The Count of Monte Cristo was originally published in serial form, and was a huge success. People would wait in long lines to buy the latest installment. Within a few months the novel was translated into ten languages. Dumas had also published another extremely successful novel, The Three Musketeers, in the same year. With the publication of The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas became famous worldwide. In Europe, his literary reputation was higher than that of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo.

The Count of Monte Cristo has remained popular with readers for over 150 years, and is often considered to be Dumas’s masterpiece. Writing in 1902, H. A. Spurr (The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas) stated that the theme of the novel “is taught so effectively, so honestly, and on so great a scale, that the book has a moral value which should preserve it from oblivion for generations to come.”

Spurr’s prediction proved to be correct. In recent years, F. W. J. Hemmings, in The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas, described the novel as “the greatest ‘revenger’s tragedy’ in the whole history of the novel.” And in 2003, Robert McCrum, literary editor of the British newspaper, The Observer, in his list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, placed The Count of Monte Cristo in fourteenth position, calling it “a masterpiece of adventure writing.”

However, in spite of the novel’s high standing amongst readers in every generation since its first publication, The Count of Monte Cristo has not generally received such high accolades from literary scholars. There is a perception that Dumas’s novels fall short of the demands of serious literature. In fact, The Count of Monte Cristo has often been viewed as a well-plotted adventure novel, well suited to popular taste, but little more. In Writers for Children, Avriel H. Goldberger has tried to bridge this gap between popular acclaim and literary standing in the work of Dumas. She acknowledges that The Count of Monte Cristo ranks with the great revenge stories of all time, but states:

This is not because Monte Cristo has equal merit as a work of art or as a probe of the psyche, but because it speaks so powerfully to our need to fantasize impossible victories of the individual against injustice.