Fair old paperback, age tanning, some tears. 1970. 7th printing.
☆JULES VERNE - RARE FAIR 1970 KIDS'ADVENTURE SCI-FI BOOK:A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH☆
A fantastic voyage!!
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
The book starts out in May 1863 with Professor Lidenbrock coming home to his house in Germany to read his runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga written by Snorri Sturluson. After a while of reading the manuscript Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel found a coded note written in runic script. Axel and the Professor started to try to decode the message into Latin. They found a very weird message. The Professor tried to decipher the message but he couldn’t.
Professor Lidenbrock was determined to decode the message. So much, that he locked up everyone in his house with no food until he decoded the message. But, amazingly, Axel decoded the message while he was cooling himself off with the manuscript. Axel noticed that his uncle’s deciphering was correct, you just had to read it backwards. Axel, however,decides to keep this a secret. He is afraid of what his uncle would do. After a while, Axel finally decides to tell his uncle because he was starving. Professor Lidenbrock translates the message, which is a note written by an alchemist from Iceland named Arne Saknussemm, who said he had found a secret passage to the center of the earth through a place called Snæfell in Iceland.
Now that Professor Lidenbrock knows what the note says and knows where to go he heads to Iceland. Lidenbrock takes Axel with him, but he isn’t so sure about going to Iceland and going in a volcano. When they get to Iceland they meet a man named Hans Bjelke. They ask him to be their guide and go with them to find the center of the earth. Hans accepts and goes with them. They make it to the base of the volcano.
In late June, they make it to the volcano. The volcano has three craters. The message the Professor read said that the opening to the passage is in one of the craters. The message said that to find the passage you have to look for a shadow that a mountain casts a shadow on. But you can only see the shadow in the last few days of June. The weather was to cloudy to see the shadow. However, eventually the sun comes out and they know which crater to take.
They descend down into the volcano. They experience lots of trouble and dangers. At one point Axel almost dies due to dehydration, but Hans finds a river to drink from. After a while, the group finds a large cavern with an ocean, etc. They build a raft and set out into the sea. A thunderstorm comes up and almost destroys the raft. This shows us how much the Professor wants to find the center of the earth. But, the strangest thing the group sees is a human. They don’t mess with it. What the group doesn’t realize is that they have made it to the Center of the Earth.
The group then leaves through a passage but the sea rushes in and sweeps them away. After drifting for a long time they end up in Italy. Once safe the group says their goodbyes and goes their separate ways.
-----
Review
5 out of 5 St*rs!!!
"The reason Verne is still read by millions today
is simply that he was one of the best storytellers
who ever lived."--Arthur C. Clarke
Product Description
A pioneer in the genre of science fiction writing, Jules Verne possessed an uncanny ability to imagine — often with startling accuracy — the future possibilities of science. In this classic novel, first published in 1864, the author introduces readers to Otto Lidenbrock, a professor of geology who ventures into a fantastical world within an extinct Icelandic volcano. Verne's vivid imagination and masterful storytelling ability has made this book a popular choice among readers for more than 140 years. This version is believed to be the most faithful rendition into English of this classic currently in the public domain. The few notes of the translator are located near the point where they are referenced.
Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
From the Publisher
In this fully dramatized adaptation of Jules Verne's classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Leonard Nimoy, John de Lancie, and cast members from Star Trek® feature films and all four TV series take you on an incredible journey.
Journey to the Center of the Earth is the story of Professor Lindenbrock, his nephew Axel and their quest for the secrets contained at the earth's core. Led by Hans, their Icelandic guide, Lindenbrock and Axel descend deeper into the planet than anyone has ever gone before...but will they make it back to the surface alive?
Featuring virtuoso performaces from the entire cast, riveting sound effects and original music, Alien Voices' production of Journey to the Center of the Earth is an adventure in sound.
From the Inside Flap
The intrepid Professor Lindenbrock embarks upon the strangest expedition of the nineteenth century: a journey down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the Earth's very core. In his quest to penetrate the planet's primordial secrets, the geologist--together with his quaking nephew Axel and their devoted guide, Hans--discovers an astonishing subterranean menagerie of prehistoric proportions. Verne's imaginative tale is at once the ultimate science fiction adventure and a reflection on the perfectibility of human understanding and the psychology of the questor. As David Brin notes in his Introduction, though Verne never knew the term "science fiction," Journey to the Centre of the Earth is "inarguably one of the wellsprings from which it all began."
From the Back Cover
A pioneer in the genre of science fiction writing, Jules Verne possessed an uncanny ability to imagine—often with startling accuracy—the future possibilities of science. In this classic novel, first published in 1864, the author introduces readers to Otto Lidenbrock, a professor of geology who ventures into a fantastical world within an extinct Icelandic volcano. Verne's vivid imagination and masterful storytelling ability has made this book a popular choice among readers for more than 140 years. This version is believed to be the most faithful rendition into English of this classic currently in the public domain. The few notes of the translator are located near the point where they are referenced.
About the Author
Jules Verne started out composing librettos, but the French-born author's passion for travel and exploration compelled him to turn to adventure tales, creating the prototype for today's science fiction. One of the most translated authors in the world, Jules Verne is best known for his classics, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I
It was on Sunday, the 24th of May, 1863, that my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, came rushing suddenly back to his little house in the old part of Hamburg, No. 19, Königstrasse.
Our good Martha could not but think she was very much behindhand with the dinner, for the pot was scarcely beginning to simmer, and I said to myself:
“Now, then, we’ll have a fine outcry if my uncle is hungry, for he is the most impatient of mortals.”
“Mr. Lidenbrock, already!” cried the poor woman, in dismay, half opening the dining-room door.
“Yes, Martha; but of course dinner can’t be ready yet, for it is not two o’clock. It has only just struck the half-hour by St. Michael’s.”
“What brings Mr. Lidenbrock home, then?”
“He’ll probably tell us that himself.”
“Here he comes. I’ll be off, Mr. Axel; you must make him listen to reason.”
And forthwith she effected a safe retreat to her culinary laboratory.
