Les Miserables.

HUGO, Victor.

Item Number: 110295

New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1886.

Finely bound example of Hugo’s masterpiece, with an autograph signed letter from him laid in. Quarto, five volumes. Bound in full brown morocco, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, five raised bands, elaborate tooling to the front and rear panels, ornamental dentelles and ribbon markers.Illustrated with designs by de Neuville, Bayard, Morin, Valnay, and others. With an early autograph letter signed by Hugo tipped in on a prefatory blank leaf in the first volume. The letter is addressed to Hector Bossange, the Paris bookseller who published Hugo’s Odes et Ballades in 1828, the same year this original holographic note was written. In near fine condition. An exceptional presentation.

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.