Les Miserables read-a-long 2026 | Première Partie (1)

Thank you @VikingNorthUtsire That was an interesting read.

I liked the way they drew modern parallels with the Boris Johnson quote about working class mothers having children today who are “unloved and undisciplined.” (How dare he comment at all!!!!)

The mothers bear all the judgement and blame from a society that just leaves them to struggle. The fathers are just ‘absent.’

Fantine knew she had to separate from her child for both their sakes. She was resigned to it with no considered plan, making her way back to Montreuil sur Mer. I think it was always a gamble, whoever an unmarried mother left her child with? Her assumption was that Madame Thenardier had strong maternal instincts and would not be capable of mistreating a child in her care. 😔

This is no doubt why many people also thought their grandmother or sister was their mother, rather than their actual (young, unmarried) mother, if the baby could be looked after in the family structure rather than farmed out. And then later there were the Magdalen laundries of course…

Can’t help taking a step back and thinking this whole bloody mess in the story is ALL because of men not taking responsibility for offspring. Tholomyès the Twat obviously, but also the father of Valjean’s sister’s SEVEN children who clearly they could not support. I know I know no contraception etc etc but men just have to shag no matter what don’t they, and women always bear the cost.

I remember reading about "baby farming". It seems that either the stigma of unmarried motherhood, or just the practicalities of needing to work and having no childcare, meant that this was not an uncommon choice. Poor women, poor babies.

livingwithdying.leeds.ac.uk/2022/11/01/unloved-and-undisciplined-nineteenth-century-baby-farming-and-the-demonisation-of-working-class-mothers-across-the-ages/

This is a good piece on the history of feeding bottles with a small bit about wet nurses, you really were gambling with your babies’ life in industrialised Britain leaving them with a wet nurse. There is one horrifying case of a woman who regularly accepted children and offered to raise them if you sent a monthly sum and then promptly murdered them. Glass bottles were great but all the rubber teats etc were a nightmare for bacteria and sterilisation was quite a late development and I think took a while to filter down . Formula helped but animal milk was also a regular substitute, sterilisation was the game changer.
https://www.alimentarium.org/en/story/history-baby-bottles#:~:text=Between%201850%20and%201950%2C%20the,and%20fitted%20with%20rubber%20teats.

It’s the total lack of knowing who they are though.. I think a wet nurse would have been known to a village?
Although yes I suppose I am thinking about a more cohesive social circle, which Fantine doesn’t have. The points about abandonment etc are well made. It really does make you appreciate how far we’ve come (compulsory school, social services, etc - for all the faults, at the systems are there).
I think Hugo is also condemning the village a little bit for observing and not realising what it going on.

It’s kind of like the baby farms in Oliver Twist where the orphan babies too young for the orphanage got left with a woman who was supposedly going to wet nurse them but in fact you’d be lucky if they got anythIng at all. The invention of formula and sterilisation has saved so many lives.
I don’t think it was that uncommon though for working class women to leave their babies with a wet nurse especially after the Industrial Revolution.

How do you mean? @SanFranBear

Laying it on with a trowel! 🤣

I think childhood was a very different thing in times gone-by. Abandonment of children was common. Fantine herself had been abandoned, so leaving Cosette with someone is actually a “step up” from her own background.

Even in the 1960s parenting was viewed as a success if a child was fed and clothed. Those were the minimum requirements! You didn’t have to concern yourself too much with where children were or feel any responsibility at all as to their mental state. Corporal punishment still existed in schools and at home. Attendance at school was a legal requirement but it wasn’t the “thing” it is today. And that’s the 60s! 140 years before 1817.

I agree it’s nothing short of staggering that Fantine leaves Cosette with these people. I mean for goodness sake woman! Could she not at least have asked around first???
I think Hugo either has no actual understanding of motherhood (being male), or is hamming up the tragedy (possibly), or making out Fantine to be a complete numpty. Or all three.

The bit about the names did make me chuckle. (“Frogmella… it’s exotic!”)

