Jules Gabriel Verne (February 8 1828–March 24 1905) was a French author who pioneered the science-fiction genre. He is best known for
novels such as Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1864),
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870), and
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne wrote about
space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented,
and before practical means of space travel had been devised. He is the third most translated author in the world, according to
Index Translationum. Some of his books have been made into films. Verne, along with
Hugo Gernsback and H. G. Wells, is often popularly
referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".[1]
Biography
Early years
Jules G. Verne was born to Pierre Verne, an attorney,
and his wife, Sophie, in Nantes, the former capital of
Brittany, France. The eldest of five children, Jules spent his early years at home with his
parents in the bustling harbor city of Nantes. The family spent summers in a country house just outside the city, on the banks of
the Loire River. Here Jules and his brother Paul would often
rent a boat for a franc a day. The sight of the many ships navigating the river sparked Jules's imagination, as he describes in
the autobiographical short story Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse. At the age of
nine, Jules and Paul, of whom he was very fond, were sent to boarding school at the Saint Donatien
College (Petit séminaire de Saint-Donatien). As a child, he developed a great interest in
travel and exploration, a passion he showed as a writer of adventure stories and science fiction. His interest in writing often
cost him progress in other subjects.
At the boarding school, Verne studied Latin, which he used in his short story Le Mariage de
Monsieur Anselme des Tilleuls in the mid 1850s. One of his teachers may have been the French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, professor of drawing and mathematics at
the college in 1842, and who later became famous for creating the US Navy's first submarine, the USS Alligator. De Villeroi may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the
Nautilus in Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea, although no direct exchanges between the two men have been recorded.
Verne's second French biographer, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuye, formulated the
rumor that Verne was so fascinated with adventure at an early age that he stowed away on a ship
bound for the West Indies, but that Jules's voyage was cut short when he found his father waiting for him at the next port.
Literary debut
After completing his studies at the lycée, Verne went to
Paris to study for the bar. About 1848, in conjunction with Michel Carré, he began writing librettos for operettas. For some years
his attentions were divided between the theatre and work, but some travellers' stories which he wrote for the Musée des
Familles revealed to him his true talent: the telling of delightfully extravagant voyages and adventures to which cleverly
prepared scientific and geographical details lent an air of verisimilitude.
When Verne's father discovered that his son was writing rather than studying law, he promptly withdrew his financial support.
Verne was forced to support himself as a stockbroker, which he hated despite being somewhat
successful at it. During this period, he met Alexandre Dumas, père and
Victor Hugo, who offered him writing advice.
Verne also met Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two daughters. They were married on
January 10 1857. With her encouragement, he continued to write
and actively looked for a publisher. On August 3 1861, their son,
Michel Jules Verne, was born. A classic enfant
terrible, Michel was sent to Mettray Penal Colony in 1876 and later
would marry an actress in spite of Verne's objections, had two children by his 16 year old mistress, and buried himself in debts.
The relationship between father and son did improve as Michel grew older.
A typical
Hetzel front cover for a Jules Verne book. The edition is
Les Aventures
du Capitaine Hatteras au Pôle Nord, type "Aux deux éléphants".
Verne's situation improved when he met Pierre-Jules Hetzel, one of the most
important French publishers of the 19th century, who also published Victor Hugo,
Georges Sand, and Erckmann-Chatrian, among
others. They formed an excellent writer-publisher team until Hetzel's death. Hetzel helped improve Verne's writings, which until
then had been repeatedly rejected by other publishers. Hetzel read a draft of Verne's story about the balloon exploration of Africa, which had been rejected by other publishers for
being "too scientific". With Hetzel's help, Verne rewrote the story, which was published in 1863 in book form as Cinq semaines
en balloon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). Acting on Hetzel's advice,
Verne added comical accents to his novels, changed sad endings into happy ones, and toned down various political messages.
From that point to years after Verne's death, Hetzel published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these
include: Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of
the Earth, 1864); De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the
Moon, 1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1869); and Le tour du monde en
quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), which
first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. The series is collectively known as "Les voyages extraordinaires" ("extraordinary
voyages"). Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en
quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), which he wrote with
Adolphe d'Ennery. In 1867 Verne bought a small ship, the Saint-Michel, which he
successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On
board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. In 1870, he was appointed as "Chevalier" (Knight) of the
Légion d'honneur. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in
the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before
being published in the form of books. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing
of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories - Doctor Ox - in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous. According
to the Unesco Index Translationum, Jules Verne
regularly places among the top five most translated authors in the world.
Last years
On March 9 1886, as Verne was coming home, his
twenty-five-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot him with a gun. One bullet missed, but the second entered Verne's left leg, giving him
a limp that would not be cured. Gaston spent the rest of his life in an asylum.
