Henry Vizetelly's Writing's
- Artist/Author/Producer: Vizetelly, Henry (1820-1894)
- Confronting Bodies: The National Vigilance Association
- Dates of action: 1888-94
- Location: England
- Description of the Art Work
- "Extracts Principally from English Classics: Showing that the Legal
Suppression of M. Zola's Novels Would Logically Involve the Bowdlerizing
of Some of the Greatest Works in English Literature", 1888
- Description of incident
- 1888 England-London: A work compiled by and privately printed for
Vizetelly, publisher of Flaubert, Goncourt, Gautier, Maupassant, Daudet,
Bourget, Zola and other translations, and many outstanding writers in
English. At the Instigation of a powerful "purity" group, the National
Vigilance Association, founded in 1884, Vizetelly was prosecuted, on the
basis of selected passages, for publishing five works of Zola, two of
Maupassant, one of Bourget. Aged 70, and ill, he was convicted and
jailed for three months.
- Results of incident
- 1894 England-London: Vizetelly died shortly after release. It was
apparently his espousal of books about the depressed classes in society,
as much as the "coarse" scenes in some books, that caused outrage and led
the respectable to rationalize that he was a mere exploiter of vulgarity.
Source: Banned Books 387 B.C. to 1978 A.D., by Anne Lyon Haight, and Chandler B.
Grannis, R.R. Bowker Co, 1978.
