Les Misérables: Edited and Annotated by Stephen Parkin

by Victor Hugo, Charles E. Wilbour (Translator)

Overview

According to its author, Les Misérables was to show “the progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life”. Centring on the adventures and the tortuous path to redemption of former convict Jean Valjean during the tumultuous years leading to the Paris uprising of June 1832, Hugo's 1862 masterpiece presents the universal story of a man struggling to regain his dignity, to make up for his past mistakes and to find a place in society and in the ethical cosmos of his time.

Originally published during Hugo's self-imposed exile in Guernsey and featuring a complex web of characters, with the masses of the Parisian dispossessed in the background, Les Misérables is not only one of world literature's greatest feats of storytelling, but an unsurpassed exploration of human morality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847495181
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	11/18/2025
Series:	Alma Classics Evergreens
Pages:	1465
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.79(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Victor Hugo (1802-85) was a French dramatist, novelist, and poet who in 1830 was called "the most powerful mind of the Romantic movement". His early success came in drama, and he used the stage as a platform for his social and political ideas. Hugo published his forceful verse drama Cromwell in 1824. Three years later, he added a provocative preface supporting the claims of Romantic drama as against the French classical tradition and calling for works that combined tragedy and comedy in the free style of Shakespeare. The controversial Hernani, presented at the Comédie-Française in 1830, marked the beginning of a prolific period of playwriting, which was partly inspired by his love for the actress Juliette Drouet. Their affair began in 1833; she eventually left the stage and became his companion until her death in 1883. Hugo's other works included the verse-drama Le Roi s'amuse (1832), which was banned from the French stage but subsequently used by Verdi as the libretto for Rigoletto, and the prose plays Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor (both 1833). The failure of Les Burgraves (1843), together with the advent of realism in the mid 19th century, brought the Romantic experiment to an end. Owing to his opposition to the government, Hugo spent the years from 1851 to 1870 in exile, first in Brussels and then on the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. During his exile he wrote a few plays and the epic novel Les Misérables (1862), which returned to the stage as a vastly successful musical more than a century later. He returned to Paris after the proclamation of the Third Republic and died in 1885. He was buried in the Panthéon after being driven there, at his own request, in a poor man's hearse.

Date of Birth:

February 26, 1802

Date of Death:

May 22, 1885

Place of Birth:

Besançon, France

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

Pension Cordier, Paris, 1815-18