I think I have read on a little - very sad section but so vivid

...his levels of judgement are very strong throughout really

Hard agree - although he does seem to reserve his most damning critique to the 'middle classes' as he thinks of workers as generous and the bourgeoisie as respectably honest... particularly jarring as he ends the chapter referencing the Revolution!

I’m admiring how “Master of the House” in the musical has captured the Thenardiers so well, they are just as grotesque and awful, poor Cosette. Hugo is damning of them as people and a class. I mean they are awful humans but his levels of judgement are very strong throughout really. I guess I’m not used to hearing the authors voice being expressed so loudly as opposed to being an undertone in the writing.

I was wondering too if these trashy novels were what Emma was reading during her time at the convent in 'Madame Bovary'!

Poor Fantine, how awful to have no choice but to leave your child with a total stranger because you have to find work. Horrible to think how much that must still happen in the world, and how precarious the child’s situation is. Having now read chapter 2, Cosette is clearly not going to be looked after well 🙁

I did think the bit about baby names was funny - plus ça change! 😄

I thought Hugo was very forgiving of Tholomyes which makes sense as you say he was kind of like that himself. He ends up twenty years later rich and influential, a wealthy lawyer, a wise elector and severe judge but always a man of pleasure.
In other words, the consequences for the way he treated Fantine (and encouraged his friends to treat the other women) are exactly none, just as he predicted in his letter. Patriarchy makes the world go round. Plus ca change.

I think it was importantly that Hugo told us that! It really emphasises the difference in their situations.

Poor Fantine... although how the fuck do you go from 'aw, aren't they sweet, all playing together' to 'is it OK if I just leave her here, stranger who I've been talking to for all of about 10 minutes!'

I know it was a different time, and she had noone and blah de blah but.. bloody hell!

Also, not happy that Hugo felt obliged to let us know Tholomyes was able to go on and be a success in his life - yuk!

Yes, the Victorian morality codes certainly had huge and lasting impact.

You are absolutely right about Hardy & I would have mentioned him if I hadn’t been worried about my post being too long, but he is much later in the century. Far from the Madding Crowd is 1874 & Tess is 1891. There’s also Edith Wharton. I can remember my old history of Eng Lit book pointing out that there’s a clear development from Little Em’ly from David Copperfield (melodramatic & sentimental) to Tess. But even Tess is young and beautiful.

In contrast Balzac’s La cousine Bette (1847) begins with a married woman in her late 40s (beautiful but definitely not young) being propositioned by an objectionable older man and her understandable refusal kicks off the whole plot of the novel. That’s 2 years before David Copperfield. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was only 7 years after DC. I can’t imagine an early Victorian English novel being as bold as what was being written in France at the same time. The closest I can think of is either Anne Brontë or Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell (& even Ruth is saintly by the end) - (caveat I’m not an English Lit expert so there may be some I’ve overlooked). There’s also Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair - but that feels a different tone to what is being written in France.

There is an interesting question about why English writers followed the path of middle class values, because Richardson’s Clarissa written a century earlier is far bolder (& he was the middle class moralist compared to Fielding). I looked it up on Wikipedia when I posted yesterday & I’d forgotten just how shocking the plot is. Possibly the shift was due to the need to make the novel a respectable form of literature (there’s a passage in Northanger Abbey where Jane Austen justifies the novel that I keep thinking about re this). Possibly in France there’s the fact that some of their 18th century novelists were also philosophes (eg Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire) who were more interested in the novel as a means to convey ideas than morality and who really weren’t very respectable themselves.

I think you can tell this from his somewhat lascivious descriptions of female beauty.

What about Hardy though?

If Fantine had been with Tholomyes nearly 2 years when he abandoned her, and then 10 months later Cosette is going on 3… Fantine must have got pregnant right at the beginning of the relationship????

@MotherOfCatBoy I knew Hugo was a womaniser but wow he’s complicated!

He advocated for women’s social, legal and educational rights. He argued “The Shared Burden” saying if women bear half the “burden” of society then they are entitled to half the rights (not to be legal ‘minors’). He was friends with George Sand who challenged gender norms.

And yet…. Affairs, using prostitutes, that code you detail 🤢

Perhaps a Madonna/Whore complex?

And the knowledge to write convincingly across all social strata?