In the case of "The Phantom of the Opera" translation, which lost a reputed 100 pages' worth of text overall, one gathers that it was largely a matter of time constraints, plus a modicum of censorship, plus simply skipping the difficult bits (a lot of the random phrases that got omitted turn out on examination to be ones that were slightly ambiguous or potentially tricky to translate!) Gaston Leroux's books had not sold well to that date in the English market, and indeed his other novels still don't; in fact I believe "The Phantom of the Opera" didn't become a best-seller either until after it was adapted for the screen ten years or so later. So it was simply a matter of a very busy translator rushing through a book that nobody cared much about, and apparently making a conscious choice to prune the background of the minor characters in order to produce a text with more focus on the actual titular Phantom.
In the case of "Twenty Years After", however, I would assume they expected it to be a reliable hit in advance. (I haven't actually looked into the history of Dumas' publication in England at all, but I'm assuming that "The Three Musketeers" was a success at the time of original publication, while I know from my rather deeper involvement in the Leroux 'fandom' that POTO wasn't!) On the other hand it is a very long book; even the abridged Project Gutenberg file (the only one I can run a quick text count over) is about 200,000 words, which puts it into "Crime and Punishment" territory, and the 1846 French edition on Wikisource runs to six hundred pages.
So it's entirely possible that the publishers in this case were trying to hit physical constraints in terms of the number of volumes the edition would have to be brought out in, etc. Unfortunately Project Gutenberg, unlike Wikisource, doesn't appear to credit the specific edition on which this particular e-text was based.
I just hit another weirdly random change between the two editions while re-reading the initial reunion between d'Artagnan and Athos: in the French version Athos says that he is forty-nine (Je suis encore jeune, n’est-ce pas, malgré mes quarante-neuf ans ? ) and in the English version he is only forty-eight ("in spite of my eight-and-forty years of age")... Oh well, for fic purposes I shall just have to fudge it :-p What I was actually looking for was Athos' observations on Milady, and that remark about 'blood calling for blood'.
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In the case of "Twenty Years After", however, I would assume they expected it to be a reliable hit in advance. (I haven't actually looked into the history of Dumas' publication in England at all, but I'm assuming that "The Three Musketeers" was a success at the time of original publication, while I know from my rather deeper involvement in the Leroux 'fandom' that POTO wasn't!) On the other hand it is a very long book; even the abridged Project Gutenberg file (the only one I can run a quick text count over) is about 200,000 words, which puts it into "Crime and Punishment" territory, and the 1846 French edition on Wikisource runs to six hundred pages.
So it's entirely possible that the publishers in this case were trying to hit physical constraints in terms of the number of volumes the edition would have to be brought out in, etc. Unfortunately Project Gutenberg, unlike Wikisource, doesn't appear to credit the specific edition on which this particular e-text was based.
I just hit another weirdly random change between the two editions while re-reading the initial reunion between d'Artagnan and Athos: in the French version Athos says that he is forty-nine (Je suis encore jeune, n’est-ce pas, malgré mes quarante-neuf ans ? ) and in the English version he is only forty-eight ("in spite of my eight-and-forty years of age")... Oh well, for fic purposes I shall just have to fudge it :-p What I was actually looking for was Athos' observations on Milady, and that remark about 'blood calling for blood'.