Les Miserables.

HUGO, Victor.

Item Number: 122855

Bruxelles : Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Ce, 1862.

Rare first printing of this classic work of literature, published in Brussels on the 30th or 31st March 1862. Octavos, 10 volumes bound into 5, bound in contemporary full morocco, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers. From the library of painter George Cooke with his bookplate to the front pastedown of each volume. Cooke was a painter who specialized in portrait and landscape paintings and was one of the South’s best known painters of the mid nineteenth century. In very good condition. A nice example with noted provenance.

Victor Hugo’s “great novel has been hailed as a masterpiece of popular literature, an epic poem in prose about God, humanity, and Hugo… Hugo hoped that Les Misérables would be one of if not the ‘principal summits’ of his body of works. Despite its length, complexity, and occasionally unbelievable plot and characterization, it remains a masterpiece of popular literature. It anticipates Balzac in its realism, but in its flights of imagination and lyricism, its theme of redemption, and its melding of myth and history, it is uniquely Hugo” (Dolbow, 149, 214). Charles E. Wilbour was hired by the Carleton Publishing Company to translate Hugo's grand masterpiece, and he did so very quickly, allowing the first American edition to be published within months of its French release. The intense advertising campaign waged by Carleton resulted in massive sales for Les Misérables, solidifying Hugo's epic in second place (behind only Uncle Tom's Cabin) in pre-Civil War American book sales.