Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

BOOK: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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In 1872 Verne settled in Amiens with his family. During the next several years he traveled extensively on his yachts, visiting such locales as North Africa, Gibraltar, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1886 Verne’s mentally ill nephew shot him in the leg, and the author was lame thereafter. This incident, as well as the tumultuous political climate in Europe, marked a change in Verne’s perspective on science, exploration, and industry. Although not as popular as his early novels, Verne’s later works are in many ways as prescient. Touching on such subjects as the ill effects of the oil industry, the negative influence of missionaries in the South Seas, and the extinction of animal species, they speak to concerns that remain urgent in our own time.
Verne continued writing actively throughout his life, despite failing health, the loss of family members, and financial troubles. At his death in 1905 his desk drawers contained the manuscripts of several new novels. Jules Verne is buried in the Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens.
The World of Jules Verne and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1828
Jules Gabriel Verne is born in the port city of Nantes, France, the first of the five children who will be born to Pierre and Sophie Allotte Verne. His father, an attorney, will encourage young Jules to pursue a career in law. His mother, from a ship-building family, instills in him a love of the sea.
1831
Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
is published.
1833
George Sand’s novel
Lélia
is published by the well-known publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who later will publish Verne’s novels.
1834
Jules begins attending secondary school. During his years at school, he excels in geology, Latin, and Greek. Also greatly interested in machinery, he makes frequent visits to nearby factories.
1839
It is said that the adventurous boy tries to run away to sea aboard a ship bound for the West Indies but is apprehended by his father before reaching open waters.
1843
Tahiti becomes a French protectorate.
1844
Alexandre Dumas’s
Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo)
is published.
1847
Jules begins studying law in Paris; he will receive his degree in two years. In Paris, family friends introduce him to some of France’s most distinguished writers, including Victor Hugo. Jules begins writing to supplement his meager allowance. Several of his plays are well received in theaters; his fiction appears in the Parisian magazine
Musée des familles.
1852
Louis- Napoléon becomes emperor of France as Napoleon III. Novelists Alexandre Dumas (pére and fils) secure Verne a position as secretary of the Theatre lyrique.
1853
French administrator Georges-Eugène Haussmann begins alterations and municipal improvements in Paris, including the construction of the wide boulevards that distinguish the city to this day. The Crimean War begins, pitting Russia against France, England, and the Ottoman Turks.
1854
French poet Charles Baudelaire’s translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe captivates Verne and initiates his lifelong admiration of the American author.
1857
Verne marries the widow Honorine de Viane Morel, whom he had met the previous year. Quitting his position at the Theatre lyrique, he embarks on a career as a stockbroker at Eggly and Company, although he continues to devote his mornings to writing. Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poems
Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil)
and Gustave Flaubert’s novel
Madame Bovary
are published.
1859
Verne spends hours in the library gaining the scientific knowledge that will inform his fiction. He travels to England and Scotland. English naturalist Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
is published. Work begins on the Suez Canal.
1861
Verne travels to Norway and Denmark. His son and only child, Michel, is born. He meets the legendary photographer Nadar.
1862
Verne’s manuscript
Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon)
is accepted by Hetzel for publication. Until his death, Verne will publish an average of two books a year with Hetzel, forming the cumulative series known as
Voyages ex- traordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages).
Hugo’s
Les Misérables
appears.
1863
Five Weeks in a Balloon
is published to great success.
1864
Voyage au centre de la Terre (Voyage to the Center of the Earth)
is published. Verne writes an article on Poe for
Musée des familles.
1865
De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon)
appears. English writer Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
is published.
1866
Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras)
is published.
1867
Verne travels with his brother Paul to New York aboard the
Great Eastern. Les enfants du capitaine Grant (The Children of captain Grant)
is published.
1868
Captain
published. He purchases his first yacht, the
Saint-Michel,
named for his only son
1869
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)
is published in two volumes (1869-1870). Its depiction of the submarine
Nautilus
(named after the first submarine, invented around 1800 by American engineer Robert Fulton) predates the construction of the first submarine by twenty-five years.
1870
The Franco-Prussian War breaks out; Verne serves in the Coast Guard.
1871
Une ville flottante (A Floating City),
partly inspired by a trip to Niagara Falls, New York, is published. Verne’s father dies. The Franco-Prussian War ends.
1872
The Verne family moves to Amiens, where Verne will reside the rest of his life.
1873
Another Verne masterpiece,
Le tour du monde en quatre vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days),
is published. French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s confessional autobiography
Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell)
is published.
1874
Le Docteur Ox (Dr. Ox’s Experiment and Other Stories)
appears, along with
L‘Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island). Around the World in Eighty Days
is adapted for the stage. Verne purchases a new yacht, the
Saint-Michel II.
1875
Le Chancellor (The Chancellor)
is published.
1876
Michel Strogoff
is published.
1877
Les Indes noires (The Child of the Cavern) and Hector Servadac
are published. Verne buys his last yacht, the
Saint-Michel III.
1878
A leisurely cruise aboard the
Saint-Michel III
takes Verne and his brother to North Africa, Portugal, and Gibraltar.
1879
Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum (The Begum’s Fortune)
and
Les tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine (The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China)
are published.
1880
Verne cruises to Scotland and Ireland.
La Maison a vapeur (The Steam House)
is published.
1881
Verne cruises to Holland, Denmark, and Germany.
La Jan-gada (The Giant Raft)
is published.
1882
Verne moves his family to a larger house in Amiens with a circular tower; today it is a well-known Verne landmark and the headquarters of the Jules Verne Society in Amiens.
