Critical Evaluation
English-language readers of A Journey to the Centre of the Earth initially contended with extremely corrupt translations of the work. The first such translation was published in the United Kingdom in 1871 by Griffith and Farren and reprinted by numerous American publishers from 1877 onward. A much better translation was serialized in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph in 1874, but the 1877 publishers chose the earlier, corrupt version. This version substituted “Jack” and “Professor Hardwigg” for the names of the two main characters and distorted the text out of all recognition, to the extent of improvising melodramatic incidents absent from Jules Verne’s text and entirely out of keeping with his project. Several other variants appeared subsequently on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them abridged but not otherwise corrupted; the best and fullest translation was made by William Butcher for the Oxford University Press edition of 1992.
Meanwhile, the second French edition of the text, issued in 1867, was revised and expanded from the original. Much of the scientific information contained in the first edition was borrowed, sometimes almost verbatim, from Louis Figuier’s La Terre avant le déluge (1863; The World Before the Deluge, 1866), but Figuier issued a new edition of his book in 1867 that took account of recent developments and controversies in paleontology occasioned by discoveries of ancient human bones and artifacts by Jacques Boucher de Perthes and by the work of the English geologist Charles Lyell. Whereas the first edition of Figuier’s book had located the origins of humankind in the Garden of Eden, the second substituted an evolutionary account in which primitive humans equipped with stone tools lived alongside mammals that had since become extinct; this led Verne to add the scene involving the giant humanoid herdsman to his novel.
Figuier, who was later to edit La Science illustrée—a popular science magazine that also featured a good deal of early science fiction—made no objection to Verne’s borrowings and seems to have been delighted that his popularizing work was being reproduced and amplified. However, a plagiarism suit was launched against the first edition of Verne’s novel by Léon Delmas, who had published a story about a subterranean descent provoked by a cryptogram in the September, 1863, issue of La Revue contemporaine; the suit was eventually abandoned.
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth was the second volume of what eventually became an extended series of voyages extraordinaires (extraordinary voyages) penned by Verne and published by P.-J. Hetzel, who had put him under contract to produce approximately a quarter of a million words per year to be published in a new periodical, Le Magasin d’education et de récreation, and subsequently in handsome illustrated volumes. The serials and books produced in consequence of this contract—which endured throughout his career—made Verne internationally famous. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth was the first novel in the series to win considerable popular and critical success; an advance copy sent by Hetzel to George Sand inspired her to write a hollow earth story of her own, Laura: Voyage dans le cristal (1864; Journey Within the Crystal, 1992; also as Laura: A Journey into the Crystal, 2004), in which Earth is imagined as a gargantuan geode filled with crystals.
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth was one of the most imaginatively adventurous of the voyages extraordinaires , to the extent that it qualifies as an early venture into proto-science-fiction. The notion of survivals from prehistoric eras continuing to thrive in protected enclaves was to be reemployed many times, although Verne’s use of...
(This entire section contains 1154 words.)
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it is a trifle half-hearted and he was careful to leave open the possibility that some of these images were hallucinatory. The idea that the earth might be hollow was by no means original to Verne, however, having been suggested several times before, most notably by the astronomer Edmond Halley, and featured in numerous previous literary texts.
The geological and paleontological discoveries made by Professor Lidenbrock in the course of his 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 leap between 1863 and 1867, and the amended account was, inevitably, 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 narrative remains a zestful tale of unprecedented adventure and retains all its readability. In the context of the history of imaginative literature, the novel is uniquely important for 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 character, ever-ready to receive enlightenment from his older and wiser uncle, to perform the narrative function of standing in for readers.
Because Hetzel had made his reputation publishing collections of books and periodicals for children—although his new magazine was not as restricted in its intended appeal as his earlier ventures had been—the fact that A Journey to the Centre of the Earth employed 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 he 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.
There had never been a book like A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and although Verne followed it with a handful of other adventure stories of similar boldness, he seems to have been strongly advised by Hetzel to restrain his imagination and stay within more mundane and easily comprehensible bounds. Most of his imitators, who established “extraordinary voyages” as a prolific late-nineteenth century subgenre, adopted the same restricted method, and it was not until the twentieth century emergence of the new genres of scientific romance and science fiction—which gladly claimed Verne as a significant ancestor and A Journey to the Centre of the Earth as one of their most important exemplars—that the true significance of the novel began to be fully appreciated. It can now be seen not merely as a foundation stone of modern science fiction but also as a work whose determination to import robust scientific speculation and disciplined scientific method into a vivid adventure story, with a considerable degree of literary elegance, was rarely matched in the next hundred years.
