←Menu of Letters 1894

Aet. 41, to Alfred Fletcher, editor of the Daily Chronicle.

According to the Vigilance Record (15 May 1889) Henry Vizetelly was charged on 1 and 2 May 1889 at the behest of the National Vigilance Association for publishing several indecent books. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Zola’s Fortunes of the Rougons and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron were adjourned by the judge sine die, while the prosecution continued against other titles.

The NVA denounced Madame Bovary in 1888. The novel had appeared in an English translation by Eleanor Marx, published by Vizetelly in 1886. George Moore met Eleanor through Olive Schreiner and arranged her commission to translate Madame Bovary. In her Preface, she wrote “Of living novelists … there are but two who can be said to belong to the school of Flaubert, as opposed to the ’naturalist’ school of Zola  — the Norwegian Alexander Kielland and the Irishman George Moore” (page XVIII).

The Confessional Unmasked by C.B., first published in Dublin in 1833, was pornographic propaganda intended to undermine the Catholic Church. Investigative journalism in Truth (15 August – 5 December 1889) identified the pamphlet’s publisher, John Kensit of the City Protestant Book Depot, as an affiliate of the NVA.

Hubert Montagu Cookson Crackanthorpe (1870-1896) was an avant-garde writer and editor, sometimes called “the English Maupassant.” His short stories Wreckage, about decadent lifestyles, was published in 1893. He knew George Moore as an equally avid supporter of the Independent Theatre Society.

In April 1891, Edmund Hope Verney was arrested with a Lesbian pimp and charged with conspiring to procure a virgin girl for sex. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. The case was revisited by George Moore in “Literature and Morals” (Century Magazine. May 1919).

On 7 June 1889, fifteen year old George Vallance was charged with sexually assaulting an adolescent servant girl in a case brought before the Borough of Leamington Spa Police Court.

William Alexander Coots (1842-1919) was Secretary of the NVA.

The Daily Chronicle published a series of articles and letters on the subject of this letter:

• 2 January — announced the death of Henry Vizetelly
• 4 January — Robert Buchanan related that only he (in spite of despising Zola) and George Moore protested in 1889 when Vizetelly was prosecuted for publishing Zola. The prosecution was “an outrage on literature.”
• 5 January — Aaron Watson claimed that the Institute of Journalists, who fêted Zola in 1893, were also active in Zola’s cause to free literature.
• 6 January — Buchanan claimed to have written to the Home Secretary in Vizetelly’s defense, while the press remained silent.
• 8 January: Frank Harris revealed his offer to pay Vizetelly’s legal costs, but Vizetelly decided not to fight.
• 9 January — Ernest Vizetelly explained that Harris’s offer came with unacceptable conditions [choice of lawyer]. He was at work on his father’s concluding volume of memoirs (1870-1894), which would be published in due time [it has never been published]. Hubert Crackanthorpe advocated the creation of an author’s union to instigate a test case by publishing certain of Zola’s works, in which all literary London would be for the defense.