After the deaths of Hetzel and his beloved mother in 1887, Jules began writing darker works. This may partly be due to changes
in his personality, but an important factor is the fact that Hetzel's son, who took over his father's business, was not as
rigorous in his corrections as Hetzel Sr. had been. In 1888, Jules Verne entered politics and
was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for
fifteen years. In 1905, while ill with diabetes, Verne died at his home, 44 Boulevard
Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). Michel oversaw publication of his last novels Invasion of the Sea and
The Lighthouse at the End of the World. The "Voyages
extraordinaires" series continued for several years afterwards in the same rhythm of two volumes a year. It has later been
discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were published at the end of
the 20th century.
In 1863, Jules Verne wrote a novel called Paris in the 20th Century
about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and comes to a
tragic end. Hetzel thought the novel's pessimism would damage Verne's then booming career, and suggested he wait 20 years to
publish it. Verne put the manuscript in a safe, where it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. It was published in
1994.
Reputation in English-speaking countries
While Verne is considered in many countries such as France as an author of quality books for young people, with a good command
of his subjects, including technology and politics, his reputation in English-speaking countries suffered for a long time from
poor translation.
Characteristic of much of late 19th century writing, Verne's books often took a chauvinistic point of view. The British Empire in particular was
frequently portrayed in a bad light, and so the first English translator, Reverend Lewis
Page Mercier working under a pseudonym, removed many such passages, such as those
describing the political actions of Captain Nemo in his incarnation as an Indian nobleman. Such negative depictions were not, however, invariable in Verne's works; for example,
Facing the Flag features Lieutenant Devon, a heroic, self-sacrificing
Royal Navy officer worthy of any written by British authors. Captain Nemo, an Indian, was
balanced by Ned Land, a Canadian. Some of Verne's most famous heroes were British (e.g. Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days).
Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne
used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times keeping the nominal value and only changing the unit to an
Imperial measure. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were
converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and whole chapters were cut because of the need to fit the work in
a constrained space for publication. (The London author, Cranstoun Metcalfe (1866–1938), translated two of Verne's later works
into English during the first years of the 20th century.)
For those reasons, Verne's work initially acquired a reputation in English-speaking countries for not being fit for adult
readers. This in turn prevented him from being taken seriously enough to merit new translations, leading to those of Mercier and
others being reprinted decade after decade. Only from 1965 on were some of his novels re-translated more accurately, but even
today Verne's work has still not been fully rehabilitated in the English-speaking world.
Verne's works also reflect the bitterness France felt in the wake of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, and the loss of Alsace and
Lorraine. The Begum's Millions (Les Cinq
cents millions de la Begum) of 1879 gives a highly stereotypical depiction of Germans as monstrous cruel militarists. By
contrast, almost all the protagonists in his pre-1871 works, such as the sympathetic first-person narrator in Journey to the
Centre of the Earth, are German.
Hetzel's influence
Hetzel substantially influenced the writings of Verne, who was so happy to finally find a willing publisher that he agreed on
almost all changes that Hetzel suggested. Hetzel rejected at least one novel (Paris in the 20th Century), and asked Verne to significantly change his other drafts. One
of the most important changes Hetzel enforced on Verne was the adoption of optimism in his novels. Verne was in fact not an
enthusiast of technological and human progress, as can be seen in his works created before he met Hetzel and after his death.
Hetzel's demand of the optimistic text proved correct. For example, The Mysterious Island originally ended with the
survivors returning to mainland forever nostalgic about the island. Hetzel decided that the heroes should live happily, so in the
revised draft, they use their fortunes to build a replica of the island. Many translations are like this. Also, in order not to
offend France's then-ally, Russia, the origin and past of the famous Captain Nemo were changed from those of a Polish refugee avenging the
partitions of Poland and the death of his family in the January Uprising repressions to those of an Indian prince fighting
the British Empire after the Sikh War.
Predictions
Jules Verne's novels have been noted for being startlingly accurate descriptions of modern times. "Paris in the 20th Century"
is an often cited example of this as it describes air conditioning, automobiles, the internet, television, and other modern
conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts. Another good example is "From the Earth to the Moon", which is
uncannily similar to the real Apollo Program, as three astronauts are launched from the
Florida peninsula and recovered through a splash landing.
Bibliography
Jules Verne and some of the creatures from his novels
Verne wrote numerous works, most famous of which are the 54 novels part of the Voyages Extraordinaires. He also wrote short stories, essays, plays, and poems.
