The afterlife of an artist—of writers and painters—can be almost as eventful as when they were alive. They are forgotten or rediscovered, exalted or derided. Some become greater than they were when they lived. Others become so obscure that it is hard to understand why they were ever so popular. Some enter a half- life in which they are famous but not actually read. Others become famous for reasons far removed from what they intended.
Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) seems rather spry almost 120 years after his death. He remains the most translated French author of all time. His cultural influence has been tremendous, inspiring real-life scientists worldwide as much as fantasy and science fiction writers. Dozens of film versions of his work have been made over the past century, starting with Georges Méliès’ famous 15-minute silent film Le voyage dans la lune (1902). As recently as 2008 and 2012, profitable new Hollywood film adaptations of his work used the amusing conceit that Verne’s novels are actually non-fiction.
That idea is not so far-fetched, considering that most of Verne’s most famous work was serialized in magazines intended for families, meaning they were intended not just to entertain, but also to enlighten. They were informed by up-to-date factual information about geography and science (such baggage, which seemed fascinating in 1863, may seem less compelling to contemporary readers). Verne’s visionary editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, was not only a close friend but also a collaborator who greatly influenced the content of Verne’s work. Hetzel made Verne wealthy (and himself even wealthier) with a brilliant scheme of first serializing Verne’s work in his magazine, then publishing a book version, and then publishing a lavishly illustrated Christmas edition intended for children. The quality of Verne’s work deteriorated after Hetzel’s death in 1886, but that may have more to do with Verne’s own increasingly poor health and family problems than with the loss of his publisher and advisor.
Verne was an international success in his own lifetime. His posthumous success in the English-speaking world is even more remarkable considering the vagaries his work suffered in the decades after his death. Hetzel’s counsel helped to enhance Verne’s considerable narrative gifts when they were both alive, but other factors suffocated or distorted Verne’s work after his death, unbeknownst to the general public. Verne’s son Michel (who died in 1925) rewrote or passed off some of his own work as that of his father. But much worse than Michel’s machinations were the English language translations of Verne’s work. Essentially, much of Verne’s work available in English for about a century was mistranslated, mutilated, rewritten, or hacked to pieces by his British and American translators. This bowdlerization had already begun when Verne was alive, when scenes that could offend imperial British or patriotic American sensibilities were removed. Verne knew that the translations were bad, but he could do nothing about it. The use and reprinting of these mutilated works went on for decades.
Some of the changes don’t even seem to make sense. The hero of Verne’s The Mysterious Island is called Cyrus Harding in some translations, as opposed to the original’s Cyrus Smith. As a child, I was gifted with a deluxe, slipcased hardcover edition of Journey to the Center of the Earth, published by the Heritage Press in 1966. Imagine my surprise when I opened it and found that the main protagonist’s name was Von Hardwigg and not Liedenbrock as in the original. Years later, I was to learn that this ‘deluxe edition’ was in fact a reprint of the mediocre first English translation of 1871, which changed the names of the main characters, added chapter headings that didn’t exist, and rewrote or deleted portions of the text.
A later popularizer of Verne’s work (and critic of the earlier bad translations) was the British-South African Idrisyn Oliver Evans (1894-1977), better known as I.O. Evans, FRGS (Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society). A retired civil servant with literary aspirations, Evans has been called “Verne’s best friend and his worst enemy.” Beginning in the 1950s and continuing for several decades thereafter, Evans reintroduced much of Verne’s work in popular editions published in the United Kingdom and United States. The ‘Fitzroy Editions’ produce by Evans (63 hardcovers in the UK and 10 paperback editions in the U.S.) were extremely popular. I grew up reading the Fitzroy Edition Ace paperbacks, and they are still relatively common in the Science Fiction sections of used bookstores.
Unfortunately, Evans, who was certainly aware of the poor translations of the late 19th and early 20th century, carried out his own heavy-handed editing of Verne’s work in order to meet the demands of the marketplace and to satisfy his own personal preferences. Although the Fitzroy Editions were intended to offer new versions— and in some cases, works were translated for the first time—they were also described as “modernized for uniform presentation.” In practice, this meant that the publishing formula required each volume to be less than 200 pages long. Evans did whatever he needed to cut them down to size, rewriting, or even dropping chapters as needed.
Longer works were also split into two books using new titles. The Mysterious Island became two books: Dropped from the Clouds and Secret of the Island. Evans sometimes used old and inferior translations, sometimes used better ones, and sometimes even did the translations himself. His national pride led him to remove portions of the texts that seemed anti-British. Nevertheless, his chief priority was to make Verne more accessible to the modern public. He explained later that his new versions of Verne had been “stripped of their excessively long passages” and that “long passages of geographical information, many of which are outdated” had been deleted.
