In 1888 the publisher Henry Vizetelly was given the hefty fine of £100 (plus £200 for keeping the peace) for publishing English translations of three novels by Émile Zola: Nana (1880); Pot Bouille (published as Piping Hot, 1882); and the worst offender of the three, La Terre (published as The Soil, 1888), regarded by the judge (and author of the Hicklin verdict) Chief Justice Sir Edward Cockburn as a work of ‘bestial obscenity’. The case had initially been brought by the National Vigilance Association (NVA), a relatively new contender among Britain's moral reform organizations but one that would play the most significant role in the governmentalization of the obscene in Britain and in making such a project, moreover, an imperial one. Once the NVA secured a summons against Vizetelly for publishing the works in question, however, the Home Office decided to take over the case. The verdict that thus ensued was, in the words of one Home Office official, ‘epoch-making’ – although not, perhaps, for the reasons he surmised. For while the passage of the Obscene Publications Act had forged a link between obscenity, governmentality and empire in Britain it was not until the 1880s that regulating the obscene became a project of imperial hygiene. In making apparent the linkages between the English language, the national body and imperial space the Vizetelly trial not only served as a marker of the dangers to both nation and empire should they become ‘corrupted’, but provided a means for a new technique of governing the obscene to enter the disciplinary network.