The Abbreviated Monte Cristo

Section Two: Monte Cristo for Kids Ah! Children's editions! Since The Count of Monte Cristo is almost 200 years old, and by a famous author, it's been adapted many times into a child-friendly package, perfect for a bedtime story! Classics Illustrated has set the bar pretty high- by proving that the entire novel, with subplots, can be shoehorned into less than 100 pages. The children's text editions have a tendency to do away with the violence, emphasize Dantes' imprisonment and escape, and cut corners on the "revenge" part. Some add child-friendly humorous scenes, have radical "re-interpretations" of the events and/or add manufactured happy endings (usually involving Dantes/The Count getting back together with Mercedes). They also draw strict lines between good/evil, with the protagonist, Dantes, as "good" and the Villefort/Fernand/Danglars trio as "evil".  I've done a site-wid...

Section One Supplement: How to Identify a "Standard Abridged Edition" of The Count of Monte Cristo [Anonymous] Translator’s Note: The prevailing taste for brevity has made the spacious days of the stately three-volume novel seem very remote indeed. A distinct prejudice against length now exists: a feeling that there is a necessary antithesis between quantity and quality. One of the results is that those delightfully interminable romances which beguiled the nights and days of our ancestors in so pleasant a fashion are now given no more than a passing nod of recognition. [...]   This, then, is felt to be sufficient apology for the present abridgement of one of the world’s masterpieces. It has been the object of the editor to provide the modern reader with a good translation and a moderately condensed version of Dumas’ narrative. This, while omitting, of ne...