Henry Vizetelly
by Gillian Devine

Henry Richard Vizetelly 30 July 1820 - 1 January 1894, died, aged 73, at "Heatherlands", Rushmoor, Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey and is buried in the churchyard at St John’s, Churt.

Vizetelly was a British publisher and writer. He started the publications Pictorial Times and Illustrated Times, wrote several books while working in Paris and Berlin as correspondent for the Illustrated London News, and between 1880 and 1890, ran a publishing house in London, Vizetelly & Company.

Vizetelly was born in London, the son of a printer and apprenticed as a wood-engraver. He remained a highly skilled engraver throughout his career but soon developed a portfolio career including publishing, writing, and journalism. He moved to become Paris correspondent for the Illustrated London News in 1865 and was later transferred to Berlin. He published many of his own works during these years and built up a specialism as a wine connoiseur (a topic on which he published several guides)

Later in the century, his publishing house back in London issued numerous translations of French and Russian authors, including the first English translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary in 1886. In 1888 he was prosecuted for obscene libel for publishing Emile Zola's fiction, he was repeatedly fined and in 1889 given a three month jail sentence. Vizetelly’s time in Holloway affected his health badly. He afterwards moved out of London with his daughter and his son Arthur to Heatherlands, near Tilford, Surrey, where he spent, in suffering, the few years that were left him. He died on January 1, 1894, after a final distressing illness. And the little graveyard of the village of Churt became the last resting-place of the man who was persecuted by the Pecksniffs of Great Britain, and whom the Dictionary of National Biography describes as the pioneer of the world’s pictorial press.