I was left alone, but not feeling equal to the task of making the most irascible of professors listen to reason, was about to escape to my own little room upstairs, when the street-door creaked on its hinges, and the wooden stairs cracked beneath a hurried tread, and the master of the house came in and bolted across the dining-room, straight into his study. But, rapid as his flight was, he managed to fling his nutcracker-headed stick into a corner, and his wide-brimmed rough hat on the table, and to shout out to his nephew:
“Axel, follow me.”
Before I had time to stir he called out again, in the most impatient tone imaginable:
“What! Not here yet?”
In an instant I was on my feet and in the study of my dreadful master.
Otto Lidenbrock was not a bad man. I grant that, willingly. But, unless he mightily changes, he will live and die a terrible origi- nal.
He was professor in the Johannæum, and gave the course of lectures on mineralogy, during which he regularly put himself into a passion once or twice. Not that he troubled himself much about the assiduity of his pupils, or the amount of attention they paid to his lessons, or their corresponding success. These points gave him no concern. He taught subjectively, to use a German philosophical expression, for himself, and not for others. He was a selfish savant— a well of science, and nothing could be drawn up from it without the grinding noise of the pulleys: in a word, he was a miser.
There are professors of this stamp in Germany.
My uncle, unfortunately, did not enjoy great facility of pronunciation, unless he was with intimate friends; at least, not when he spoke in public, and this is a deplorable defect in an orator. In his demonstrations at the Johannæum the professor would often stop short, struggling with some obstinate word that refused to slip over his lips—one of those words which resist, swell out, and finally come forth in the anything but scientific shape of an oath. This put him in a great rage.
Now, in mineralogy, there are many names difficult to pronounce—half Greek, half Latin, barbarous appellations which would blister the lips of a poet. I have no wish to speak ill of the science. Far from it. But when one has to do with rhomboidal crystallisations, retinasphaltic resins, galena favosite, molybdates of lead, tungstates of manganese, and titanites of zircon, the most nimble tongue may be allowed to stumble.
The townsfolk were aware of this pardonable infirmity of my uncle’s, and they took advantage of it, and were on the watch for the dangerous passages; and when he put himself in a fury laughed at him, which was not in good taste, even for Germans. His lectures were always very numerously attended, but how many of those who were most regular auditors came for anything else but to make game of the professor’s grand fits of passion I shouldn’t like to say. Whatever my uncle might be, and I can hardly say too much, he was a true savant.
Though he sometimes broke his specimens by his rough handling, he had both the genius of a geologist and the eye of a mineralogist. With his hammer and steel pointer and magnetic needle, his blow-pipe and his flask of nitric acid, he was a master indeed. By the fracture, the hardness, the fusibility, the ring, the smell, of any mineral whatever, he classed it without hesitation among the six hundred species science numbers to-day.
The name of Lidenbrock was consequently mentioned with hon-our in gymnasiums and national associations. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, and Captains Franklin and Sabine, paid him a visit when they passed through Hamburg. Becqueul, Ebolmann, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, Sainte Clarice Deville, took pleasure in consulting him on the most stirring questions of chemistry, a science which was indebted to him for discoveries of considerable importance; and in 1853 a treatise on Transcendent Crystallography, by Professor Otto Lidenbrock, was published at Leipsic, a large folio, with plates, which did not pay its cost, however.
Moreover, my uncle was curator of the Museum of Mineralogy, belonging to M. Struve, the Russian ambassador, a valuable collection, of European celebrity.
Such, then, was the personage who summoned me so impatiently.
Fancy to yourself a tall, spare man, with an iron constitution, and a juvenile fairness of complexion, which took off full ten years of his fifty. His large eyes rolled about incessantly behind his great goggles; his long thin nose resembled a knife-blade; malicious people declared it was magnetised, and attracted steel filings—a pure calumny; it attracted nothing but snuff, but, to speak truth, a super-abundance of that. When I have added that my uncle made mathematical strides of three feet at every step, and marched along with his fists firmly clenched—a sign of an impetuous temperament—you will know enough of him not to be over-anxious for his company.
He lived in his little house in Königstrasse, a dwelling built partly of brick and partly of stone, with a crenated gable-end, which looked on to one of those winding canals which intersect each other in the centre of the oldest part of Hamburg, which happily escaped the great fire in 1842.
The old house leaned forward slightly, and bulged out towards the passers-by. The roof inclined to one side, in the position a German student belonging to the Tugendbund wears his cap. The perpendicular of the house was not quite exact, but, on the whole, the house stood well enough, thanks to an old elm, firmly imbedded in the façade, which pushed its flower buds across the window-panes in spring.
My uncle was pretty rich for a German professor. The house was his own, and all its belongings. These belongings were his godchild Gräuben, a Virland girl, seventeen years old, his servant Martha, and myself. In my double quality of nephew and orphan, I became his assistant in his experiments.
I must confess I have a great appetite for geological science. The blood of a mineralogist flows in my veins, and I never grow weary in the society of my beloved stones.
On the whole, it was possible to live happily in this little house in Königstrasse, notwithstanding the impatience of the owner; for though he had a rough fashion of showing it, he loved me for all that. But, the fact was, he was a man who could not wait, and was in a greater hurry than nature.
When he used to plant mignonette and convolvuluses in his terra-cotta pots in the spring, every morning he went regularly and pulled their leaves, to hasten their growth.
With such an original, there was no alternative but to obey, so I darted into the study immediately.
II
The study was a complete museum, every specimen of the mineral kingdom was to be found there, all labelled in the most perfect order, in accordance with the three great divisions of minerals—the inflammable, the metallic, and the lithoid.
How well I knew this alphabet of mineralogical science. How many a time, instead of loitering about with boys of my own age, I amused myself by dusting these graphites, and anthracites, and pit coal, and touch-stones; and the bitumens, and the resins, and organic soils, which had to be kept from the least particle of dust; and the metals, from iron up to gold, the relative value of which disappeared before the absolute equality of scientific specimens; and all those stones, enough to build the little house in the Königstrasse over again, and an extra room besides, which I would have fitted up so nicely for myself.
But when I entered the study now, I scarcely thought of those wonders. My mind was entirely occupied with my uncle. He had buried himself in his big arm-chair, covered with Utrecht velvet, and held a book in his hands, gazing at it with the most profound admiration.
