By the last decades of the 19th century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one carefully cultivated by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel – promising a specific mixture of scientific plausibility, adventure and moral instruction. ‘Jules Verne’ told readers roughly what they would get: a journey, maps, technological marvels, diagrams, rational wonder. A Verne book was, arguably, less the expression of a single imagination and more a tissue of scientific discourse and popular pedagogy, garnished with vivid illustrations. From the mid-1860s, Hetzel did not simply publish Verne; he curated him. Les Voyages extraordinaires appeared in a uniform format – distinctive bindings, illustrations, series numbering, prefatory material – that acted as a guarantee. Few writers could match Verne in sales or in spin-offs, including the hugely successful theatre productions. After its publication in 1873, Around the World in Eighty Days became one of the most frequently staged adventure spectacles of the late 19th century, selling out in Paris, London and New York.
Popular success did not, however, translate to literary prestige. Verne was largely ignored by Zola and the Naturalists, or treated with disdain when they did bother to notice him. For them, science meant determinism, heredity, pathology; not techno-optimist speculation. Verne’s science involves heroic inventors, awe-inspiring machines and encyclopedic exposition; this kind of material didn’t register at all as ‘literary’ science. Zola called Verne a ‘vulgariser’, adding that if his books sold well, so did ‘dictionaries and parish prayer books’, and they had ‘no importance whatsoever’.
Verne had a long-standing wish to be elected to the Académie Française, but despite the efforts of his friend Alexandre Dumas fils, the honour never came. Verne was categorised as a children’s writer or an adventure writer – not a serious novelist. One would think his sales figures would have been a solace, but he never cared much, leaving all that to his publisher; the literary establishment’s disdain stung, however. In a fine irony, he is now little read by young people – to whom he must seem hopelessly old-fashioned – but academics take him quite seriously, producing a regular stream of articles and monographs.
In another irony, those of us who grew up reading him or seeing film versions of his tales often remember him as the great storyteller of sheer motion, his characters always going somewhere: voyaging across oceans, descending into the Earth, taking balloon flights over Africa, projecting themselves towards the moon. Yet Verne travelled comparatively little, especially during the period when his most ambitious journeys were imagined and written about. Apart from a few cruises and modest European trips, his life unfolded largely between Nantes, Paris and Amiens, anchored to the routines of writing, family and publishing deadlines. He and his brother visited the US in 1867, but stayed only six days. The immensity of his fictional voyaging emerged from an intense imaginative compression of space – maps studied at a desk, scientific reports mined for narrative energy, a globe contained and rendered in print. Verne’s novels suggest that modern travel, far from requiring perpetual motion, could be generated out of stillness.
Verne attended law school to please his father, secretly hoping to become a writer, preferably for the theatre. In the late 1840s and the decade following, he took administrative or other jobs, often unpaid, at Paris theatres. Around 1849, he met Alexandre Dumas senior at the salon of a well-known palm reader, the Chevalier d’Arpentigny. Verne soon formed a friendship with the younger Dumas, closer to him in age and himself seeking to establish a literary career, independent of his father’s reputation. Sometimes in collaboration with Dumas, sometimes alone, Verne wrote a number of plays – comedies, musicals, tragedies – and while some were performed, and even had modest success, Verne struggled to find a niche in a fiercely competitive scene.
During these years, when his future was uncertain, his anxiety expressed itself in agoraphobia, violent stomach troubles and numerous bouts of facial paralysis (for which he received electric shock treatment). His efforts finally began to bear fruit: in 1851 he published a few stories in the illustrated magazine Musée des familles; as the name suggests, it was meant to be gently educative and entertaining reading for the family. Some stories were written to order, occasionally to match an existing illustration. The magazine gave Verne a platform to experiment with narrative forms before he published his first hugely successful novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, in 1863.
Sometime in 1861 or 1862, Verne met Hetzel, who had published a wide range of authors, including Stendhal and Balzac. A lifelong republican, Hetzel had participated in the 1848 revolution and served as Lamartine’s chief of staff during the period of the provisional government; following Louis-Napoléon’s coup in 1851, he fled to Belgium, publishing from there Hugo’s fierce denunciation of the new emperor, Les Châtiments. Later in the decade, as the political climate in France calmed, he returned to Paris and resumed publishing, branching out into family-oriented subjects and opening a bookshop specialising in children’s books. He saw great potential in Verne’s balloon novel: it was the kind of high-quality, educational fiction he wanted for a new magazine he was planning. He suggested revisions and soon offered Verne a contract under which he would commit to deliver multiple volumes a year (most accounts say three, one roughly every four months). Hetzel would buy these volumes outright for a flat fee, rather than offering royalties based on sales.
