Several years prior to the first Vizetelly trial, the impoverished autodidact and future sex-reform campaigner William James Chidley (1860?–1916) read a translation of Zola's Nana. Although Nana was by no means the first French novel that Chidley had read, nor even the first work by Zola (he had recently read L'Assommoir), it had a tremendous impact on him. As he records in his ‘Confessions’, a remarkable account of nineteenth-century sexuality:

While the impetus behind the various attempts to regulate English translations of Zola's works in England, Australia and India was the belief that they undermined the self-governing abilities of their readers, for Chidley Nana in fact served to convince him that he needed to cultivate self-control in order to ensure his bodily strength and purity.

Chidley's path to attaining self-control was, however, long, torturous and intimately bound with reading. As an adolescent he became, he believed, ‘nervous and ill’ as a result of reading works such as Reynolds's Mysteries of Paris, Smollett's Roderick Random, and Shakespeare's works as masturbatory aids.