“What a book! What a book!” he exclaimed.
This reminded me that Professor Lidenbrock was also given to bibliomania in his leisure moments; but an old book would have had no value in his eyes unless it could not be found anywhere else, or, at all events, could not be read.
“What! don’t you see it, then?” he went on. “It is a priceless treasure! I discovered it this morning while I was rummaging about in Hevelin’s, the Jew’s shop.”
“Magnificent!” I replied with forced enthusiasm.
Really, what was the good of making such a fuss about an old quarto volume, the back and sides of which seemed bound in coarse calf—a yellowish old book, with a faded tassel dangling from it?
However, the professor’s vocabulary of adjectives was not yet exhausted.
“Look!” he said, asking himself questions, and answering them in the same breath; “is it handsome enough? Yes; it is first-rate. And what binding! Does it open easily? Yes, it lies open at any page, no matter where. And does it close well? Yes; for binding and leaves seem in one completely. Not a single breakage in this back after 700 years of existence! Ah! this is binding that Bozerian, Closs, and Purgold might have been proud of!”
All the while he was speaking, my uncle kept opening and shutting the old book. I could not do less than ask him about the contents, though I did not feel the least interest in the subject.
“And what is the title of this wonderful volume?” I asked.
“The title of it?” he replied, with increased animation. “The title is ‘Heims Kringla,’ by Snorre Turleson, the famous Icelandic author of the twelfth century. It is the chronicle of the Norwegian princes who reigned in Iceland.”
“Indeed!” I said, doing my best to appear enthusiastic. “And it is translated into German, of course?”
“Translated!” cried the professor, in a sharp tone. “What should I do with a translation? Who cares for translations? It is the original work, in the Icelandic—that magnificent idiom at once grand and simple—which allows of the most varied grammatical combinations and most numerous modification of words.”
“Like German,” I said, making a lucky hit.
“Yes,” replied my uncle, shrugging his shoulders; “without taking into account that the Icelandic language has the three numbers like the Greek, and declines proper names like the Latin.”
“Does it?” said I, a little roused from my indifference. “And is the type good?”
“Type? Who is talking of type, you poor, ignorant Axel. So, you suppose this was printed! You ignoramus! It is a manuscript, and a Runic manuscript, too.”
“Runic?”
“Yes. Are you going to ask me to explain that word, next?”
“Not if I know it,” I replied, in a tone of wounded vanity.
But my uncle never heeded me, and went on with his instructions, telling me about things I did not care to know.
“The Runic characters were formerly used in Iceland, and, according to tradition, were invented by Odin himself. Look at them, and admire them, impious young man!—these types sprang from the imagination of a god.”
From AudioFile
A lovesick youth and his eccentric uncle descend into the bowels of our planet in a story that influenced numerous subsequent writings, notably Edgar Rice Burrows's Pelucidor series. Penguin bills this title as a "children's classic," doing it a disservice. Jules Verne wrote adventure and science fiction for a popular audience of kids and adults. Fortunately, narrator Glover treats the material on its own merits--which are considerable. Here are all the thrills, chills and humor of the original, delightfully presented by an artist who has fun with his text and shares it generously with the listener. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
-----
About this item
Product Information
Publisher Ace Science Fiction Classic
Publication date January 1, 1970
7th printing.
Language English
Product Dimensions 6.6 x 4 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight < 1 lb.
Book length 316
------
SOME GENERAL INFO ABOUT
Open main menu
Search Wikipedia
Edit
Watch this page
Journey to the Center of the Earth
For other uses, see Journey to the Centre of the Earth (disambiguation).
Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth-1874.jpg
Book cover made in 1874
Author Jules Verne
Original title Voyage au centre de la Terre
Illustrator Édouard Riou
Cover artist Édouard Riou
Country France
Language French
Series The Extraordinary Voyages #3
Genre Science fiction, adventure novel
Publisher Pierre Jules Hetzel
Publication date
1864
Published in English
1871
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 183
ISBN 0486440885
Preceded by The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
Followed by From the Earth to the Moon
Journey to the Center of the Earth (French: Voyage au centre de la Terre, also translated under the titles A Journey to the Center of the Earth and A Journey to the Interior of the Earth) is an 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano.
The genre of Subterranean fiction already existed long before Verne. However, the present book considerably added to its popularity and influenced later such writings. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs explicitly acknowledged Verne's influence on his own Pellucidar series.
Plot Edit
The story begins in May 1863, in the Lidenbrock house in Hamburg, Germany, with Professor Lidenbrock rushing home to peruse his latest purchase, an original runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga written by Arne Saknussemm ("Heimskringla"; the chronicle of the Norwegian kings who ruled over Iceland). While looking through the book, Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find a coded note written in runic script. (This was a first indication of Verne's love for cryptography. Coded, cryptic or incomplete messages as a plot device would continue to appear in many of his works and in each case Verne would go a long way to explain not only the code used but also the mechanisms used to retrieve the original text.) Lidenbrock and Axel transliterate the runic characters into Latin letters, revealing a message written in a seemingly bizarre code. Lidenbrock attempts a decipherment, deducing the message to be a kind of transposition cipher; but his results are as meaningless as the original.
Professor Lidenbrock decides to lock everyone in the house and force himself and the others (Axel, and the maid, Martha) to go without food until he cracks the code. Axel discovers the answer when fanning himself with the deciphered text: Lidenbrock's decipherment was correct, and only needs to be read backwards to reveal sentences written in rough Latin.[1] Axel decides to keep the secret hidden from Professor Lidenbrock, afraid of what the Professor might do with the knowledge, but after two days without food he cannot stand the hunger and reveals the secret to his uncle. Lidenbrock translates the note, which is revealed to be a medieval note written by the (fictional) Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm, who claims to have discovered a passage to the center of the Earth via Snæfell in Iceland. In what Axel calls bad Latin, the deciphered message reads:
The Runic cryptogram
In Snefflls [sic] Iokulis kraterem kem delibat umbra Skartaris Iulii intra kalendas deskende, audas uiator, te [sic] terrestre kentrum attinges. Kod feki. Arne Saknussemm.
