Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre was initially published in 1864 and reissued in a revised version in 1867. Although it was preceded into print by Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon), which featured a balloon larger and more capable than any that actually existed at the time, the earlier novel now seems to many readers and critics to be too modest to count as science fiction, and it is, in consequence, Voyage au centre de la terre that is more often held up as a breakthrough text in the history of sf. It was also recognized by some contemporary reviewers as an important and ground-breaking text, and hailed as a potential pioneer of a genre of romans scientifiques [scientific fictions].
Verne had not started his literary career with the aim of pioneering a new genre of adventure fiction. He had initially moved to Paris in the 1850s in the hope of becoming a playwright, and had shown enough signs of promise in that regard to be adopted as a protégé of Alexandre Dumas (who considered his own theatrical work to be far more worthy of critical attention and acclaim than his popular feuilleton novels). When Verne began to work in prose, he soon produced an allegorical complaint against the soullessness of technology, “Maître Zacharius” (1854), in which a clockmaker is seduced by the Devil, and his career as a novelist might have developed differently had he been able to publish a much more elaborate complaint of the same sort, Paris au XXe siècle (1994; tr. as Paris in the 20th Century, 1996), which he wrote in the early 1860s—but he was instructed by his publisher never to let it see the light of day, and meekly obeyed.
The publisher in question was P.-J. Hetzel, one of the great pioneers of children’s literature, for whom Dumas had done a good deal of work before both of them had been exiled from Paris in the wake of Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état of 1851. Verne had offered Hetzel some non-fictional articles on ballooning, but Hetzel had persuaded him to use the material as the basis for an advenrure novel—the novel that ultimately materialized as Cinq semaines en ballon. Hetzel was sufficiently impressed to offer Verne a contract to produce similar aventure stories on a regular basis for the “family magazine” he founded in 1864, Le Magasin d’Éducation and de Récréation, and Verne accepted gratefully. Hetzel, however, was in two minds about Verne’s tendency to let his imaginative run wild, and gradually reined him in. Verne followed Voyage au centre de la terre with Les aventures de Capitaine Hatteras (1864; tr. as The English at the North Pole), another novel that does not seem very fantastic nowadays, although it must have seemed more adventurous at the time, when the pole was still mysterious and out of reach, but he continued to produce even bolder exploratory works over the next few years.
The other Verne texts that may nowadays be considered important foundation-stones of sf include De la terre à la lune (1865; tr. as From the Earth to the Moon), which described the building of a huge gun for the purpose of firing a manned missile into space, the classic Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870: tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), which introduced the enigmatic Captain Nemo and his ultra-sophisticated submarine Nautilus, and a sequel to his space gun story, Autour de la lune (1870; tr. as Around the Moon), in which the missile orbits the moon before returning to Earth. Alongside these novels, however, Verne wrote far more modest adventure stories: Le désert de glace (1866; tr. as The Desert of Ice), Les enfants du Capitaine Grant (1867-68; tr. as In Search of the Castaways), the two novellas collected as Une ville flottante suivi Les forceurs du blocus (1871; tr. as A Floating City and The Blockade Runners), Aventures de trois russes et de trois anglais dans l’Afrique australe (1872; tr. as The Adventures of Three Russians and Three Englishmen in South Africa and Measuring a Meridian) and Le pays des fourrures (1873; tr. as The Fur Country), and the work that brought him to the peak of his celebrity, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (1873; tr. as Around the World in Eighty Days).
Although Verne subsequently ventured into space again in the unconvincing Hector Servadac (1877), and reproduced the narrative template of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers in Robur le conquérant (1886; tr. as The Clipper of the Clouds), substituting an airship for the submarine, he never returned wholeheartedly to the imaginative extravagance of his early novels, becoming so moderate in his inventions that the genre of romans scientifiques faltered somewhat, and did not make much further progress in Frane until the example of H. G. Wells provided an inspirational boost in the 1890s. There is a sense, however, in which that half-heartedness, and a marked reluctance to “go too far”, was evident even in the works that were subsequently hailed as landmarks in the history of speculative fiction. Nowhere was that half-heartedness more manifest, in fact, than in Voyage au centre de la terre, although history has obscured the fact by consigning its first edition to oblivion; all subsequent reprints in France, and all translations, employed the 1867 text rather than the original, and the difference between them was significant.
The narrator of the story, Axel, witnesses the discovery by his uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, of an encrypted runic manuscript contained in a copy of the Heimskringla (a record of Icelandic kings) bought from a second-hand bookstore. The professor, a polymathic teacher at the Johanneum—a prestigious college in Hamburg—deciphers the cryptogram, which proves to be the work of a celebrated (fictitious) alchemist, Arne Saknussem; the resultant text claims that the center of the Earth might be reached means of one of the several craters of the extinct volcano of Snaefells in Iceland. When Lidenbrock suggests that they should follow in Saknussem’s footsteps, Axel is initially horrified, but is persuaded to risk the enterprise by a girl named Graüben, whose affection he craves, and who judges that it will make a hero of him. Axel and his uncle then set sail for Reykjavik, eager to get there by the first of July, when the angle of the sun’s rays will indicate the relevant crater.