1883
Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel
Treasure Island
is published. War in Indochina breaks out.
1884
Verne voyages to Italy, where Pope Leo XIII personally blesses his work.
1885
Victor Hugo dies. English novelist Henry Rider Haggard publishes
King Solomon’s Mines.
1886
Verne’s deranged nephew, Gaston, shoots him in the leg, laming him for life. This personal disaster, and his growing cynicism about industrialization, marks a turn toward pessimism in Verne’s outlook and writing. His longtime publisher, Hetzel, dies. Verne sells the
Saint-Michel III
because of financial concerns. Robert Louis Stevenson publishes
Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
1887
Verne’s mother dies.
1888
Verne is elected to the municipal council of Amiens, where he will serve for fifteen years.
1889
Sans dessus dessous (Topsy-Turvy)
appears, which contains notably negative views on the potential of technology. His later novels will take on various forms of social injustice, from the plight of orphans to the corrupting power of missionaries in foreign lands.
1895
English novelist H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
is published.
1897
Le Sphinx des glaces (The Ice Sphinx),
written as a sequel to Poe’s 1838 novel
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
is published. Flagging health plagues Verne. His brother Paul dies. English writer Rudyard Kipling’s
Captains Courageous
and Edmond Rostand’s play
Cyrano de Bergerac
are published.
1899
Verne’s
Le testament d‘un excentrique (The Will of an Eccentric)
deals with the oil industry’s ravages of the environment.
1905
Leaving a drawer filled with manuscripts, and with his fam- ily gathered at his bedside, Jules Verne dies of complications from diabetes. He is buried in Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens. His posthumously published novels, altered considerably by his son, Michel, remain a source of scholarly debate and interest.
Introduction
The book you hold in your hands is considered by many Jules Verne readers to be his masterpiece. Serialized in a widely read French family magazine in 1869 and 1870 and published in two volumes in those same years, it was Verne’s seventh successful novel. As is true of much of his fiction, in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Verne capitalized on the spirit of the time, incorporating up-to-the-minute scientific data in a pulse-quickening adventure plot. Verne’s mission as a novelist, he wrote, was to “depict in novel format the entire Earth, the whole world, by imagining adventures unique to each country and by inventing characters indigenous to the habitats in which they live” (quoted in Evans,
Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel,
p. 30; see “For Further Reading”). By all accounts, he succeeded, originating a fictional genre, writing in a voice at once unique and universal, and for forty years feeding his devoted readers a steady diet of extraordinary fiction based on scientific fact.
France had never seen anything like Verne. His readers touted him as a genius, a soothsayer, a visionary. His fourth book,
From the Earth to the Moon,
was so popular it elicited requests from single French women wishing to accompany Verne to the lunar landscape in his new space-going vessel. “Parisians are certainly brave,” Verne wrote in a letter after publication of that book. “Some of them are determined by hook or crook to embark on my projectile” (quoted in Teeters,
Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented Tomorrow,
p. 62). His reputation grew, and his works were reportedly translated into more languages than Shakespeare’s plays. “Take a young English boy and put half of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
in his hand, in translation; then give him the other half in French; and that boy will figure out a way to try to understand,” said British author and Verne enthusiast Rudyard Kipling (quoted in Lynch,
Jules Verne,
p. 112). Verne never let his readers down, publishing more than sixty novels and some twenty short stories, as well as a few dozen plays. Even one hundred years after his death, a new generation of Verne fans can see his plots through Disney’s lens. His enduring popularity is a testament to the human appetite for fantasies brought to life.
Among Verne’s mountain of novels collectively known as
Extraordinary Voyages, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
stands out. In it, Verne used techniques he perfected in his previous books. Near-death beneath the ice caps and strangulation in the tentacles of giant squids made his readers squirm in their armchairs, while observation windows and an encyclopedia-toting sidekick educated as they entertained. At times remarkably lyrical, at other times strictly scientific, Verne’s writing took readers places they had never gone before—indeed, to places few of them had even imagined. But unlike in his other novels, in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
he did more than paint a realistic picture of an unreal voyage. The book is Verne’s masterpiece not for the wonders of the sea he describes, but for the realistic creation of a singular man. It’s Captain Nemo, to the maelstrom and to the end.
In his other books, Verne’s heroes are acted upon. The outside world intrudes on the voyage of discovery; it supplies the adventure and propels the books, and their narrators, onward. In
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
Verne turns the drama inward by making Nemo the central figure and the propelling force. The book follows the adventures of Verne’s scientist-hero, Aronnax, and his two friends Ned Land, the harpooner, and Conseil, Aronnax’s manservant, during a period of captivity and scientific discovery in Captain Nemo’s submarine. It is through Nemo’s genius and his secret (and possibly malevolent) motives that the three captives find themselves on their voyage. Verne knew that, for the book to work, Nemo had to be almost larger than life. “It is important that this unknown character refrain from contact with other human beings, from whom he lives apart,” wrote Verne in a letter to his publisher. “He is no longer on
earth,
he manages without the earth” (quoted in Lottman,
Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography,
p. 130). A natural leader living on a ship inhabited by a crew of ghostlike men, a noble scientist in search of the unknown, a child marveling at the bounty of the seas, a genius and a lunatic, Nemo is the most complex character Verne ever created. He destroys ships without conscience and yet cries over lost companions. He is genial, affable, and terrible all at once. Nemo is Verne’s work of genius, ranking alongside Melville’s Captain Ahab and London’s Sea Wolf as the most fearsome and complex man sailing the fictional seven seas.

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