Les Misérables. by HUGO, Victor - 1862: Authorized English translation (copyright).

London: Hurst and Blackett, successors to Henry Colburn, 1862. First authorized edition in English First authorized edition in English, preceded only by the American piracy in the same year, and considerably scarcer, with copies in publisher's cloth being particularly rare. Set against the backdrop of the political turmoil leading up to the 1832 June Rebellion, Hugo's vast tale articulates a sequence of love stories both romantic (between Marius and Cosette, the date of whose wedding night in the novel was in fact the date of Hugo's first tryst with his own mistress Juliette Drouet) and familial (in Valjean's moral redemption through realising a love for his adopted daughter Cosette).
The translation was by Lascelles Wraxall, and published in October 1862, within months of the original French-language edition. The Guinness Book of World Records (1981) claims that "The shortest literary correspondence on record was that between Victor Marie Hugo (1802-85) and his publisher, Hurst and Blackett, in 1862. The author was on holiday and anxious to know how his new novel Les Misérables was selling. He wrote '?'. The reply was '!'." Sadly the story is apocryphal. 3 volumes, octavo. Original blue diagonal-bead-grain cloth, spines lettered and decorated in gilt, covers with blind-stamped borders, pale green endpapers. Housed in a brown cloth flat-back folding case. Contemporary ownership inscriptions of F. Edith Slater to free endpapers; collector's labels of Virginia bibliophile Christopher Clark Geest. Slight rubbing to joints, a fine copy, exceptional in this condition. Olin H. Moore, "Some Translations of Les Misérables", Modern Language Notes, Vol. 74, No. 3 (March 1959), pp. 240-6.