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Picture: Mathew Murphy Les Misérables Birmingham Hippodrome 9 August to 27 August, 2022 Victor Hugo’s mammoth five volume novel Les Misérables is universally regarded as one of the greatest literary works of the 19th century, and indeed, all time. It ran to 655,478 words in the original French - War and Peace running to 600,000 by comparison - and was hugely popular with the public. The publication came after an astronomical, unheard of book deal, 300,000 francs, the equivalent of £3 million in today’s money, for a licence which ran for just eight years! Deals today are usually the author’s lifetime plus 50 or 70 years copyright. The five volumes were published between the end of March and mid May in 1862, with 100,000 copies snapped up by an eager public in two months. Hugo was a literary superstar and the novel had a Harry Potter style launch with no advance copies, no quotes, no information, with a “from the man who brought you The Hunchback of Notre Dame comes a new blockbuster” marketing approach. Much of the book, incidentally, was written in Guernsey where Hugo was in self-enforced exile for 15 years from 1855 after attacking Napoleon III in an influential and damning political pamphlet. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the much more famous Napoléon Bonaparte, had seized power by force in 1851, declared himself emperor, and had dispensed with democratic government so after Hugo’s fierce attack, exile seemed a sensible option.
Victor Hugo by Étienne Carjat, 1876 When the book finally burst on the streets the reception from the literary establishment was lukewarm at best, most fellow writers and critics slammed it . . . but hey, what do critics know? It even had the distinction of being added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Catholic church, the list of prohibited books deemed to be heretical or immoral and Catholics were forbidden to read it. Staunchly Catholic France’s confessionals must have soon been working overtime though as the public lapped up the tale of the real working class hero Jean Valjean in their droves. It was an international best seller. The publisher, Albert Lacroix in Brussels, who had borrowed the 300,000 franc advance from a bank, repaid the loan in a matter of months. Hugo’s tale of the ex-convict, jailed for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child, of his life and redemption, struck not just a chord, it struck gold. Worker’s groups clubbed together to buy a copy, a black market opened up, it had become a must-read phenomenon. History, with less skin in the game than critics and rivals at the time, was to place it on the top shelf occupied by literature’s elite, although in today’s 280 character world of the Twitterati, its 1,500 or so pages may be seen now as perhaps too daunting to attempt. Not to worry though, there have been more than 60 films over the years, along with cartoons, comics, radio plays, TV adaptations and a host of stage plays, the first in 1862, the same year it was published, a heavily rewritten version staged at Saddler’s Wells in London. Hugo’s son Charles put on his own two act version in Brussels in 1863 and the same year plays appeared in Washington and New York in the frenzy of Hugomania. The current, 2022 Les Misérables production trailer The story these days, in Britain at least, is perhaps best known, and in many cases I suspect, only known by the musical from Claude-Michel Schönberg (music) and Alain Boublil (original lyrics) which runs at Birmingham Hippodrome to 27 August. The novel’s five volumes are Fantine, Cosette, Marius, The Idyll in the Rue Plumet and the Epic in the Rue St. Denis, which covers the barricades and battles of the short-lived revolution, and finally, the hero of the piece, Jean Valjean, given his own final volume. The volume names are the story in a nutshell, the main characters and main action of book and musical, the novel taking us from the time of Waterloo in 1815 to the June Rebellion which lasted for just two days in Paris in 1832 – not the French Revolution which had ended in 1799. The 30-year-old Hugo, incidentally, although not involved in the uprising, had heard gunfire and had wandered down a side street to see what was going on only to find himself trapped behind the barricades with bullets flying around him from all directions. The seeds of Les Misérables had been sown. Valjean is the ex-con turned hero, Fantine the single mother and cruelly wronged worker who turns to prostitution to support Cosette, her daughter, who, unbeknown to her, was being abused by the Thénardiers who she was paying to look after her, and Marius is the idealist who fell for the grown up Cosette in the heady days leading up to the noble and futile insurrection. The musical has echoes of Evita in that it was first released as a concept album, then turned into a musical, in this case an arena show at the Palais des Sports in Paris in 1980.
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