Jules Verne – Part I
Michael Raff, High Desert Branch
Looking ahead to February’s Dickens Festival in Riverside, we present this two-parter about one of the Victorian era’s most influential authors.
Jules Verne (1828-1905) was born on a small island on the Loire River within the town of Nantes, France. He studied in boarding and religious schools and just may have been influenced by his teacher Madame Sambin, a widow who told tales of her late husband, a navy captain, who survived a shipwreck and lived as a castaway (possibly an inspiration for The Mysterious Island).
Verne moved to Paris around the time of the French Revolution to study law. However, on the side he wrote plays, poems, short stories, autobiographical accounts, songs, scientific and artistic studies, and most importantly―books. He met and married Honorine Anne Hébée Morel in 1857. He published several pieces in magazines and became a successful playwright.
He also met publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who was trying to establish a high-quality publication, Magazine of Education and Recreation, that specialized in scientific education along with fiction and entertainment. Hetzel’s magazine proved a perfect fit for Verne’s literary pursuits, and before long he published Verne’s novel Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), in serial form. What followed was a golden age for Verne and his most famous books appeared in Hetzel’s magazine: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). It wasn’t always smooth sailing for Verne and Hetzel. Paris in the twentieth century was rejected by the publisher as being too pessimistic and subversive. Also, an important plot element in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea became a point of contention. Hetzel insisted changing Captain Nemo’s motivations for sinking Russians ships to sinking slave trading ships. After that their relationship became less amicable.
Verne was able to live on his writings, but most of his wealth came for his stage adaptations. He also won some prestigious awards, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (1870), and in 1892 he was promoted to officer. Verne also went into politics.
Verne was an avid researcher. The Mysterious Island was probably influenced by Francois Raynal’s book, Wrecked on A Reef, about sailors who survived a shipwreck in the Auckland Islands for nineteen months. Other influences were…
Check back with us in February for Part II with
further influences, and Fun Facts about Verne.
This piece originally appeared in The Inkslinger,
newsletter of the High Desert Branch, in September 2021