It’s hard to imagine other writers – the likes of Flaubert, Gautier or even Balzac – agreeing to such terms. One thinks of the white-hot letter Baudelaire sent to Gervais Charpentier when the latter altered some of his phrasing: ‘I told you: delete the whole piece if you don’t like a comma in it, but don’t delete the comma itself; it’s there for a reason … I’ve spent my entire life learning how to construct sentences, and I say – without fear of being laughed at – that what I deliver to a printer is perfectly finished.’ Verne, however, seemed to welcome Hetzel’s revisions. As their relationship developed, Hetzel’s interventions became so great that the books often changed dramatically – characters were altered or expunged, dark events were softened and endings became uplifting. Narrative structures were simplified. Sexual references were deleted, as were any political jibes.
Then there was the issue of payment. By one estimate, Verne took home just an eighth of the profits from his books. But our modern system of advances, royalties and copyright was not yet widely accepted, so the Hetzel-Verne arrangement was not quite the highway robbery it seems now. Verne seemed content with it (though later in life he asked for better terms and got them). The fixed-fee model gave him financial stability: by the late 1850s, he had moved on from his theatre jobs and was working as a stockbroker with his in-laws; by 1863, his contract with Hetzel allowed him to devote himself full-time to writing. Verne addressed Hetzel as ‘my good, dear director’ and replied to his heavy-handed interventions on his drafts in remarkably upbeat terms: ‘You are perfectly right in everything you say’ or ‘it’s especially by your notes, by your pencilled-in fits of anger, that I truly understand what doesn’t work.’ Hetzel was keenly aware of literature as property. He lobbied for a law to establish that a work entered the public domain on the death of its author, albeit with a fixed percentage of posthumous profits going to the family. Though one is tempted to fault him for undercompensating a naive Verne, it’s also true that Verne might not have found another publisher willing to take on the kinds of books he was writing.
One of Verne’s books, however, was suppressed at Hetzel’s insistence and remained unpublished until its rediscovery in 1989; in 1996, it was translated by Richard Howard as Paris in the 20th Century. The novel was probably written sometime between 1860 and 1863. It’s set in 1960 on prize day at the Academic Credit Union, a massive university with 180,000 students. The prizes are mostly for scientific and technical achievements, since the number of humanities students has dwindled almost to nothing. When Michel Dufrénoy receives a prize for his Latin verse compositions, the audience breaks into derisive laughter. There is near universal literacy in the 20th century, but nobody reads anything apart from technical manuals. Michel goes in search of a volume of Hugo or Balzac or Lamartine and finds they are all forgotten: the only books available are on science and technology. In disgrace with his family, he drifts unsuccessfully from one job to another, loses the only girl he loves and ends up in the cemetery of Père Lachaise (recalling the last scene of Balzac’s Père Goriot) in a heavy snowstorm, falling unconscious, muttering the girl’s name and exclaiming ‘O Paris!’ The ending is bleak, and though Verne depicts the city as teeming with remarkable inventions and technologies, this future world is joyless, soulless and loveless, dedicated to conformity and hostile to difference.
There had been futurist novels before Verne’s, the most notable being Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440. Published in 1771, it is an exemplary Enlightenment fantasy. The narrator falls asleep in Paris and wakes in a future city that has been morally and socially reformed, with reason, justice and civic virtue triumphant. The imagined city’s architecture is a marvel of neoclassical aesthetics, all harmony and just proportion. Verne’s dystopian alternative seems a direct refutation of Mercier’s, or at least of utopian thinking in general. Verne’s Michel is a late Romantic, a ghost adrift in a landscape of cultural extinction.
Verne submitted Paris in the 20th Century to Hetzel shortly after the latter had accepted Five Weeks in a Balloon. Reading this second novel, Hetzel was appalled. ‘I’d consider publication of this book a disaster for your name,’ he told Verne. ‘It’s a washout, a fiasco.’ The notion that science might increase social misery rather than alleviate it wasn’t one that Hetzel could safely domesticate for schools and families. The Verne brand required ideological consistency. And so Verne put the book away, and seems never to have thought about it again.
