisher.

There is also a fascinating account of the double life Zola himself lived, with his wife Alexandrine on the one hand and his lover Jeanne and their children on the other.

The book follows the course of the prosecution and at the end of his tribulations, the final word is left to Henry Vizetelly himself in his posthumous memoirs where he refers, with admirable restraint, to the fact that “My publication of the works of M.Zola, and the persecution of a band of fanatics, brought about my pecuniary ruin.”

This is an unhappy tale of a witch hunt and of censorship and both Zola and Vizetelly are well worth remembering.

This book includes useful and an admirably clear amount of research on the two men, with a coda on the fate of the main protagonists and a comprehensive account of Zola’s ambitious cycle of novels, which made me want to return to his work again.

Eibhear Walshe’s novel, The Diary of Mary Travers, has been long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award.

Zola and the Victorians

Eileen Horne

MacLehose Press Quercus, London, £14.99