In slightly better Latin, with errors amended:
In Sneffels Jokulis craterem, quem delibat umbra Scartaris, Julii intra kalendas descende, audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges; quod feci. Arne Saknussemm
which, when translated into English, reads:
Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jökull of Snæfell, which the shadow of Scartaris touches (lit: tastes) before the Kalends of July, and you will attain the center of the earth. I did it. Arne Saknussemm
Snæfellsjökull.
Professor Lidenbrock is a man of astonishing impatience, and departs for Iceland immediately, taking his reluctant nephew with him. Axel, who, in comparison, is cowardly and anti-adventurous, repeatedly tries to reason with him, explaining his fears of descending into a volcano and putting forward various scientific theories as to why the journey is impossible, but Professor Lidenbrock repeatedly keeps himself blinded against Axel's point of view. After a rapid journey via Lübeck and Copenhagen, they arrive in Reykjavík, where the two procure the services of Hans Bjelke (a Danish-speaking Icelander eiderdown hunter) as their guide, and travel overland to the base of the volcano.
In late June, they reach the volcano, which has three craters. According to Saknussemm's message, the passage to the center of the Earth is through the one crater that is touched by the shadow of a nearby mountain peak at noon. However, the text also states that this is only true during the last days of June. During the next few days, with July rapidly approaching, the weather is too cloudy for any shadows. Axel silently rejoices, hoping this will force his uncle – who has repeatedly tried to impart courage to him only to succeed in making him even more cowardly still – to give up the project and return home. Alas for Axel, however, on the second to last day, the sun comes out and the mountain peak shows the correct crater to take.
After descending into the crater, the three travellers set off into the bowels of the Earth, encountering many strange phenomena and great dangers, including a chamber filled with combustible gas, and steep-sided wells around the "path". After taking a wrong turn, they run out of water and Axel almost dies, but Hans taps into a neighbouring subterranean river. Lidenbrock and Axel name the resulting stream the "Hansbach" in his honour and the three are saved. At another point, Axel becomes separated from the others and is lost several miles from them. Luckily, a strange acoustic phenomenon allows him to communicate with them from some miles away, and they are soon reunited.
After descending many miles, following the course of the Hansbach, they reach an unimaginably vast cavern. This underground world is lit by electrically charged gas at the ceiling, and is filled with a very deep subterranean ocean, surrounded by a rocky coastline covered in petrified trees and giant mushrooms. The travelers build a raft out of trees and set sail. The Professor names this sea the Lidenbrock Sea. While on the water, they see several prehistoric creatures such as a giant Ichthyosaurus, which fights with a Plesiosaurus and wins. After the battle between the monsters, the party comes across an island with a huge geyser, which Lidenbrock names "Axel's Island".
A lightning storm again threatens to destroy the raft and its passengers, but instead throws them onto the coastline. This part of the coast, Axel discovers, is alive with prehistoric plant and animal life forms, including giant insects and a herd of mastodons. On a beach covered with bones, Axel discovers an oversized human skull. Axel and Lidenbrock venture some way into the prehistoric forest, where Professor Lidenbrock points out, in a shaky voice, a prehistoric human, more than twelve feet in height, leaning against a tree and watching a herd of mastodons. Axel cannot be sure if he has really seen the man or not, and he and Professor Lidenbrock debate whether or not a proto-human civilization actually exists so far underground. The three wonder if the creature is a man-like ape, or an ape-like man. The sighting of the creature is considered the most alarming part of the story, and the explorers decide that it is better not to alert it to their presence as they fear it may be hostile.
The travellers continue to explore the coastline, and find a passageway marked by Saknussemm as the way ahead. However, it is blocked by what appears to be a recent cave-in and two of the three, Hans and the Professor, despair at being unable to hack their way through the granite wall. The adventurers plan to blast the rock with gun cotton and paddle out to sea to escape the blast. Upon executing the plan, however, they discover that behind the rockfall was a seemingly bottomless pit, not a passage to the center of the earth. The travellers are swept away as the sea rushes into the large open gap in the ground. After spending hours being swept along at lightning speeds by the water, the raft ends up inside a large volcanic chimney filling with water and magma. Terrified, the three are rushed upwards, through stifling heat, and are ejected onto the surface from a side-vent of a stratovolcano. When they regain consciousness, they discover that they have been ejected from Stromboli, a volcanic island located in southern Italy. They return to Hamburg to great acclaim – Professor Lidenbrock is hailed as one of the great scientists of history, Axel marries his sweetheart Gräuben, and Hans eventually returns to his peaceful life in Iceland. The Professor has some regret that their journey was cut short.
At the very end of the book, Axel and Lidenbrock realize why their compass was behaving strangely after their journey on the raft. They realize that the needle was pointing the wrong way after being struck by an electric fireball which nearly destroyed the wooden raft.
Inspiration Edit
The book was inspired by Charles Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man of 1863 (and probably also influenced by Lyell's earlier ground-breaking work Principles of Geology, published 1830–33). By that time geologists had abandoned a literal biblical account of Earth's development and it was generally thought that the end of the last glacial period marked the first appearance of humanity, but Lyell drew on new findings to put the origin of human beings much further back in the deep geological past. Lyell's book also influenced Louis Figuier's 1867 second edition of La Terre avant le déluge ("The Earth before the flood") which included dramatic illustrations of savage men and women wearing animal skins and wielding stone axes, in place of the Garden of Eden shown in the 1863 edition.[2]
It is noteworthy that at the time of writing Verne had no hesitation with having sympathetic German protagonists with whom the reader could identify. Verne's attitude to Germans would drastically change in the aftermath of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War. After 1871, The sympathetic if eccentric Professor Otto Lidenbrock would be replaced in Verne's fiction by the utterly evil and demonic Professor Schultze of The Begum's Fortune.
Main characters Edit
Professor Otto Lidenbrock: a man of science and astonishing impatience and the uncle to Axel.
Axel: the nephew of Professor Lidenbrock, overcautious and unadventurous student.
Hans Bjelke: a Danish-speaking Icelander eiderdown hunter who becomes their guide; dependable, resourceful and imperturbable.
Grauben: the goddaughter of Professor Lidenbrock with whom Axel is in love.
Martha: the maid at the house of Professor Lidenbrock.
