Alexandre Dumas

First complete English translation of the classic swashbuckling adventure, The Three Musketeers — the most acclaimed and influential of the early translations.

• Alexandre Dumas (French).
• Translated by William Barrow.
• The Three Musketeers; or, the feats and fortunes of a Gascon adventurer.
• London: Bruce and Wyld, 1846. 
• 687 pages.
• Translator's preface bound before Preface to The Library of Foreign Romance. 
• Without the additional Library of Foreign Romance series title page, matching Munro 80. 
• Contemporary half brown calf with marbled boards, rebacked with original spine laid down, gilt-lettered burgundy morocco spine label.
• Housed in elaborate custom inlaid morocco clamshell case, lined in scarlet wool.

First published in Paris in 1844, The Three Musketeers appeared in England and America soon thereafter in a variety of shortened and serialized adaptations: first in two US translations, then serialized and abridged in the UK by Vickers. Barrow's version here, published as part of the Library of Foreign Romance series, is traditionally labeled the earliest complete English translation because Vickers omits "the account of the dinner at Maitre Coquenard's" plus "much of the original French version is compressed"; further, "an entirely new chapter which Dumas had not written is gratuitously interpolated before the final one" (Munro, 80-1). But most importantly, Barrow's translation was the most widely read, among the best for more than a century, and handled with verve and a charming touch of literalism.

Yet it must be admitted that neither the literalism nor the completeness is altogether absolute: as the Translator's Preface takes care to reassure its readers, a translation from the French that left nothing at all to the imagination would "pander to profligacy," sullied by those traces of objectionable matter so enticing to Continental sensibilities and so morally objectionable to "those of our fair countrywomen who have not lost the delicacy which is the most endearing of their national charms"; those traces have therefore been safely omitted. What remains does very well.

The novel has been the subject of three centuries' worth of dramatic adaptations: from the opera produced in Dumas's lifetime, to a Wodehouse-authored Broadway musical, to the 1973 Oliver Reed/Michael York costume extravaganza beloved of middle-school substitute French teachers, to 2009's Barbie and the Three Musketeers. None of these tributes have ever eclipsed the original, which lives and flourishes not by its historical intrigues or even its immortal characters, but by its high spirits, joie de vivre, and dashing style.