Jules Verne

Jules Verne was the most widely read French novelist of his era and one of the most widely read novelists in any language in the history of literature — a writer whose Voyages Extraordinaires, published over a period of more than forty years, created the template for the modern science fiction novel and whose visions of submarine warfare, lunar travel, circumnavigation, and technological adventure have entered the permanent imagination of the world. He is, after Agatha Christie, the most translated author in history, and his influence extends far beyond literature into film, technology, and the popular understanding of science.

Nantes and Paris

Jules Gabriel Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, the eldest son of Pierre Verne, a prosperous lawyer, and Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe. The port city of Nantes, with its wharves, shipyards, and the traffic of Atlantic commerce, shaped his lifelong fascination with travel, the sea, and the machinery of exploration. According to family legend, he ran away at the age of eleven to serve as a cabin boy on a ship bound for the Indies — his father retrieved him before the vessel sailed, and Jules promised to travel henceforth “only in his imagination.”

He studied law in Paris, as his father wished, but was drawn irresistibly to the theatre and to literature. He wrote plays and libretti, met Alexandre Dumas père, who encouraged him, and began contributing stories and articles to the Musée des familles. His early years in Paris were financially precarious — he worked as a stockbroker’s secretary while writing — but he was reading voraciously in science, geography, and exploration, accumulating the vast store of technical knowledge that would distinguish his novels.

The Voyages Extraordinaires

In 1862, Verne met the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who recognised his talent and offered him a long-term contract: Verne would produce two novels a year — later three — for serial publication in Hetzel’s Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation, to be collected as the Voyages Extraordinaires. The partnership lasted until Hetzel’s death in 1886 and was continued by his son, and it produced sixty-two novels and eighteen short stories, one of the most sustained feats of literary productivity in the history of fiction.

Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), the first of the Voyages, established the formula: a journey into unknown or extreme territory, conducted by men of science and adventure using the latest (or slightly extrapolated) technology, narrated with geographical precision and imaginative grandeur. The public responded immediately and enthusiastically.

The Great Novels

The novels of the late 1860s and 1870s are Verne’s masterpieces. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) sends Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel down through an Icelandic volcano into a prehistoric world beneath the earth’s crust. From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and its sequel Around the Moon (1870) describe the construction of a gigantic cannon that fires a manned projectile to the moon — a narrative that anticipates the Apollo programme with startling prescience (three crew members, a Florida launch site, a Pacific Ocean splashdown).

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) is Verne’s finest novel and one of the greatest adventure stories ever written. Captain Nemo — the mysterious, brilliant, misanthropic commander of the submarine Nautilus — is Verne’s most complex character, a Byronic hero of the technological age who has rejected human civilisation and found freedom beneath the waves. The novel’s descriptions of undersea landscapes, marine life, and submarine technology were revolutionary, and its influence on the popular imagination has been incalculable.

Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) — the story of Phileas Fogg’s wager that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days — is Verne’s most purely entertaining novel, a comic masterpiece of clockwork plotting that became one of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century and has been adapted for stage, screen, and television more times than any of his other works.

The Mysterious Island (1875), a Robinsonade set during the American Civil War, brings together characters from several earlier novels and is often considered Verne’s most ambitious work.

Later Works

The later Voyages Extraordinaires — Robur the Conqueror (1886), The Castle of the Carpathians (1892), Master of the World (1904) — are darker in tone, reflecting Verne’s increasing pessimism about technology and human nature. Several novels published posthumously were substantially rewritten by his son Michel, and scholars continue to debate their authenticity.

Translation and Reception

Verne has been poorly served by his English translators. The standard Victorian and Edwardian translations — particularly those published by Sampson Low — were heavily abridged, inaccurately translated, and stripped of much of the scientific detail and political commentary that gives the originals their substance. Modern retranslations by William Butcher and others have revealed a more sophisticated, more literary, and more politically engaged writer than the Anglophone world had recognised.

In France, Verne has always been taken more seriously than in English-speaking countries, where he was long classified as a children’s author or a mere entertainer. Roland Barthes and Michel Butor wrote influential critical essays on his work, and the French literary establishment has increasingly recognised him as a major figure in nineteenth-century literature.

Collecting Verne

The Hetzel editions — the original French publications with their elaborate illustrated bindings — are the most desirable collectible form. The large-format in-octavo editions with polychrome cartonnages (decorative cloth bindings) designed by Hetzel are iconic and highly sought after. First Hetzel editions of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1871), Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873), and Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864) are major collecting targets. English-language first editions (Sampson Low, various dates) are collected but less prized than the Hetzel originals.