Notes Edit
The first English edition was published in its entirety by Henry Vickers in 12 installments of a Boys magazine entitled "The Boys Journal". the plates are more numerous than the book form which was published with an 1872 title page. If it was released in 1871 as a single volume it was late in the year. This "True" first edition also found in an octavo normal book size (not Annual size), has been overlooked by bibliographers. It has a place of pre-eminence up to about a 3rd of the way through the 12 monthly issues and then slides down into the main body of the journal. The Magazine does NOT seem to have survived in its loose format of 12 individual parts.[3]
The 1871 English language edition published by Griffith and Farran (named Journey to the Centre of the Earth at Project Gutenberg) is an abridged and altered translation. It changes the Professor's name to Hardwigg, Axel's name to Harry (or Henry) Lawson, and Grauben's name to Gretchen. It omits some chapters, while rewriting or adding portions to others. The redactor's note by Norm Wolcott, at Project Gutenberg, claims that this translation is the most popularly reprinted one, despite the flaws. The 1877 translation by Ward, Lock, & Co., Ltd., translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson, is more faithful, though it too has some slight rewrites (according to the redactor at its Project Gutenberg page, where its title is translated as Journey to the Interior of the Earth).
The 1877 translation by Ward Lock & Co Ltd., translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson was adapted by AD Classic Books' 2008 edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth. In this edit by A.R. Roumanis, antiquated writing and out of date sayings were replaced which makes this the most modernized version available.
The novel frequently uses the device of the Professor explaining or arguing scientific matters with Axel, in order to communicate scientific facts on which the world-view is based. In the midst of their descent, this role reverses at one point, as Axel points out strata to the Professor as another example of the same story-telling method. Many things postulated in the novel are now known to be incorrect, including the temperature of space being minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and volcanoes erupting due to a reaction between water and chemicals in the Earth's crust.
Adaptations Edit
Film Edit
1959: Journey to the Center of the Earth, USA, directed by Henry Levin, starring James Mason and Pat Boone. In the film, the character of Axel becomes Alec and is more adventurous than cowardly as he is in the novel. The film introduces two new main characters: a female explorer and a main antagonist.
1978: Viaje al centro de la Tierra, Spain, directed by Juan Piquer Simón, starring Kenneth More and Pep Munné. It was distributed in Great Britain and the US as Where Time Began.
2008: Journey to the Center of the Earth is a 3-D film by Eric Brevig. Cast members include Brendan Fraser, Anita Briem and Josh Hutcherson. The film follows as a sequel to the original book.
2008: Journey to the Center of the Earth – A direct-to-DVD release by The Asylum, which is a loose adaptation of the original book. It was released as Journey to Middle Earth in the United Kingdom.
Walt Disney Pictures began work on a "Journey" in the late 1990s, but was not happy with the appearance of the subterranean caverns, so the project was scrapped and the cavern scenes were altered and used in the production of their 2001 film Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
Television Edit
An animated television series, Journey to the Center of the Earth, first broadcast in 1967 on ABC, starring the voices of Ted Knight, Pat Harrington, Jr., and Jane Webb, only loosely based on Verne's novel.[4]
A limited animation television special in the Famous Classic Tales series was aired by CBS in 1977.
A 1989 movie called Journey to the Center of the Earth took only the title and a general idea from the Verne novel, and had a unique plot aimed at a teen audience. It was written by Debra Ricci, Regina Davis, Kitty Chalmers, and Rusty Lemorande, and was directed by Lemorande and Albert Pyun. It stars Emo Philips, Paul Carafotes, Jaclyn Bernstein, Kathy Ireland, Janet Du Plessis, Nicola Cowper, Lochner De Kock, and Ilan Mitchell-Smith. It was based on an uncompleted version, more faithful to Verne's text, written and directed by Lemorande, that had been left unfinished because of Cannon Films' premature closure.
In 1993, NBC aired a made-for-TV film version with a cast including John Neville, F. Murray Abraham and Kim Miyori. The film used the title and general premise of Verne's novel, but had its heroes carry out the journey in an earth-penetrating machine.[5] A television series was supposed to follow, but was never produced.[citation needed]
The Wishbone 1996 episode "Hot Diggety Dawg" was based on the novel, featuring several major scenes starring the title character as Professor Lidenbrock.
The 1999 Hallmark Entertainment movie starred Treat Williams, Jeremy London, Bryan Brown, Tushka Bergen, and Hugh Keays-Byrne (this version deviates considerably from Verne's original).
A TV film version by RHI Entertainment starring Rick Schroder, Peter Fonda, Victoria Pratt, Steven Grayhm and Mike Dopud was shot on location in and around Vancouver on high definition video during the summer of 2007. The show aired on February 4, 2008 and been released on DVD. Victoria Pratt and Peter Fonda's characters were added to the original story.
Theater Edit
A stage version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, written by Gerald Fitzgerald and directed by Steven-Shayle Rhodes, was produced at Pegasus Theatre in Dallas, Texas in 2000, with substantial changes made to the characters and the plot.
In 2014, Fitzgerald's 2-act script was adapted into a 3-act melodrama format and presented at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Dallas, directed by Joey Dietz.
Other Edit
A thrill ride based on the book, Journey to the Center of the Earth, is open at The Mysterious Island section of Tokyo DisneySea's theme park.
A water ride at Water World in Federal Heights, Colorado called 'Voyage to the Center of the Earth' is loosely based on the book.
A mill chute ride, called 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' and loosely based on the book, existed at Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom from 1960 to 1992.
Video games called Journey to the Center of the Earth: in the early 1980s by Ozisoft;[6] in 1988 by Chip Software [7] for the Commodore 64; in 1989 by Topo Soft [8] for the ZX Spectrum and in 2003 by Frogwares.[9]
A board game adaptation of the book designed by Rüdiger Dorn was released by Kosmos in 2008.[10]
A concept album called Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Rick Wakeman, was released in 1974. It combines song, narration and instrumental pieces to retell the story
Rick Wakeman released a second concept album called Return to the Centre of the Earth in 1999, it tells the story of a later set of travelers attempting to repeat the original journey.
