More Impressions of Zola


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 English Illustrated Magazine in February 1894 called 'My Impressions of Zola', that sets out his entire history with the French writer. I have been able to find a digital copy of this article and transcribe it.** But it post-dates their falling out, because of what Moore wrote about Zola in Confessions. Indeed - it describes the whole affair from Moore's perspective. 
As such, it is excellent material for the volume. But Moore also wrote two earlier articles about Zola: 'Zola at Work', which was published in Burlington in April  1881 and 'A Visit to Zola', which was published in St James Gazette in May of the same year. Describing his Burlington article to Zola in a letter at the time, Moore boasted that it had 'one sole merit and one sole originality: Firstly that it is the truth and secondly that it is the first praise of you to be made in England'. So these two articles belong to Moore's earlier phase of less qualified enthusiasm for Zola. 

Unfortunately, neither of these articles has been digitised and - due to social distancing restrictions - I have not yet been able to access hard copies. I'm hoping, however, to travel to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh later in August where there are excellent collections of nineteenth century newspapers and periodicals. So I'm hopeful I'll have more to say about this then!


*Partly because I've scheduled it to appear automatically, whilst I'm on leave!

** All the images I've used to illustrate this post are taken from 'My Impressions of Zola'.

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