Moore Time, Please

This post carries on from the previous one in which I described how George Moore serialised Confessions of a Young Man in the magazine, Time. I explored a moral, political and religious split amongst the partners in Swan Sonnenschein, the firm who published Time and Moore’s book. So, in this post, I’ll consider how this affected Moore.

Henry Vizetelly
    It is important here to understand how Moore’s decision to sign up with Sonnenschein occurs at a very particular point in his career. His two previous novels, A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and A Drama in Muslin (1886) had been widely recognised as works of realism, written under the influence of the French writer, Émile Zola. The subtitle of A Drama in Muslin is even ‘A Realistic Novel’. Moore had published these novels with the firm of Henry Vizetelly, who was also making a name as a publisher of Zola’s novels in translation.

    But Vizetelly’s activities were drawing criticism. Put simply, Zola’s detailed depictions of the living conditions and sex lives of the French working classes were too much for conservative English institutions, such as the National Vigilance Association. In 1888 Vizetelly would be denounced in Parliament and sent to prison for publishing a translation of Zola’s La Terre which was judged to be obscene.

    On top of this, Moore’s own aesthetic affiliations were shifting: his next two publications were Parnell and his Island (1886) - a book of essays that brought Zola’s documentary style of evidence gathering to rural life in Ireland; and Confessions of a Young Man (1888), in which Moore broke away from Zola’s realism for a style that was more Impressionistic and, possibly, even Decadent.

    His biographer, Adrian Frazier, then, suggests that Moore's decision to leave Vizetelly and sign with a new publisher, Swan Sonnenschein reflects these two factors: Moore may have hoped that his work would escape censorship with a new firm and he may have been signalling this change in his own values as a writer.

    Moore's ‘Defensio Scriptis Meis’ provides important evidence here. This essay offers a biographical account of his work on A Drama in Muslin that emphasises very strongly the psychology of his characters. Frazier suggests that this approach represents a deliberate move away from ‘physiology’ and marks Moore’s ‘abandonment of naturalism’ - the particular style of realism associated with Zola.* The essay was, in other words, a way of signalling to the literary public and his readers a change in approach and style.

     And the place where Moore published 'Defensio Scriptis Meis' in March 1887? -Time magazine. It was his first Sonnenschein publication. Hence the link between Time, Sonnenschein and Moore's new direction as a writer.

    In the event, it turns out Moore was mistaken or naive if he thought that he could escape censorship. His contract with Sonnenschein specified that the firm could request changes in his work ‘for commercial and other reasons’. And this happened from the very first. Moore spent the next couple of years wrangling with Wigram over the text of the Parnell book and then Confessions. He would spend considerable effort in organising attempts to defend and release Vizetelly and returned to Vizetelly for his next novel, Spring Days (1888), which is described once again as 'A Realistic Novel' on the frontispiece.

   In sum - closer inspection reveals that the serialisation of Confessions in Time reflects an unusual and relatively self-contained phase in the career of this maverick author, and a very particular set of circumstances.

* Adrian Frazier, George Moore (2000), p.153.

Comments

New comments are not allowed.

Popular posts from this blog

More Impressions of Zola

Image
This post is going to be a bit shorter and more patchy.* More precisely, it's about a current gap in my research. My previous post provided a bit of general information about Émile Zola and how important he was to George Moore. I suggested that Moore set himself up as an authority on Zola in London in the early 1880s, by writing critical articles about him, translating Zola's work and writing about him in Confessions of a Young Man . As an earlier post pointed out, however, Moore's attitude and disposition towards Zola changed considerably - where his early articles express sympathy and enthusiasm for the French writer, his later was response was more qualified even critical. I'm hoping to capture some of this in the appendices to the critical edition of Confessions that I'm working on, by reproducing some excerpts from Moore's journalism. But this is where I have run into problems, exacerbated by the COVID19 pandemic and crisis. Moore wrote an article for Eng
Read more

Waxing lyrical: Moore and Schopenhauer

Image
Caricature of Huysmans In my previous post on Moore and Huysmans I suggested that A rebours (1884)   and Confessions of a Young Man (1887) share a sense of equivocation or ambivalence that might be, in some respects, more truly Decadent than any reference to vice or excess. Another shared connection here is their relation to autobiography. Huysmans' creation, Des Esseintes was frequently taken to be modelled upon himself by critics. And  Confessions of a Young Man presents itself as an autobiography - from the second English edition of 1889, the narrator even shared the same name as the author. In both cases, however, autobiographical identifications are important, but complex and hard to sustain at certain points.*  So, in this post and the next, I'll explore some points around Confessions and its vexed and complex status as autobiography. My starting point is passage from early in chapter 1: I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no
Read more

The Académie Julian

Image
Rudolph Julian I mentioned in my previous post that the narrator of Confessions of a Young Man moves from studying at the École des Beaux Arts to working in a smaller school based in the passage des Panoramas off the Boulevard Montmartre in the 2e arrondissement of Paris. The Académie Julian was founded in 1868 by Pierre Louis Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907), who had moved to Paris from the South of France. Moore was fascinated by Julian* and also wrote about him in an article entitled 'Meissonier and the Salon' for the Fortnightly Review in July 1890: M. Julian was once a shepherd in the south of France. In his native village he established a reputation for extraordinary strength and artistic capacity. He had thrown every young man within twenty miles in the wrestling contests, and he had astonished every one by the skill he showed in drawing. For a time his fate hung in the balance. A great wrestler or a great painter, which was he to be? Moore seems to have been greatly impres
Read more