The biz side of Les Miz: it was the first international book launch in publishing history

Are you all ready? Are you braced for the new version of Les Misérables …. it’s coming … it’s coming … it’s here!!! See trailer below. The BBC has a new all-go-to-hell production, and The Financial Times is contributing to its glory.  

The BBC production premiered on December 31st in the UK. When will it be available for those of us in the colonies? Who knows. But meanwhile, an article from the Financial Times, which (appropriate to its purview) discusses the biz side of Les Miz. “That hulking monument of French literature, Les Misérables owes a heavy debt to Queen Victoria’s Royal Mail.”

It was the first planned international book launch in publishing history: “Cutting-edge technology helped speed the birth and broadcast the fame of Les Misérables,” writes Boyd Tonkin. “Steam-driven printers that cranked out high-volume, low-cost editions; regular mail-carrying steamers; expanding railway and telegraph networks: all came together to ease the book’s passage.” 

The book that was meant to touch everyone has touched some unexpected, flinty hearts: a production opened last month in Tehran, of all places: “It turns out that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is an avid Hugo fan who once praised Les Misérables as “a book of wisdom” that everyone should read. Somewhere in the non-denominational hereafter envisaged by Hugo’s cranky personal religion, the old man must be enjoying a very long, and very hearty, last laugh.”

A few excerpts:.

As David Bellos records in his study of the book, The Novel of the Century, the Parisian daily La Presse could claim that, in this work nobody had yet read, “all the raw issues of the nineteenth century are compressed into . . . characters who will enter universal memory and never leave it”. Pre-release blurbs hardly come more gushing — or more true.

Hugo cannily boosted his new product with brash announcements that proclaimed his novel to be “the social and historical drama of the nineteenth century”.

***

No book had ever debuted with this multi-platform fanfare. It hardly mattered that Hugo’s rivals sneered: that Alexandre Dumas likened it to “wading through mud”, or that those catty diarists the Goncourt brothers bitched that Hugo had made a pile “for taking pity on the suffering masses”. The first two volumes sold out in two days. Queues clogged the narrow streets of Paris when new volumes arrived. In workers’ clubs, members banded together to buy volumes. Across the Atlantic, the polymath Charles Wilbour had completed his five-volume translation by December 1862. It sold in its hundreds of thousands. Shorn of Hugo’s denunciation of slavery, censored pamphlets of Wilbour’s translation became the favoured campfire reading of weary Confederate soldiers in the American civil war. They took to calling themselves (Robert E.) “Lee’s Miserables”. In politics, Hugo backed well-managed change. His novel pleas for “progress that has a gentle incline”. As a worldwide cultural phenomenon, however, Les Misérables looks like a wholly revolutionary coup. No French novel, not even Dumas’s all-conquering The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844, had ever earned so much so quickly, moved so fast, spread so far — or made such a planet-spanning noise. For Hugo and his entourage, soaring idealism went hand in hand with commercial nous. The former mandated the latter.

***

His novel moved the masses because its author and his crew drew on every smart weapon in the armoury of 19th-century industrial society — its financial instruments; its media networks; its transport infrastructure. Hugo’s ultimate message, of integrity, loyalty and solidarity, may be simple. “To love or to have loved is enough,” we learn when Valjean’s ward Cosette marries the student Marius: “Don’t ask for anything more.” The method of its delivery, though, was as strategically artful and complex as his age allowed. It worked then. It works now. From London to Tehran, Les Misérables still manufactures outrage and uplifts with the same steam-hammer force as in 1862.

Postscript on 1/7: I should add that the all-time highest ranking post ever in the Book Haven is: “Enjoy Les Misérables. But Please Get the History Straight.” – it’s here.

Tags: Alexandre Dumas, David Bellos, Victor Hugo

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2019 at 12:10 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.