French Novels and the Victorians

Abstract

Thomas Carlyle dubbed Balzac as the ‘brutallest blackguard now extant with any talent’; Elizabeth Barrett described Lélia by George Sand, an author she generally admired, as ‘a serpent book, both for language colour & soul-slime’; Geraldine Jewsbury claimed Flaubert’s Salammbô was ‘enough to make any reader sick…. It is heavily horrible’. Yet beneath these wild pronouncements, Juliette Atkinson has uncovered the pervasive complicity of Victorian readers with the modern French fiction they theatrically pledged to consign to the flames. She demonstrates how the pose of moral outrage was precisely that—a pose—which obscured the extent to which novelists such as Hugo, Balzac and Sand had conquered English audiences. Not only did the most vehement censors of French fiction, such as John Wilson Croker, disagree over what constituted the grounds of the immortality: was it subversive ideas, as espoused by novelists like Eugène Sue, or the bawdy behaviour gleefully served up by Paul de Kock? There was scant agreement either over who should be allowed to read it. Material that would evidently ruin or pervert impressionable minds seemed to have left these courageous English critics unscathed. For instance, George Henry Lewes praised the decision of the Lord Chamberlain to ban Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias as the subject was ‘not only unfit to be brought before our sisters and our wives, but unfit to be brought before ourselves’. As Atkinson wittily remarks, Lewes ‘should know, as he owned a copy of the novel’. Time and again, those who railed most energetically against French literature inadvertently displayed how intimately they were acquainted with it.