Les Miserables

Victor Hugo's Les Miserables was first published on 31 March 1862. It begins in 1815 and culminates in the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, and it follows the lives of a large cast whose paths cross over that period. Jean Valjean is a peasant who is released from nineteen years in the prison at Toulon, five of them for stealing bread for his sister's starving family and the rest added for his attempts to escape. Marked for life by his yellow passport, he is turned away from every inn in Digne until the bishop, Myriel, gives him a bed and then, when he is caught stealing the bishop's silverware, refuses to denounce him.

That act changes the direction of Valjean's life. Among the people he later encounters are Fantine, a seamstress who loses her place and dies leaving a small daughter, Cosette; Cosette herself, who as a child is lodged with a cruel innkeeping family; a police inspector who will not accept that a former convict can become an honest man; and the young students who build barricades in Paris in 1832. The novel is an epic historical work that moves between individual lives and the wider events around them.

Les Miserables is usually known in the English-speaking world by its French title, though several alternative English titles have been used, among them The Wretched and The Dispossessed. It has been adapted many times for film, television and the stage, including as a musical.