Vizetelly, Victor R., b c 1900; Purchase, Russell, d 1970

In 1967 Russell Purchase, a wine merchant of North Street, Chichester, conceived the idea of a biography of Henry Vizetelly, an early writer on wines, centring on his trials in 1888 and 1889 for obscene libel, by reason of publishing Emile Zola's novels in English. Purchase traced Henry's grandson, Victor R. Vitetelly, who had continued the family firm of printers and was then living in retirement nearby at Angmering-on-Sea, West Sussex (see file 1/8 for Purchase's letters to Vizetelly, and 2/5 for Vizetelly's to Purchase). Vizetelly contacted members of the family, gathered together and arranged family memorabilia, and made some notes from published sources, and lent these to Purchase. Purchase made good progress over the following two years, prepared draft chapters and approached a publisher. But he died in 1970, and his executors passed all the papers to Vizetelly.

The Vizetelly family first established a presence in the world of publishing in 1843, when Henry Richard Vizetelly (1820-1894) and his elder brother James Thomas Vizetelly (1817-1897) launched a newspaper, The Pictorial Times as a short-lived rival to the Illustrated London News. The brothers were sons and grandsons of printers. From an early stage they sought to combine publishing with journalism and printing. Henry was an experienced wood-engraver, whose contributions were valuable to his publications. A younger brother, Frank Vizetelly (1830-1883), worked as a travelling correspondent for the Pictorial Times, and went on to found the Monde Illustr in Paris. Frank became a war correspondent, reporting and producing sketches from Sicily during Garibaldi's expedition of 1860, and from the American and Spanish civil wars. He died in the massacre of Hicks Pasha's army in Sudan in 1883.

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