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Jules Verne was born at Nantes on 8 February 1828 and died at Amiens on 24 March 1905. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica traces his path from law studies in Paris to the theatre, where around 1848 he wrote the librettos for two operettas with Michel Carré, and then to the travel stories he placed in the Musée des Familles. Those stories, in the encyclopedia’s reading, showed him where his gift lay: wildly improbable journeys made believable by carefully prepared scientific and geographical detail.
Science Made Into Story
The same article places Verne in a line of imaginary voyages that runs from Cyrano de Bergerac through Swift and Defoe to Mayne Reid. What set him apart, it argues, was the plausible scientific machinery he built into each plot. The novels it singles out show the range of that method: Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), De la terre à la lune (1865), Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869) and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, first serialized in Le Temps in 1872. The descent through an Icelandic volcano in the first of these belongs to the long history of ideas about a hollow earth.
His publisher put the plan in plain terms. In the 1867 illustrated edition of Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras, Pierre-Jules Hetzel wrote that the series, subtitled “Voyages dans les Mondes connus et inconnus”, set out to sum up what modern science knew of the earth and the sky and to retell the history of the universe in a lively form.
Hetzel’s statement of the series’ aim
Son but est, en effet, de résumer toutes les connaissances géographiques, géologiques, physiques, astronomiques, amassées par la science moderne, et de refaire, sous la forme attrayante et pittoresque qui lui est propre, l'histoire de l'univers.
J. Hetzel, "Avertissement de l'éditeur", Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1867)
In the same note Hetzel quoted an unnamed scholar who had promised readers that these books would entertain like the best of Alexandre Dumas and teach like the works of François Arago.
Poe
Verne’s debt to Edgar Allan Poe is written into one of his late novels. Le Sphinx des glaces (1897) carries a dedication to Poe’s memory and sends its sailors south in the wake of Arthur Gordon Pym, the hero of Poe’s Antarctic novel, whose story the characters discuss again and again.
Verne’s dedication in Le Sphinx des glaces
A la mémoire d'Edgar Poe, À mes amis d'Amérique.
Jules Verne, Le Sphinx des glaces (Paris: Hetzel, 1897)
The Sea
The 1911 encyclopedia notes that Verne split his time mainly between Paris, his house at Amiens and his yacht, which helps explain how often his plots put to sea.
Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Born on January 15, 1814, in Chartres, France, Hetzel started his career in publishing at an early age. He became one of the most important French publishers of the 19th century, known for his commitment to high-quality literature and for championing the cause of intellectual freedom.
Before Verne, Hetzel’s name already stood on major works. The 1842 volumes of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine carry the imprint of Furne, J.-J. Dubochet and J. Hetzel. Hetzel published Verne’s first success, Cinq semaines en ballon, in 1863. For a quarter of a century after that, the 1911 Britannica says, he brought out one or more of Verne’s stories nearly every year. The books appeared in the “Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation” and, as the Hatteras edition shows, were sold in richly illustrated formats, that one with 150 vignettes by Riou.