The suppressed book leads us to speculate on what Verne might have become without Hetzel. Paris in the 20th Century is not a very good novel – it’s repetitious, the prose often bland, and the characters thin. But conceptually it’s an important work. Might Verne have continued on this darker path and become a critic of modernity like Flaubert or Dickens, Carlyle or Baudelaire? Given the books he eventually produced, it seems unlikely; he appears to have been innately optimistic, expansive, interested in new developments of all kinds. But perhaps that’s the Verne that Hetzel shaped, devoid of doubt, irony, bitterness and cultural anxiety. Verne seems never to have doubted Hetzel’s judgment. Five Weeks in a Balloon sold very well and was followed by the hugely successful Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) with its vividly imagined underground world hidden inside our own.
Sometime between 1863 and 1864, Verne began thinking about a novel involving a trip to the moon. He had always been interested in astronomy and ballistics and the two subjects come together spectacularly in De la Terre à la Lune (1865) and its sequel, Autour de la Lune (1869). Although the volumes were published separately, Verne conceived of them as a single unit. This new translation by David Coward and William Butcher, with an introduction and extensive notes by Butcher, brings both novels together under the title Journey to the Moon. Like many in Europe, Verne was fascinated by the progress of the American Civil War, and especially by the new kinds of weaponry being developed and deployed. Verne, who was pro-Union and abolitionist, was strongly attracted to the US as a site of innovation, exploration and bold national experiments; some thirty of his works feature American settings or characters. Hetzel worked closely with Verne on De la Terre à la Lune. He encouraged him to rely more on humour while setting things up, to present the moon project as a collective enterprise and to keep the science daring but disciplined, adventurous but plausible. The novel was different from the books Verne had published previously; it involved little physical travel and instead put a great deal of emphasis on process: calculation, public opinion, media chatter.
The novel opens just after the American Civil War, introducing the fictional Baltimore Gun Club, populated by ex-military men, all Americans and all gun-obsessed. Each member has paid dearly for his obsession: ‘Crutches, wooden legs, articulated arms, hooks for hands, rubber jaws, silver skulls, platinum noses, all were represented.’ One character relaxes by charring his wooden legs before a good fire. (The comedy in De la Terre à la Lune is one of its most endearing traits.) But the Baltimore Gun Club functions in the Hetzel-approved way: science is embodied by institutions rather than individuals. The solitary genius is replaced by committees of engineers and accountants. Conflict takes the form of ritualised debates between obsessive scientists, and things always stay safely, if paradoxically, within the norm. This was Roland Barthes’s view of Verne, that even his most fantastic spaces and settings were essentially extensions of the bourgeois home, and that the fantastical adventures served to affirm the social order.
A fine example of Verne turning a potentially dangerous conflict into a comforting resolution is the clash between two scientists in De la Terre à la Lune. We meet the first of these early on. Impey Barbicane is the president of the Baltimore Gun Club and the one who does most to develop the idea of creating an enormous cannon to fire a capsule towards the moon. Barbicane possesses many of the traits that distinguish Verne’s heroes: ‘calm, cool and austere, eminently serious and reserved; punctual as a stopwatch, of imperturbable character … applying practical ideas even to the riskiest enterprises’. His nemesis is Captain Nicholl. During the Civil War Barbicane ‘was a great founder of cannonballs and Nicholl was a great forger of armour plating’, so the two have a symbiotic rivalrous relationship. They quarrel and decide to settle matters with a duel – but this never takes place. When the appointed time comes, one man has become absorbed by a mathematical problem and the other has found a bird trapped in a net – both have forgotten all about the engagement.
The novel spends quite a lot of time on the public response to the proposed moonshot. When it is announced that it will go ahead, ‘the entire United States of America, ten times the size of France, gave a single cheer … 25 million hearts, swollen with pride, beat as one.’ Hetzel’s influence is everywhere, with his belief that scientific advancement is not only a matter of discovery, but something that needs to be financed, explained and popularised. Episodes involving the international press, swelling subscription lists and the letters that arrive from around the world function almost as an image of a Hetzel-style publishing success. A reader might expect the narrative of a voyage to the moon to convey some sense of wonder. But instead, everything about the trip and the moon itself is measured, catalogued, named and mapped. Data appears as a kind of moral good and science as a means of making the unfamiliar intelligible and therefore ‘human’ – though the human in question is always a rational, calm and practical creature.
