HUGO, Victor.

£1,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Toilers of the Sea. First edition in English of Hugo's allegorical adventure novel set in Guernsey, where he lived in exile."Like his obscure American contemporary, Herman Melville, Hugo was fascinated by the life of seafaring men which he saw all around him at Guernsey... He took copious notes on the construction of ships and navigation, and on the folklore and oceanography of the Channel Islands region. To his poet's ear the mariner's technical vocabulary seemed entrancing, and he filled his novel with a wealth of nautical lingo" (Josephson, pp. 456-7).It was published in French earlier the same year as Les Travailleurs de la mer.Provenance: Purchased by Stephen C. Massey from Pickering and Chatto, December 1980.

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