The Count of Monte Cristo

I asked my friend Moira over at Clothes in Books if she would read Dumas’s novel with a view to our both blogging about it. This is my offering and I can’t wait to read hers. And now here it is: https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-count-of-monte-cristo-will-get-you.html

I must have eight or maybe nine when I first read The Count of Monte Cristo in an abridged and bowderised edition that was my mother’s. It had been a school prize. Quite how much abridged and bowderlised I didn’t realise until I came to reread it last year – more of that later. It was the most thrilling read of my childhood. However after the splendid and gripping account of Edmond Dantès’s betrayal, incarceration, and escape from the Chateau D’If, my childhood self did find that the long and labyrythine plot of revenge sagged somewhat. And well over fifty years later, my adult self felt the same. However I was determined to plough on through all 117 chapters and 1240 pages, by the method of reading at least three chapters a day. And once it began to grip me, I was carried along, and then I could have gone on reading it forever.

What a magnificent fever-dream of a novel! But how could it ever have been thought appropriate for children? I can’t do better than quote from Robin Buss’s introduction to his translation in the Penguin edition: ‘there are not many children’s books, even in our own time, that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides; an extended scene of torture and execution; drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism.’ Not many novels for adults either if it comes to that, particularly at the time it was written.

The Count is the progenitor of the superheroes of the twentieth century. He undergoes a symbolic death when he disguises himself as a corpse to escape from his prison and is reborn as something more than human and, as he finally comes to realise, also less than human in his single-minded determination to punish those who betrayed him. He spends ten years establishing himself as the suave and cultured Count of Monte Cristo, man of mystery and disguise, and perfecting his plans for revenge. But at what cost? Dumas tells us that shortly after Dantes’s escape, the sight of a mortally wounded Customs man makes little impression on him: he ‘was on the track that he wished to follow, proceeding towards the end he wished to attain: his heart was turning to stone in his breast.’

So, am I glad that I read it? Absolutely. Will I be reading it again? No, but it did leave a Count of Monte Cristo shaped hole in my life which could only be filled by embarking on The Three Musketeers.

PS Entering prison in October 2025 for a five-year sentence, Nicolas Sarkozy let it be seen that he was carrying a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Beyond irony …