De la Terre à la Lune concludes with the moonshot taking place, but the trip itself is deferred to the sequel, Autour de la Lune. The second book shifts the tone considerably. There are three characters aboard the spaceship: Barbicane, Nicholl and a Frenchman, Michel Ardan (his surname an oblique tribute to Verne’s friend Nadar, who was, like him, a balloon enthusiast). In these books, as in most of Verne’s fiction, the characters never change, surprise us or deepen their one defining trait: Barbicane’s is curiosity, Nicholl’s scepticism, Ardan’s bravado. In Autour de la Lune, the trio are managing the consequences of their great technical leap. The pace slows and digressions abound – on weightlessness, silence, the mountains of the moon. And when the crew learn that, due to a chance event, they won’t be able to land on the moon but may instead end up in permanent orbit, the reader can’t help but feel disappointed. The Hetzelian pedagogical drive is now given free rein and we learn about topics from astronomy to optics, with a whole chapter given over to algebra.
Because – unlike most other lunar fantasies before and since – the novel refuses us the pleasure of a landing, the actual surface of the moon remains unknown, only glimpsed by the three crew members. This allows Verne to avoid making any blunders about what the surface is really like. And perhaps the book’s real originality lies in allowing the reader to imagine viewing the Earth from space; this is the closest Verne gets to generating a sense of wonder or mystery. Getting the three characters out of orbit and back to Earth is where the adventure comes in, and their splashdown in the ocean is eerily prescient. Autour de la Lune is Verne’s fullest expression of Hetzel’s vision: science not as pessimistic futurism, but as a stabilising force. The sequel doesn’t outdo the first book; instead it corrects its tendency towards spectacle by emphasising the importance of observation and measurement. Together they offer a model for the scientific future.
Journey to the Moon is a worthy addition to Coward’s distinguished body of translations (of Dumas, Maupassant and Simenon, among others). In this edition, he and Butcher preserve the balance between scientific exposition and narrative momentum (though that momentum sometimes slows to a crawl, as in the algebra chapter). They wisely choose not to smooth out the pedagogical passages or turn them into brisker, modern infotainment. Most important, the translation manages to convey Verne’s sense of humour. In his introduction and appendix, Butcher warns us that previous English translations of Verne’s novels – almost all of them before 1970 – are not to be trusted, though many remain in print. Translators in Britain and America routinely deleted large swathes of material – often the scientific material Verne laboured over – and removed any humour that might sound anti-British or anti-American. These early translators, and their publishers, seem to have viewed the texts as a kind of free zone, as if Verne’s originals were really only a suggestion (rather in the spirit of Hetzel, in fact). Characters were added and deleted, renamed, altered beyond recognition. Titles and plots often changed too. Unlike most Verne scholars until quite recently, Butcher has examined the original manuscripts and this research is reflected in his notes. He laments that some of Verne’s finest chapters in the early novels were lost in Hetzel’s ‘paroxysms of destructive editing’. Some scholars now suggest that Verne’s manuscripts, rather than the published books, ought to be the basis for any new translations or editions – as if one might be able to discover and appreciate the real Verne, a pure, pre-Hetzel Verne. It is certainly true that Verne’s literary qualities remain underestimated. He is a fine narrative craftsman, integrating exposition with adventure in a distinctive way. Despite his often dated, even quaint, insistence on scientific accuracy, the novels remain compulsively readable.
Walter Benjamin never wrote much about Verne, but his idea of wish-images (Wunschbilder) – objects, architectural spaces, technologies and fantasies that manifest a society’s unconscious desires – offers a way of grasping how Verne staged his era. Certainly, the Baltimore Gun Club is busy making wish-images. Its fantasies are not irrational, however, but hyper-rational. It is this quality that finds expression in Verne’s endless calculations, his clubs and organisations with their elaborate rules of order, his cost breakdowns and status updates. Rationality becomes, ironically, a way of re-enchanting the world.
It is doubtful whether this vision resonates today, at a time when technocratic optimism seems less innocent. But the disenchantment has been present for a long while. When the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled Verne’s fantasy, it also exposed it. Once humans actually got to the moon, the nationalism of space travel did away with any internationalist utopian vision. Verne could imagine the voyage, but not its geopolitics. Still, read against the deterministic language now circulating under the name of posthumanism, Verne’s science fiction looks less naive than curiously resistant. The future appears not as a machine already in motion, but as a provisional destination towards which one sets off, as part of a shared undertaking. If Naturalist science foreclosed freedom in the name of deterministic explanation, and posthumanism refines that foreclosure by dispersing agency across systems and processes, Verne preserves a humbler agency – fallible, procedural and resolutely forward-moving. His optimism depends not on answers, still less on mastery, but on the simple conviction that the journey will be worth it in the end.