An 8-part radio serial was produced for BBC Radio 4 by Howard Jones in 1963. It starred Bernard Horsfall and Jeffrey Banks.
A radio drama adaptation was broadcast by National Public Radio in 2000 for its series "Radio Tales".
Alien Voices, an audio theater group led by Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie, released a dramatized version of Journey to the Center of the Earth through Simon and Schuster Audio in 1997.
A 90-minute radio adaptation by Stephen Walker directed by Owen O'Callan was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra on 20 November 2011 and re-broadcast on 11 and 12 November 2012. Nicholas Le Prevost starred as Professor Otto Lidenbrock, Nathaniel Parker as Axel and Oliver Senton as Hans. Rosemary McNab, an original female character who funds and accompanies the expedition (and has affairs with both Hans and Otto along the way), was played by Kristen Millwood.[11]
Christopher Lloyd's character of Doctor Emmett Brown, one of the two main fictional characters of the Back To The Future film series, attributed the origins of his lifelong devotion to science to having read as a child the works of Jules Verne in general, and Journey to the Center of the Earth in particular. (This is evident when he reveals that he tried to dig to the Center of the Earth at the age of twelve.) Back to the Future Part III, especially, pays homage to Journey of the Center of the Earth where Dr. Brown carves his initials in a mineshaft after storing the time machine, just like Arne Saknussemm did to help guide future explorers. At the end of the film, it is also revealed that Dr. Brown's two sons are named Jules and Verne.
The first part of the second season of Around the World with Willy Fog by Spanish studio BRB Internacional was "Journey to the Centre of the Earth".
Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the Pellucidar series using the Journey to the Center of the Earth concept.
The surname of Kathy Ireland's character in Alien From L.A. (1988), a film about a girl who falls through the earth and discovers a repressive subterranean society, is Saknussemm.
The 1992 adventure/role-playing game Quest for Glory III by Sierra Entertainment used Arne Saknoosen the Aardvark as a bit character for exploration information, alluding to the explorer Arne Saknussemm.
The DC Comics comic book series Warlord took place in Skartaris, a land supposed to exist within a Hollow Earth. Its creator, Mike Grell, has confirmed that "the name comes from the mountain peak Scartaris that points the way to the passage to the earth's core in Journey to the Center of the Earth."[12]
Louis MacNeice's final play Persons from Porlock contains a reference to Journey to the Center of the Earth at the beginning. Because his mother used to read it aloud to him, Hank became 'completely fascinated' with 'caves and pot-holes and things' (p 111). At the end of the play 'Herr Professor Lidebrock' is one of the characters Hank meets down the pot hole. Hank says to him, 'Oh, my dear Professor, I've always wanted to meet you, since my mother used to read me your adventures. How you went down the volcano and ran into all those mastodons. But, of course, in your case you got out again.' The Professor replies, 'That was because I am a character in fiction.' He continues, 'Jules Verne invented me'(p 141).[13]
Halldór Laxness, the only Icelandic author to be awarded the Nobel Prize, situated his novel Under the Glacier in the area of Snæfellsjökull. The glacier has a mystic quality in the story and there are several references to A Journey to the Center of the Earth in connection with it.
In the Exile computer game series and its remake, the Avernum series, the player's party is exiled to a vast underground cavern similar to the one described in A Journey to the Center of the Earth. It also contains a subterranean ocean and networks of tunnels, but it is lit by bioluminescent mushrooms rather than an electric phenomenon. One of the goals of several of the games is to escape from the cavern.
See also Edit
Subterranean fiction
Pellucidar
Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea
References
------
terms and phrases
animals antediluvian appeared Arne Saknussemm awful basaltic began calm cavern Central Sea centre CHAPTER clouds compass crater cried my uncle crowbar crust dear dear boy delighted descend discovered discovery distance doubt earth eruption extraordinary eyes fatigue fearful feet fell fissure fjord Fridriksson gallery Gigans granite Gretchen hand Harry head heard hour huge hundred hunter Hvalfjord Iceland Icelandic language Ichthyosaurus idea impossible interior island journey kind lava leagues light looked lost manometer mass mastodons matter means mighty monster Mount Sneffels mountain never o'clock ocean once passed Plesiosaurus Professor Hardwigg raft reached replied my uncle rix-dollars rock scarcely schiedam shore side Sneffels soil soon speak Stapi stone Stromboli subterranean suddenly summit terrible thought tion tone took travelling tunnel utterly vapor vast voice volcano voyage wall waves whole wholly wind wondrous words worthy
------
SOME GENERAL INFO ABOUT
JULES VERNE
Jules Verne
For other uses, see Jules Verne (disambiguation).
Jules Verne
Félix Nadar 1820-1910 portraits Jules Verne (restoration).jpg
Photograph by Nadar c. 1878
Born Jules Gabriel Verne
8 February 1828
Nantes, France
Died 24 March 1905 (aged 77)
Amiens, France
Resting place La Madeleine cemetery, Amiens, France
Occupation Novelist, poet, playwright
Nationality French
Period 1850–1905
Notable works
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Journey to the Center of the Earth
From the Earth to the Moon
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Mysterious Island
Five Weeks in a Balloon
Spouse Honorine Hebe du Fraysse de Viane (Morel) Verne
Children Michel Verne and step-daughters Valentine and Suzanne Morel
Signature
Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/;[1] French: [ʒyl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism.[2] His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.[3]
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare.[4] He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.[5]
Life Edit
Early life Edit
Nantes from Île Feydeau, around the time of Verne's birth
Jules Gabriel Verne was born on 8 February 1828 on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire River within the town of Nantes, in No. 4 Rue de Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe.[6] His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent.[7][a] In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anna, Mathilde, and Marie, would follow (in 1836, 1839, and 1842, respectively).[7]
In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Mme Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before.[8] Mme Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise.[9] The theme of the Robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including The Mysterious Island (1874), Second Fatherland (1900), and The School for Robinsons (1882).
