Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, and political thinker who lived from 1802 to 1885. He is one of the most important writers of nineteenth-century European literature. Hugo wrote during the Romantic period, a movement that valued strong emotion, imagination, social criticism, dramatic settings, and concern for the suffering of ordinary people. His major works often combine gripping stories with serious moral questions about justice, power, poverty, and human dignity.

Hugo is especially known for using large historical settings to explore the lives of people who are poor, rejected, or mistreated by society. In novels such as Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and The Man Who Laughs, he often focuses on characters who are judged by appearance, social class, or circumstance. His writing style is highly descriptive and dramatic. He frequently pauses the action to describe places, customs, laws, history, and social systems so that readers understand the world shaping the characters’ lives.

In The Man Who Laughs, students should pay attention to Hugo’s interest in inequality, cruelty, spectacle, and compassion. The novel’s title and author are identified in the uploaded text as The Man Who Laughs: A Romance of English History by Victor Hugo. Hugo’s background as a writer concerned with injustice helps explain why the novel does not simply tell an adventure story. It also asks readers to think about how societies treat the weak, the poor, and those who are made into objects of entertainment.