Jack Reading Order

Jack (1876) by Alphonse Daudet is the most Dickensian of his novels — a portrait of a child destroyed by adult social ambition and neglect, drawn with the sentimentality and social anger that Daudet took directly from his English model. Jack is the illegitimate son of Ida de Barancy, a pretty, vain woman of easy virtue who wants to be a literary salon hostess; his supposed father is the poet and charlatan d'Argenton, who resents Jack's existence as an obstacle to his own career. Jack is shunted from schools to factories, exploited by everyone who touches him, and eventually dies of tuberculosis after a brief reunion with his mother — who is too absorbed in d'Argenton's world to register what she has allowed to happen. The novel is sentimental in the Victorian mode (the dying child is a Victorian staple from Dickens through Harriet Beecher Stowe), but Daudet's social observation is sharp: Jack's destruction is not accidental but systematic, the product of a French bourgeois social order in which a child without a legitimate father and a mother without means or values is simply disposable. The novel was enormously successful and was read across Europe; Dostoyevsky admired it.