Geoffery Winthrop-Young
The Informatics of Revenge:
Telegraphy, Speed and Storage in The Count of Monte Cristo

NOTES

1
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo 1. All page 

references are to this edition. The date cannot be correct. 

According to the text, it is either February 27 or 28.

2
In keeping with Geoffrey Wilson's The Old Telegraphs, the most 

comprehensive study of the subject in English, "telegraphy" refers 

throughout the text to early visual mechanical signaling systems.

3
Some claim that the name (and maybe even some of the fate) of 

the original ingenieur-té1égraphe Claude Chappe literally brackets 

one of Hugo's most memorable characters: Claude Frollo, 

archdeacon of Tirechappes. After all, he pulls ("tire") the strings of 

Quasimodo, whose workplace is at the top of a church tower, 

where many telegraphs were installed.

4
See Hobsbawm 68 for a brief account of more realistic traveling 

times in the 1840s.

5
Many people with and some without money, among them 

Danglars (469, 637, 642, 937) are involved in railway speculations, 

including "Lord Wilmore" (i.e., Monte Cristo), of whom the Abbe 

Busoni (i.e., also Monte Cristo) says that he is pursuing a venture 

involving railroads and an "electric telegraph" (692). The 

combination of the two was a given, especially after the terrible 

accident at Meudon. That accident, however, occurred in 1842, 

four years after the Parisian section of the novel takes place. 

Likewise, the great flurry of railway speculations followed the 

formation of the first large railway companies in the early 1840s. 

Dumas is retrojecting, but it serves to make the novel even more 

up to date. One of the reasons for the railway's initial difficulties 

was that France had a very extensive canal network. Caderousse's 

roadside inn hits hard times because goods and people travel by 

barge instead (214).