Evans seems like an extreme version of American fantasy writer and editor L. Sprague de Camp, who popularized the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard in the 1950s and ’60s, but who also tampered with and rewrote some of those stories. De Camp helped popularize Howard’s work for new audiences but, decades later, Howard aficionados would demand (and get) versions of Howard’s tales untouched by de Camp’s ministrations.
As the centenary of Verne’s death approached in 2005, the situation for English language readers markedly improved. Reappraisals of the writer, both in English and French, rescued him from being pigeonholed as merely a writer for children or a “science fiction writer.” Scholars and admirers, such as Arthur B. Evans and the late Brian Taves, did much great work in reviving interest in Verne and his writing. Newer, much more accurate and scholarly translations of Verne’s most famous works have been issued. I enjoyed Jordan Stump’s new translation of The Mysterious Island in 2001 almost as much as I did the old version of the book, with its magisterial N.C. Wyeth illustrations, that I discovered as a child in the library at Palm Springs Middle School in Hialeah, Florida so long ago.
The new scholars have also cleared up a considerable amount of confusion about Verne’s works. In 2007, Verne biographer and translator William Butcher published the first English translation of Verne’s posthumously published novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World. Written in 1901 and published in 1905, it was later considered to be one of those works mostly or wholly written by Michel Verne but passed off as having been written by his father. However, it turns out that Verne did, in fact, finish a final draft of the work, so Butcher’s translation rescues the original from oblivion. I have not read the Michel Verne version, first published in English in 1914 in The Boy’s Own Paper, but the Butcher translation is a fine adventure story.
Verne, suffering from cataracts and diabetes, scribbling away in his little study next to an iron bed in his Amiens home, could still write well even near the end of his life. Lighthouse is a vivid, grim tale set in an unforgiving natural landscape. The book attests to Verne’s experience as a life-long sailor who knew about ships and the sea, although the South American setting was a product of his reading and his imagination. Verne is—emphatically—still worth reading today. Not all of his work has aged well, but the half dozen of his best books, written at the height of his powers in the 1860s-70s, have stood the test of time. Of these, the two Captain Nemo books—Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) and The Mysterious Island (1874)—are his best, followed by Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), which is 160 years old this year.
We are fortunate to have excellent recent translations by Dr. Butcher of several of Verne’s best works. These are still truly “Extraordinary Voyages,” as Hetzel called the famous series of Verne books. Even later books have their considerable virtues. Verne’s 1885 Mediterranean adventure Mathias Sandorf, a book inspired by and dedicated to Alexandre Dumas (father and son, both of whom Verne knew) is very much Verne’s homage to The Count of Monte Cristo, derivative but still enjoyable. There are also the two late Robur the Conqueror books (1886 and 1904), with a supervillain protagonist who is something like a Captain Nemo of the Air (although Nemo, as we know, is not really a villain).
The question today is not whether Jules Verne is still worth reading, but instead whether anyone is actually reading anything. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American spent 23 minutes a day reading in 2004; in 2019, that number had declined to just 16 minutes. Americans over the age of 75 are the biggest readers for pleasure. But in 2018, less than 20% of Americans read for pleasure on a given day.
Europeans don’t seem to be doing much better. A Eurostat survey conducted between 2008 and 2015 found that the average time spent reading a book ranged from 13 minutes a day in Estonia to—incredibly—two minutes a day in France. Such numbers are hardly a surprise in our distracted, noisy, and permanently online world. Who is reading, and what is being read, are also skewed. Because most current readers of literary fiction are women, the choice of what new works are published is shaped by attempts to appeal to the female-heavy reading public.
I do not know whether many women read Verne’s mostly male-oriented adventures, but I suspect that the core of Verne admirers in various societies and groups worldwide are mostly men. The first such group, the Jules Verne Confederacy, was established in 1921 by Royal Navy cadets. Yet my mother was the person who first encouraged me to read Jules Verne, she having read him in Spanish as a child in Cuba. Insofar as Verne can muster a sense of wonder and adventure among readers, he will always have an audience. In an age when few read anything, some will learn of Verne from the movies or other media, such as graphic novels. Perhaps I.O. Evans was not completely mistaken to attempt abridging and ‘updating’ Verne’s work in translation—and he worked in a far less distracted age than our own.
Indeed, how many 19th century writers are still read these days? I read mostly Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, and Mark Twain. There will always be aristocrats of the soul, even in our present age, who read those or other writers—Dickens and Tolstoy come to mind—with genuine pleasure. The immortal Jane Austen is another 19th century literary survivor. Fortunately for those who read Jules Verne, we have new, good, and faithful translations to keep us company on our way.
This essay appears in the Summer 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 31:74-77.
