Victor Hugo
Les Misérables
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 85 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
A man is imprisoned nineteen years for stealing bread, breaks parole, remakes himself as a factory owner and mayor, and is hunted for decades by a policeman who cannot conceive of a redeemed convict. Around them, Paris, and a barricade in 1832 that fails.
Why Gustave Doré
Doré and Hugo were contemporaries in the same city — Doré illustrated Hugo's poetry, and his 'London: A Pilgrimage' is the definitive visual record of nineteenth-century urban poverty. The slums he drew in Whitechapel are the same slums Hugo wrote in Paris.
This is the least speculative pairing in the library. He had the city, the century and the politics first-hand.
What to look for
The sewers and the barricade. Doré's London plates were criticised in their day for dwelling on the poor without romance, which is exactly the quality Hugo's Paris needs.
