Introduction

Victorian readers, real and fictional, often claimed to throw immoral French novels into the fire, but their engagement with French literature was far more complex than such acts suggest. This book strives to bring clarity to the ongoing critical debate regarding the insularity and prudishness of nineteenth-century readers. The socio-historical context of Anglo-French relations, like attitudes to foreign literature, moved between attraction and distrust; politicians worked to strengthen an ‘entente cordiale’ and tourists rushed across the Channel, but there was also a wariness of French radicalism and imperial ambitions. The book explores reactions to the contemporary French fiction that circulated in England between 1830 and 1870, drawing on reviews, letters, novels, and bibliographical data to do so. It aims to challenge preconceptions about Victorian Gallophobia, reflect on complex contemporary notions of immorality, and argue that French literature was not simply ‘received’ but emerged through complex transnational networks.

Conclusion

There are sound reasons for concluding in 1870–1. The Franco-Prussian War affected attitudes towards France, some of France’s major novelists died, a new generation of novelists led by Zola was on the rise, and the 1870 Education Act created fresh concerns about the composition and tastes of the reading public. Although interest in French literature did not begin in the 1870s, as many critics have claimed, the decade did mark a more defiant attitude towards supposed Victorian prudery, and a willingness to highlight and champion the transgressive qualities of French literature. It was in this period that censorshiptook centre stage, but those who resisted it were also ambivalent about the wisdom of allowing readers to access French works indiscriminately. As in previous decades, the critical discourse was often quietly challenged by reading practices.

The immorality of French novels

Anxieties about immorality were rarely far from discussion of French novels. However, contemporary notions of ‘immorality’ were far more unstable than has often been suggested. The chapter begins by reconsidering Croker’s infamous 1836 article ‘French Novels’ in the light of its French reception, which indicates that Croker was often in sympathy with, rather than opposed to, French critics. Writers such as Croker hoped that readers would police themselves, but the correspondence between Elizabeth Barrett and Mary Russell Mitford reveals a far more playful understanding of immorality. The pair claimed the notion for themselves, and in doing so developed a sense of their own sophistication. They were not alone in ignoring contemporary warnings: the furore surrounding Dumas fils’sLa Dame aux caméllias and the censorship of its theatrical adaptation demonstrated the inconsistencies of, and limits to, censorship, and hinted at the hypocritical conduct of the Victorian reading public.

Literary influence

The dangers posed by French novels were not simply moral: they were also literary. Critics throughout the period compulsively listed any indication that a Victorian novel had been influenced by French novelists. The many writers involved with the sensation fiction of the 1860s challenged the purity (both moral and formal) of English novels. Comparisons between sensation novels and their French antecedents led to a reconsideration of the assumed superiority of English life and culture. Sensation novelists did not always proclaim their French inspirations, but many were keen to identify themselves as followers of Balzac, who had set important precedents for the genre, and whose literary star was rising in England. The boundaries of the English novel were further tested by acts of plagiarism committed by novelists like Braddon and Reade; in challenging critics to untangle the composition of their work, they demonstrated the porous boundaries of domestic literary traditions.

Fictional readers

Fictional Victorian readers were often prone to enjoying French novels. The dangers lurking for female readers in improper material had been something of a literary cliché for some time, and can be found in contemporary poems and cautionary tales. However, Victorian novelists were as concerned with the effects of the novels on male readers. Numerous novels engage less with ideas of immorality than with anxieties surrounding idleness and its effect on the British male. Increasingly, though, novels offered more ambivalent and thoughtful reflections on the cultural discourse surrounding French works. Their dangers were shrugged off, and their pleasures dealt with sympathetically by novelists such as Braddon and Ouida. Cautionary tales about French novel-reading never quite went away, but critics found it increasingly hard to determine the extent to which the cautionary tales themselves might be mimicking the very dangers which they purported to condemn.

Literary networks

French novels were promoted and disseminated in Victorian England not only through libraries, booksellers, and periodicals, but also through individual members of cosmopolitan networks. Parisian salons formed one way in which French and English men of letters came into contact, but three further types of networks played important roles in strengthening ties across the Channel. Fashionable society (and in particular the circle led by Lady Blessington and the comte d’Orsay), circles that developed through political affiliations (such as the radical and feminist group that launched a project to translate George Sand’s works), and the world of professional men of letters who reviewed French novels and often socialized with their creators, also expanded the market for foreign literature, or at least tried to do so.

Cultural competition

Nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations were profoundly competitive, as the recurrent Great Exhibitions vividly illustrated. For much of the period, the French clung to their widely perceived cultural (and in particular literary) supremacy. This affected the reception of French novels in a number of ways. The flood of works by popular novelists such as Dumas and Sue in the 1840s led critics to scrutinize the bibliographical statistics of the two nations. Reactions against the perceived greater vigour of the French fiction-writing took many forms, including riots, and reflections on the impact which copyright legislation might have on curbing the dissemination of foreign works. In the 1860s, Taine’s pioneering history of English literature led to very different reflections on French superiority. In contrast with earlier attacks on French immorality, critics responded to Taine by thoughtfully considering the causes of the different paths taken by French and English novelists, and the benefits of each.

Obtaining French novels

French novels were associated throughout the nineteenth century with the infamous Holywell Street. However, they were far more widely obtainable, and readily consumed, than this suggests. Libraries such as the fairly exclusive London Library, Mudie’spopular Select Library, and working-class institutions, did their part to make them available; surviving archives paint a vivid picture of the public appetite for novels by writers such as Dumas and Paul de Kock. Booksellers such as Jeffs and Rolandi were important in supplying readers with contemporary trends, but they also took on additional roles as editors and members of Anglo-French networks. Periodicals, meanwhile, made French literature available to readers who had not necessarily been searching for it. Long serializations of the 1840s aimed predominantly at a less wealthy audience, and translations geared towards a growing middle-class (and often female) market in the 1860s, further demonstrate the omnipresence of French literature in Victorian culture.