r from the creation of a grotesque but noble character. In a way, it is possible to say that the character of the hunchback was "easy" to have pity on. Things are not so simple in Les MisTrables. This later novel had characters--whether evil or good--that were all familiar types to nineteenth-century readers. That realism of portrayals would have appealed to popular readers, who could recognize in the novel sympathetic portraits of themselves, and it helps account for the enduring popularity of the text in the modern period.
However, it seems important to recognize that Hugo's own sense of the direction of popular literature as a genre figured into his creation of the narrative of Les MisTrables. According to Winegarten, Hugo is first among such literary contemporaries as Balzac, George Sand, Dumas pere, described as "writers whose vast outpouring of words never ceases to astonish and overwhelm. Yet Hugo, or Olympio, as he was to call himself . . . gives the impression of being and displaying more of everything" (1998, p. 21). After Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo withdrew from novel writing, focusing instead on poetry and drama. However, throughout early half of the nineteenth century, despite the bitter legacy of 1848 and the rise of the Second Empire, France saw the appearance of multiple novels and tracts having social or moral criticism as their theme.
Hugo's France was a society that was full of people embarking on criticism of their own society, and the purpose of that criticism was to make that society better. The result, with respect to the meanings of the texts of criticism, was that such narratives as Les MisTrables have an intertextual relationship with other texts of the period. For example, Hugo was undoubtedly aware of the texts of Balzac, who died in 1850. In such novels as Cousin Bette, published in 1837, Balzac developed themes of moral criticism of French society. He personalized that criticism. In other words, what w...