After conferring with local scholars, Lidenbrock hires a taciturn guide, Hans Bjelke, and assembles an extensive collection of scientific instruments. The members of the party then make their way to Snaefells, where a sign specified by Saknussem’s manuscript informs them into which crater they must descend. As they do so, they make various geological observations, but the expedition seems doomed to failure when they run out of water. They are saved when they find a hot spring, the downward course of which they begin to follow.
Eventually, the expeditionaries reach a series of caves beneath the Atlantic Ocean, at a depth previously believed to be the lower limit of the Earth’s crust; instead of encountering the molten rock of the mantle, however, the travelers follow the mazy series of galleries down to an interior sea illuminated by a wan light produced by some natural electrical phenomenon. On its shore they find a fungal forest and other vegetable relics of the Earth’s Secondary Epoch. When they set sail upon the sea on an improvised raft they witness a contest between a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur in the water. By mid-August they calculate that they are somewhere beneath England.
It is at this point in the text that the two editions of the novel begin to differ significantly. In the now-familiar version, when their raft is wrecked by an electrical storm the three travelers find further relics of eras long past on the Earth’s surface, including a giant humanoid skull that was absent from the 1864 edition. This discovery is followed by a remarkable sequence in which Axel appears to glimpse of a living creature of the kind represented by the skull, tending a herd of mastodons—although the possibility is carefully left open that this is a mere dream inspired by the first discovery. The two versions reconverge when the travelers repair their raft; subsequently, they try to blast a way through a rocky obstruction but provoke a major seismic disturbance and are nearly killed. Instead, though, they are borne hectically upwards by a flood of water and eventually expelled from the Italian volcano Stromboli, from which location they make their way home.
It ought to be pointed out that the first English version of A Journey to the Center of the Earth, initially published in the U.K. in 1871 by Griffith and Farren and reprinted by numerous U.S. publishers from 1877 onwards—in spite of the availability by then of a much better translation, initially serialized in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph in 1874—is atrociously corrupt. It substitutes “Jack” and “Professor Hardwigg” for the names of the two main characters and distorts the text out of all recognition, to the extent of improvising melodramatic incidents absent from Verne’s text and quite out of keeping with his project. The persistence of that version, even when much more accurate translations had become easily available, undoubtedly helped to give English readers the impression that the original is a more fanciful text than it actually is, even in the 1867 version.
The reason for the text’s revision was that much of the geological and paleontological information contained in the first edition of Voyage au centre de la terre was borrowed, sometimes almost verbatim, from Louis Figuier’s La Terre avant le déluge (1863; translated into English as The World Before the Deluge)—but Figuier issued a new edition of his book in 1867, which incorporated a crucial change of perspective. Whereas the first edition of Figuier’s book had located the origins of humankind in the Garden of Eden, accepting that human beings were the product of a relatively recent special creation, the second came to a very different conclusion, substituting an evolutionary account in which primitive humans equipped with stone tools had lived alongside mammals that had since become extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. It was Figuier’s change of mind that led Verne to add the scenes involving the discovery of the giant humanoid skull and the vision of the herdsman to the second edition of the novel.
Figuier’s conversion, and the subsequent transmutation of Verne’s novel, was occasioned by the discovery by Jacques Boucher de Perthes of a human jawbone in a quarry at Moulin-Quignon, near Abbéville, which had occurred too late in 1863 for him to take account of it in the first edition of his book. Boucher had been arguing fervently for more than thirty years that hand-worked flints he had found in the same area must be evidence of human habitation—which, if geological estimates of the age of the rocks could be trusted, must mean that humankind had existed long before the beginning of the six-thousand-year chronology suggested by Genesis—but he had not yet convinced his opponents. The Comte de Buffon and Georges Cuvier had already accepted that the history of the world itself must be much more ancient than six thousand years, and that the six “days” of Biblical creation must each have been tens of thousands of years long, at the least, but that was a minimal concession, and many scholars continued to insist long into the nineteenth century that the findings of geology and paleontology were still compatible with the account of human origins offered in Genesis. Such scholars contended that the apparent evidence of hand-working on Boucher’s flints must be accidental, and they had backed up this claim by asserting that if the flints really had been hand-worked, then actual human remains should have been found too; the absence of such remains had become a crucial pivot in the argument, so their actual discovery made a tremendous impact on some waverers—including Figuier—who promptly changed sides. Those diehards who refused to change sides were compelled to shift their ground, insisting instead that the flints themselves could not be as old as the evidence implied, and must be post-diluvian.
