Three novels, two of them enormous. Dumas wrote for serial publication, which is why The Count of Monte Cristo runs to 466,000 words on this site and The Three Musketeers to 226,061: each chapter had to end with a reason to buy tomorrow’s paper.
The publication order is also the reading order for the musketeer books, because Twenty Years After picks up the same characters two decades later. Monte Cristo is independent of both.
The word counts below are for the editions here, and they are the practical fact about Dumas: this is not a shelf you finish in a week, and the reading times show it.
The two 1844 novels came out in the same year in different papers, and both were built from other people’s material: Monte Cristo from a real case of wrongful imprisonment and long revenge, the Musketeers from Gatien de Courtilz’s memoirs of d’Artagnan. Twenty Years After (1845) picks the same four men up two decades later, with the Fronde and a young Louis XIV in place of Richelieu.
Length is the real decision here. Monte Cristo is 466,000 words, about twenty-six hours; The Three Musketeers 226,061 and Twenty Years After 242,155, about thirteen each. That is a fortnight of evenings at an hour a night. Spend it on Monte Cristo first if you want one book to remember, on the Musketeers two if you want the company.
Where to start
The Three Musketeers — Half the length of Monte Cristo, it introduces the characters Dumas kept returning to, and its first hundred pages are the most purely enjoyable in his work.
Alexandre Dumas in publication order
Numbered by the date on each book page. Word counts and reading times are for the text on this site.
| # | Year | Title | Form | Words | Reading time | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1844 | The Count of Monte Cristo | Novel | 466,000 | 26 h | Serialised in 1844-46, then issued in volumes. |
| 2 | 1844 | The Three Musketeers | Novel | 226,061 | 13 h | Serialised through 1844. |
| 3 | 1845 | Twenty Years After | Novel | 242,155 | 13 h | Serialised through 1845; the sequel to The Three Musketeers. |
| All three | 934,216 | 52 h |
How to read Alexandre Dumas
- Series first. The Three Musketeers then Twenty Years After. The second assumes you know who Athos, Porthos and Aramis are, and it opens with a failed revolution.
- Standalone. Monte Cristo shares nothing with the musketeers. Read it on its own, or save it for the winter: at 26 hours it is the longest book on this shelf.
- Abridged or not. The editions here are complete. Abridgements of Monte Cristo cut the Roman carnival and much of the Italian material, which is where the revenge plot is set up.
All three have pages here with chapter summaries, word counts, reading times and free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB downloads.
Alexandre Dumas’s shelf · Classic fiction · All authors · Books by decade.