The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

HUGO, Victor.

Item Number: 142440

London: Richard Bentley, 1833.

First edition in English of Hugo’s masterpiece. 12mo, original cloth with paper spine labels, engraved frontispiece and additional vignette title, with final Opinions on this work. Number XXXII in the Standard Novels series. Translated by Frederic Shoberl. In very good condition. Very uncommon on the market, particularly in the original cloth.

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a revelation of what an historical novel could be” (Reid, 296). First published in 1831 as Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo’s book is “a stunning novelistic representation of late-medieval Paris and its central point… [While it] firmly rejects the idealization of the Middle Ages frequent among Romantic apologists for the ancien régime… Hugo’s novel was a hugely influential revelation of the descriptive intensity of Romantic prose” (Hollier, 662). The book has seen numerous screen adaptations, including director William Dieterle’s 1939 version starring Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara (the most expensive RKO production to that date) and the 1996 animated feature from Disney Studios.