In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing.[10] In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire River.[11] In his brief memoir "Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse" ("Memories of Childhood and Youth", 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it.[12] He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels (The Will of an Eccentric (1900) and Robur the Conqueror (1886), respectively).[12][13]
Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship Coralie, with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The ship was due to set out for the Indies that evening but stopped first at Paimboeuf, where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination".[14] It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.[15]
The Lycée Royal in Nantes (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau), where Jules Verne studied
In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842.[11] In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839 (A Priest in 1839), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive,[16] describes the seminary in disparaging terms.[10] From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau in Nantes). After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade "Fairly good" on 29 July 1846.[17]
By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion.[16] However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.[18]
In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes.[19][20] His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847 to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five children.[21]
After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year (provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams).[22] While in Nantes, he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some 30 poems to her, including "La Fille de l'air" ("The Daughter of Air"), which describes her as "blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent".[23] His passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time,[20] but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner 10 years her senior, on 19 July 1848.[24]
The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery.[25] This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in "Master Zacharius" (1854), Sava in Mathias Sandorf (1885), Ellen in A Floating City (1871), etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex".[26] The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem "La sixième ville de France" ("The Sixth City of France").[27][28]
Studies in Paris Edit
In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin.[25] (On his 1847 Paris visit, Verne had stayed at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of his aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.)[29]
Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February a provisional government of the French Second Republic took power, but political demonstrations continued, and social tension remained. In June, barricades went up in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851, in which Bonaparte had himself crowned ruler of the Second French Empire. In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days Uprising but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.[30]
Aristide Hignard
Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and Verne particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's.[31] While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theatre, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: "I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of Notre Dame de Paris, but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me."[32] Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, and Verne wrote several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.[33]
During this period Verne's letters to his parents primarily focused on expenses and on a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps,[34] the first of many he would suffer from during his life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis;[34] Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.)[35] Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns.[34] Yet another health problem would strike in 1851, when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life. [36]
In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French military, but the sortition process spared him, to his great relief. He wrote to his father: "You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions."[37] Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.[37]
Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a licence en droit in January 1851.[38]
Literary debut Edit
Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny.[38] Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas, fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, Les Pailles rompues (The Broken Straws). The two young men revised the play together, and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.[39]
Cover of an 1854–55 issue of Musée des familles
In 1851, Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as "Pitre-Chevalier"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine Musée des familles (The Family Museum).[40] Pitre-Chevalier was looking for articles about geography, history, science, and technology, and was keen to make sure that the educational component would be made accessible to large popular audiences using a straightforward prose style or an engaging fictional story. Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job.[41] Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, "The First Ships of the Mexican Navy", written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him.[40] Pitre-Chevalier published it in July 1851, and in the same year published a second short story, "A Voyage in a Balloon"(August 1851). The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow."[32]
Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre-Historique and renamed it the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theatre, with little or no salary attached.[7] Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré.[42] To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the Onze-sans-femme (Eleven Bachelors).[43]
For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer. However, Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature.[44] The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice.[45] Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day."[46]
Jacques Arago
Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.[47][48]
In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the Musée des familles: "Martin Paz", a novella set in Lima, which Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse (The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres.[49] In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story "Master Zacharius", an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition,[50] followed soon afterward by "A Winter Amid the Ice", a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels.[51] The Musée also published some nonfiction popular science articles which, though unsigned, are generally attributed to Verne.[41] Verne's work for the magazine was cut short in 1856, when he had a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier and refused to continue contributing (a refusal he would maintain until 1863, when Pitre-Chevalier died, and the magazine went to new editorship).[52]
While writing stories and articles for Pitre-Chevalier, Verne began to form the idea of inventing a new kind of novel, a Roman de la Science (novel of science), which would allow him to incorporate large amounts of the factual information he so enjoyed researching in the Bibliothèque. He is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, Isaac Laquedem, and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.[53]
At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend.[51] Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theatre for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition.[54] He also continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.[52]
Family
Family Edit
In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysse de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow aged 26 with two young children.[55][56] Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a brokerage.[57] Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.[58]
Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Théâtre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an agent de change[52] on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly.[59] Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the Onze-Sans-Femme club (all eleven of its "bachelors" had by this time gotten married). He also continued to frequent the Bibliothèque to do scientific and historical research, much of which he copied onto notecards for future use—a system he would continue for the rest of his life.[52] According to the recollections of a colleague, Verne "did better in repartee than in business".[59]
In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, Backwards to Britain (written in the fall and winter of 1859–1860 and not published until 1989).[60] A second complementary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from where they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark.[61] Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.[62]
Meanwhile, Verne continued work on the idea of a Roman de la Science, which he developed in a rough draft inspired, according to his recollections, by his "love for maps and the great explorers of the world". It took shape as a story of travel across Africa and would eventually become his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon.[52]
Hetzel Edit
Pierre-Jules Hetzel
In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat, Verne came into contact with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and submitted to him the manuscript of his developing novel, then called Voyage en Ballon.[63] Hetzel, already the publisher of Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and other well-known authors, had long been planning to launch a high-quality family magazine in which entertaining fiction would combine with scientific education.[64] He saw Verne, with his demonstrated inclination toward scrupulously researched adventure stories, as an ideal contributor for such a magazine, and accepted the novel, giving Verne suggestions for improvement. Verne made the proposed revisions within two weeks and returned to Hetzel with the final draft, now titled Five Weeks in a Balloon.[65] It was published by Hetzel on 31 January 1863.[66]
To secure his services for the planned magazine, to be called the Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), Hetzel also drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee. Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately.[67] For the rest of his lifetime, most of his novels would be serialized in Hetzel's Magasin before their appearance in book form, beginning with his second novel for Hetzel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864–65).[66]
