The Count of Monte Cristo

What It Is

A serial novel, published across eighteen instalments in the Journal des Débats between 1844 and 1846, at the moment the French press was inventing the cliffhanger and Dumas was the best-paid writer in Europe. He ran a workshop, with Auguste Maquet researching and drafting alongside him, and produced fiction at industrial speed without ever writing anything mechanical.

Everything about the construction follows from the way it was published. Short chapters. Endings that hook. A cast large enough to need a list, and a canvas that takes in Marseille, Rome, Paris, the Mediterranean, and the whole nervous, money-hungry France that came after Napoleon.

It is a novel of appetite: banquets, opera boxes, jewels, bandits, and every luxury and vice the 1830s could put on a page. It is also, and this is the surprise, a serious book about money, the press, and what a society is prepared to overlook in a rich man.

Why It Matters

It is the most widely read French novel in the world and has not been out of print in any major language since it appeared. Nothing else in the nineteenth century is so unashamedly built for the reader's pleasure and still turns out to have a conscience.

The shape Dumas built here became one of the load-bearing plots of popular storytelling, and you have met its descendants a hundred times without knowing where they came from. It runs through Victorian sensation fiction, comic books, and a great deal of modern cinema. Most of its descendants take the shape and drop the question that made it worth having.

The question underneath it is a moral one, and it is harder than an adventure story is supposed to be able to carry. Dumas does not duck it. And there is a further layer, hard to unsee once you know it: the grandson of an enslaved woman from Saint-Domingue and the son of a Black general Napoleon discarded wrote the great European fantasy of a man remaking himself in the face of a society that will not have him.

Before You Read

Long and fast. Twenty-five to thirty hours, and it is the least difficult book on this list to keep reading. Take it in big sittings, greedily. There is no shame in finishing it in a week; that is what it was engineered for.

Do not read an abridgement. The parts that look like padding — the Roman carnival, the bandits, the long dinners — are where the texture lives, and cutting them leaves you with a plot instead of a novel.

Keep the character list to hand. The cast is large and the connections between people matter; losing track early is the one way to spoil the ride.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Buss (Penguin Classics, 1996; revised 2003) — recommended. Complete, unabridged, and modern, and the first widely available English version to restore everything the Victorians quietly removed: the drugs, the sexuality, the sharper politics. It reads at the speed Dumas wrote at. The cost: Buss's English is deliberately plain and contemporary, so readers who want the pleasure of period varnish will find it undressed. View on Amazon →
• The anonymous 1846 translation, edited by David Coward (Oxford World's Classics). The Victorian English almost everyone has actually read, tidied up and supplied with a fine introduction and thirty pages of notes by a first-rate scholar of French literature. The cost: the underlying translation is a rushed Victorian job. It censors, it stumbles, and no amount of editing repairs that.
• Everyman's Library (the 1846 translation, revised by Peter Washington, with an introduction by Umberto Eco). The handsome hardback, with Eco's superb essay on why a novel this badly written can be this great. The cost: the same nineteenth-century base text, streamlined rather than replaced.

Take Buss and do not look back; it is not a close call. Lowell Bair's Bantam abridgement is the best of the short versions, and the best short version of this novel is still a mistake.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it quickly and read it blind. Do not look anything up and do not watch a film first. Almost every summary, adaptation and blurb of this novel gives away things Dumas keeps in reserve for hundreds of pages, and he built those pages to be worth the wait.

Save the introduction for the end. Both Penguin's and Oxford's walk through the novel in detail.

Pay attention to money. Who has it, how they got it, what it costs to keep. Dumas is writing about a France in which everything, including reputation, is for sale, and he never once loses sight of the ledger.

The commonest mistake is to dismiss it as a boys' adventure story. It is one. It is also the most sophisticated entertainment ever written, and it has ruined a good many readers for lesser books.