Some of his better known works include:
- Five Weeks in a Balloon (Cinq Semaines en ballon, 1863)
- Paris in the 20th Century (Paris au XXe Siècle, 1863, not
published until 1994)
- Journey to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de
la Terre, 1864)
- From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune,
1865)
- Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras
(Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras, 1866; also published in two volumes as A Journey to the North Pole or
At the North Pole or The English at the North Pole and The Field of Ice or The Desert of Ice)
- In Search of the Castaways or Captain Grant's Children
(Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, 1867-1868)
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille
lieues sous les mers, 1869)
- Around The Moon (Autour de la lune, a sequel to From the Earth to
the Moon, 1870)
- A Floating City (Une ville flottante, 1871)
- Dr. Ox's Experiment (Une Fantaisie du Docteur Ox, 1872)
- The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa (Aventures de
trois Russes et de trois Anglais, 1872 )
- The Fur Country (Le Pays des fourrures, 1873)
- Around the World in Eighty Days (Le Tour du Monde en
quatre-vingts jours, 1873)
- The Survivors of the Chancellor (Le Chancellor,
1875)
- The Mysterious Island (L'Île mystérieuse, sequel to Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways, 1875)
- Blockade runners (Les Forceurs de blocus, 1876)
- Michael Strogoff (Michel Strogoff, 1876)
- Off On A Comet (Hector Servadac, 1877; also published in two volumes as
To the Sun? and Off on a Comet!)
- The Child of the Cavern, also known as Black Diamonds or
The Black Indies (Les Indes noires, 1877)
- Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (Un Capitaine de quinze
ans, 1878)
- The Begum's Millions (Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum,
1879)
- The Steam House (La Maison à vapeur, 1879)
- Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (Les tribulations
d'un chinois en Chine), 1879
- Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (La Jangada,
1881)
- The Green Ray (Le Rayon vert, 1882)
- The Headstrong Turk (1883)
- Frritt-Flacc (1884)
- The Vanished Diamond (L’Étoile du sud, 1884)
- The Archipelago on Fire (L’Archipel en feu, 1884)
- Mathias Sandorf (1885)
- Robur the Conqueror or The Clipper of the Clouds
(Robur-le-Conquérant, 1886)
- Ticket No. "9672" (Un Billet de loterie, 1886 )
- North Against South (Nord contre Sud,
1887)
- The Flight to France (Le Chemin de France, 1887)
- Family Without a Name (Famille-sans-nom, 1888)
- Two Years' Vacation (Deux Ans de vacances, 1888)
- The Purchase of the North Pole or Topsy Turvy (Sans dessus dessous, the
second sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, 1889)
- Mistress Branican, (1891)
- Carpathian Castle (Le Château des Carpathes, 1892)
- Propeller Island (L’Île à hélice, 1895)
- Facing the Flag (Face au drapeau, 1896)
- Clovis Dardentor (1896)
- The Sphinx of the Ice Fields or An Antarctic Mystery
(Le Sphinx des glaces, a sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1897)
- The Mighty Orinoco (Le Superbe Orénoque, 1898)
- Second Fatherland (Seconde Patrie, sequel to Johann Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson,
1900; also published in two volumes as Their Island Home and Castaways of the Flag)
- The Village in the Treetops (Le Village aérien, 1901)
- The Master of the World (Maître du monde, sequel to Robur the
Conqueror, 1904)
- Invasion of the Sea (L’Invasion de la mer, 1904)
- A Drama in Livonia (Un Drame en Livonie, 1904)
- The Lighthouse at the End of the World (Le Phare du
bout du monde, 1905)
- The Chase of the Golden Meteor (La Chasse au météore, 1908)
- The Danube Pilot (Le Pilote du Danube, 1908)
- The Survivors of the 'Jonathan' (Le Naufrages du
Jonathan, 1909)
- The Eternal Adam (L’Eternel Adam, 1910)
See also
Notes
- ^ Adam Charles Roberts (2000), "The History of Science Fiction": Page 48 in Science Fiction, Routledge, ISBN
0-415-19204-8. Others who are popularly called the "Father of Science Fiction" include Hugo
Gernsback and H. G. Wells.
Further reading
- William Butcher, Arthur C. Clarke
(Introduction) (2006). Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography. ISBN 1-56025-854-3
- Herbert R. Lottman (1997). Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography. ISBN
0-312-14636-1
- Philippe Melot et Jean-Marie Embs(2005).Le Guide Jules Verne.Les Editions de
l'Amateur,Paris.ISBN 2-85917-417-6
External links
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Bibliography
Bibliography. Sources
Biography
Reviews
Misc
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Verne, Jules |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
Verne, Jules Gabriel |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
French science fiction author |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
8 February 1828 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Nantes, France |
| DATE OF DEATH |
24 March 1905 |
| PLACE OF DEATH |
Amiens, France |
be-x-old:Жуль
Вернpms:Jules Vernebat-smg:Jules Verne
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