A Hetzel edition of Verne's The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (cover style "Aux deux éléphants")
When The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was published in book form in 1866, Hetzel publicly announced his literary and educational ambitions for Verne's novels by saying in a preface that Verne's works would form a novel sequence called the Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages or Extraordinary Journeys), and that Verne's aim was "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is his own, the history of the universe."[68] Late in life, Verne confirmed that this commission had become the running theme of his novels: "My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe… And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can't be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn't true."[69] However, he also noted that the project was extremely ambitious: "Yes! But the Earth is very large, and life is very short! In order to leave a completed work behind, one would need to live to be at least 100 years old!"[70]
Hetzel influenced many of Verne's novels directly, especially in the first few years of their collaboration, for Verne was initially so happy to find a publisher that he agreed to almost all of the changes Hetzel suggested. For example, when Hetzel disapproved of the original climax of Captain Hatteras, including the death of the title character, Verne wrote an entirely new conclusion in which Hatteras survived.[71] Hetzel also rejected Verne's next submission, Paris in the Twentieth Century, believing its pessimistic view of the future and its condemnation of technological progress were too subversive for a family magazine.[72] (The manuscript, believed lost for some time after Verne's death, was finally published in 1994.)[73]
The relationship between publisher and writer changed significantly around 1869, when Verne and Hetzel were brought into conflict over the manuscript for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne had initially conceived of the submariner Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist whose acts of vengeance were directed against the Russians who had killed his family during the January Uprising. Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation that would make him an unambiguous hero. Verne, after fighting vehemently against the change, finally invented a compromise in which Nemo's past is left mysterious. After this disagreement, Verne became notably cooler in his dealings with Hetzel, taking suggestions into consideration but often rejecting them outright.[74]
From that point, Verne published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these are: Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1869); and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.[citation needed]
Sketch by Verne of the Saint-Michel
In 1867, Verne bought a small ship, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. In 1870, he was appointed as "Chevalier" (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories – Doctor Ox – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous.[citation needed]
Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress, and buried himself in debts.[citation needed] The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.[citation needed]
Later years
Later years Edit
Though he was raised Catholic, Verne became a deist in his later years, from about 1870 onward.[75][76] Some scholars believe his deist philosophy is reflected in his novels, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.[77][78]
On 9 March 1886, as Verne was coming home, his twenty-five-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was hushed up in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.[citation needed]
After the death of both his mother and Hetzel, Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888, Verne entered politics and was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.[citation needed]
Death and posthumous publications Edit
Verne's tomb in Amiens
On 24 March 1905, while ill with diabetes, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death. The Voyages extraordinaires series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne).[citation needed]
Works Edit
Jules Verne novels: The Carpathian Castle, The Danube Pilot, Claudius Bombarnac and Kéraban the Inflexible. Miniature sheet, post of Romania 2005.
See also: Jules Verne bibliography
Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel).[79] Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.
Literary reception Edit
An 1889 Hetzel poster advertising Verne's works
After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers.[80] Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.[81]
However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.[82]
This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of nomination to Verne for membership in the Académie Française,[82] and was far from unrecognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature."[83] To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal",[84] this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.[85]
This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical persona non grata continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output.[86] Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.[87]
However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the "Jules Verne cult", a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Société Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.[88]
In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France.[89][90] Roland Barthes' seminal essay "Nautilus et Bateau Ivre" ("The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat") was influential in its exegesis of the Voyages extraordinares as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.[91]
French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre.[92] The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and Journey to the Center of the Earth was accepted for the French university system's Agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.[93]
Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most Anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological "prophet" or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne.[3][94] However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's Anglophone reputation may currently be underway.[95][96]
English translations
English translations Edit
Translation of Verne into English began in 1852, when Verne's short story "A Voyage in a Balloon" (1851) was published in the American journal Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art in a translation by Anne T. Wilbur.[97] Translation of his novels began in 1869 with William Lackland's translation of Five Weeks in a Balloon (originally published in 1863),[98] and continued steadily throughout Verne's lifetime, with publishers and hired translators often working in great haste to rush his most lucrative titles into English-language print.[99] Unlike Hetzel, who targeted all ages with his publishing strategies for the Voyages extraordinaires, the British and American publishers of Verne chose to market his books almost exclusively to young audiences; this business move, with its implication that Verne could be treated purely as a children's author, had a long-lasting effect on Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries.[95][100]
An early edition of the notorious Griffith & Farran adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth
These contemporaneous English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels.[99][101][102] The British writer Adam Roberts, in an essay for The Guardian titled "Jules Verne deserves a better translation service", commented: "I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all.... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation."[101]
Similarly, the American novelist Michael Crichton observed:
Verne's prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way … [but] Verne has been particularly ill-served by his English translators. At best they have provided us with clunky, choppy, tone-deaf prose. At worst—as in the notorious 1872 "translation" [of Journey to the Center of the Earth] published by Griffith & Farran—they have blithely altered the text, giving Verne's characters new names, and adding whole pages of their own invention, thus effectively obliterating the meaning and tone of Verne's original.[102]
Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the highly criticized older translations continue to be republished, due to their public domain status and in many cases their easy availability in online sources.[95]
Relationship with science fiction Edit
The relationship between Verne's Voyages extraordinaires and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one. Verne, like H. G. Wells, is frequently cited as one of the founders of the genre, and his profound influence on its development is indisputable; however, many earlier writers, such as Lucian of Samosata and Mary Shelley, have also been cited as creators of science fiction, an unavoidable ambiguity arising from the vague definition and history of the genre.[5]
A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous".[103] Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I do not in any way pose as a scientist"[104] and "I have invented nothing."[105] His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style",[69] as he pointed out in an example:
I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa. I always was greatly interested in geography and travel, and I wanted to give a romantic description of Africa. Now, there was no means of taking my travellers through Africa otherwise than in a balloon, and that is why a balloon is introduced.… I may say that at the time I wrote the novel, as now, I had no faith in the possibility of ever steering balloons…[69]
Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace.[106] These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated.[107] As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied that he was a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work were "mere coincidence" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: "even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across."[104]
Legacy Edit
Monument to Jules Verne in Redondela, Spain
Main article: Cultural influence of Jules Verne
Verne's novels have had a wide influence on both literary and scientific works; writers known to have been influenced by Verne include Marcel Aymé, Roland Barthes, René Barjavel, Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Antoine Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre,[108] while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, and Wernher von Braun.[94] Ray Bradbury summed up Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."[109]
Notes Edit
Footnotes Edit
^ Jules-Verne 1976, p. 1: "On his mother's side, Verne is known to be descended from one 'N. Allott, Scotsman', who came to France to serve in the Scots Guards of Louis XI and rose to earn a title (in 1462). He built his castle, complete with dovecote or fuye (a privilege in the royal gift), near Loudun in Anjou and took the noble name of Allotte de la Fuye."
------
THANKS FOR LOOKING!