Anyone who has read The Count of Monte Cristo only in this 'classic version' has never read Dumas' novel. For a start, the translation is occasionally inaccurate and is written in a nineteenth-century English that now sounds far more antiquated than the French of the original does to a modern French reader: to mention a small point in this connection, Dumas uses a good deal of dialogue (he wrote by the line) and the constant inversions of 'said he' and 'cried he' are both irritating and antiquated. There are some real oddities, like the attempt to convey popular speech (which does not correspond to anything in Dumas), when the sailor in Chapter XXV says, 'that's one of them nabob gentlemen from Ingy [sic], no doubt. . .' Even aside from that, most of the dialogues in this nineteenth-century translation, in which the characters utter sentences like: 'I will join thee ere long,' 'I confess he asked me none,' and 'When will all this cease?', have the authentic creak of the Victorian stage boards and gaslit melodrama.
It can be argued that this language accurately conveys an aspect of Dumas' work, but not even his worst detractors would pretend that there is nothing more to it than that. Still less acceptable, however, than the language of the Victorian translation is the huge number of omissions and bowdlerizations of Dumas' text. The latter include part of [Character]'s opium dream at [Chapter], some of the dialogue between [Significant Antagonist] and [Another Character] in [Chapter], and several parts of Chapter XCVII, on [Character A] and [Character B]'s flight to Belgium.