The most ironic twist to this story is that the particular jawbone found by Boucher de Perthes was not what it seemed; it was actually of modern origin, and had actually been planted as a hoax, much like the famous skull of “Piltdown man”. Genuine human remains were to be found subsequently, not merely in Europe, but in distant parts of the world, gradually accumulating into the basis of a highly elaborate story of human evolution and migration extending back for millions of years to a remote “African genesis”, so Figuier’s conversion turned out, in the end, to be a step in the right direction—but it was launched from a shaky foundation, and Verne might well have been wise to leave the possibility open in his own story that what Axel saw might have been a hallucination rather than a reality. Even so, his incorporation of the herdsman scene set his novel firmly down on the side of the evolutionists: a step that might seem small now but was, in the context of the time, a bold leap—too bold, perhaps, for Verne to feel entirely comfortable with it. It would be a long time before he was prepared to match it, but that should not be allowed to obscure the fact that he did make it, and that it turned out to be a wise move. Hesitant or not, the revised text really was a landmark in the history of imaginative fiction, and does entitle Voyage au centre de la terre to be considered a key work in the evolution of modern speculatve fiction.
Incidentally, Figuier, who was later to edit La Science Illustrée—a popular science magazine that featured a good deal of early French science fiction—made no objection to Verne’s borrowings, and seems to have been delighted that his popularizing work was being reproduced and amplified. Curiously enough, though, a plagiarism suit was launched against the first edition of Voyage au centre de la terre by one Léon Delmas, who had published a story about a subterranean descent provoked by a cryptogram in the September 1863 issue of La Revue contemporaine, entitled “La Tête de Mimer” [Mimer’s Head], under the pseudonym René Pont-Jest. The basis of the suit was that Pont-Jest’s story also features a runic cryptogram whose solution uses a shadow cast on a Scandinavian mountain at a specific calendrical moment to point the way to an important secret.
Hetzel sent an advance copy of Voyage au centre de la terre to “George Sand” (Aurore Dupin), who had produced some juvenile fiction for him in the past, and was to continue doing so, but the hollow earth story she was inspired to write by Verne’s novel, Laura—in which the Earth is imagined as a gargantuan geode filled with crystals—went to another publisher. Sand remained convinced, however, that it was a suggestion she had made to Hetzel, which was doubtless relayed to Verne, that prompted the author to write Vingt mille lieues sous le mers. Sand was by no means the only writer inspired by Verne to produce voyages extraordinaires of their own, but few of his other imitators took such extravagant imaginative licence as she did, and most “Vernian fiction” embraced the same careful hesitancy that held him back. Even so, the authentically sciencefictional notion of survivals from prehistoric eras continuing to thrive in protected enclaves—which is included in the 1864 version as well as the 1867 version—was to be re-employed many times over. The idea that the Earth might be at least partly hollow was by no means original to Verne, having been suggested several times before—most notably by the astronomer Edmond Halley—as a real possibility, and featured in numerous previous literary texts, but his version of it boosted the plausibility of the notion considerably.
The geological and paleontological “discoveries” made by Professor Lidenbrock in the course of this descent through the Earth’s strata were as firmly based in the science of the day as Louis Figuier could contrive, but that science made a considerable leaps after the mid-1870s, and even the amended account was, inevitably, bound to be far surpassed in later years. For that reason, the text’s scientific content has become an artifact of mainly historical interest, but the novel is still uniquely important in the context of the development of imagnative fiction, becaue of the earnest determination with which it depicts the methodical process of observation and deduction undertaken by the professor, with the aid of then-modern scientific instruments. Scientific inquisitiveness, served by ingenious technology and logical expertise, is located at the heart of the endeavor—although Verne was wise to choose a relatively naïve viewpoint character, ever-ready to receive enlightenment from his older and wiser uncle, to perform the narrative function of standing in for the reader.
Because Hetzel had made his reputation publishing collections of books and periodicals for children—although the new Magasin was not as restricted in its intended appeal as his earlier ventures—the fact that Voyage au centre de la terre employs a youthful narrator encouraged the notion that it ought to be seen as a children’s book; its early translations were certainly marketed in that fashion in Britain and America. Verne did not intend it to be a children’s book, however, and certainly made no attempt to tailor the tenor of his didactic discourse to younger readers. Although some of his translators did that in his stead, in a more-or-less brutal fashion, the fuller and better translations give a much better idea of the extent of the author’s research, the scope of his speculations and the originality of his literary method. That narrative method, even more than the brief visionary glimpses of the potential wonders that might lie at the heart of the world, entitles Verne to be considered the most important creator of speculative fiction of his era, and a writer who set an exceedingly valuable precedent.