The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo begins in 1815 with Edmond Dantes, recently made first mate of the merchant vessel Pharaon, carrying out his dying captain's last request: to take a letter from the island of Elba to a Bonapartist in Paris. When the ship reaches Marseille, its owner, Morrel, promotes Dantes to captain and gives him two weeks' leave to marry his Catalan fiancee, Mercedes Herrera. Both decisions make him enemies. The ship's supercargo, Danglars, resents the promotion, and Dantes is denounced by men who want what he has, then imprisoned without trial in the fortress on the island of If.

What follows moves across France, Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1839, during the Bourbon Restoration and the reign of Louis Philippe I, and follows what becomes of Dantes, of the men who accused him and of the people who once depended on him. The novel appeared in serial form between 1844 and 1846 and in book form in 1846, and its plot, like that of much of Dumas's fiction, grew out of outlines supplied by the writer who collaborated with him, Auguste Maquet.

The Count of Monte Cristo followed The Three Musketeers (1844) and was serialised in the same manner, and Dumas extended the same method over The Man in the Iron Mask (1850).