Introduction
The book you hold in your hands is considered by many Jules Verne readers to be his masterpiece. Serialized in a widely read French family magazine in 1869 and 1870 and published in two volumes in those same years, it was Verne’s seventh successful novel. As is true of much of his fiction, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Verne capitalized on the spirit of the time, incorporating up-to-the-minute scientific data in a pulse-quickening adventure plot. Verne’s mission as a novelist, he wrote, was to “depict in novel format the entire Earth, the whole world, by imagining adventures unique to each country and by inventing characters indigenous to the habitats in which they live” (quoted in Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel, p. 30; see “For Further Reading”). By all accounts, he succeeded, originating a fictional genre, writing in a voice at once unique and universal, and for forty years feeding his devoted readers a steady diet of extraordinary fiction based on scientific fact.
France had never seen anything like Verne. His readers touted him as a genius, a soothsayer, a visionary. His fourth book, From the Earth to the Moon, was so popular it elicited requests from single French women wishing to accompany Verne to the lunar landscape in his new space-going vessel. “Parisians are certainly brave,” Verne wrote in a letter after publication of that book. “Some of them are determined by hook or crook to embark on my projectile” (quoted in Teeters, Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented Tomorrow, p. 62). His reputation grew, and his works were reportedly translated into more languages than Shakespeare’s plays. “Take a young English boy and put half of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in his hand, in translation; then give him the other half in French; and that boy will figure out a way to try to understand,” said British author and Verne enthusiast Rudyard Kipling (quoted in Lynch, Jules Verne, p. 112). Verne never let his readers down, publishing more than sixty novels and some twenty short stories, as well as a few dozen plays. Even one hundred years after his death, a new generation of Verne fans can see his plots through Disney’s lens. His enduring popularity is a testament to the human appetite for fantasies brought to life.
Among Verne’s mountain of novels collectively known as Extraordinary Voyages, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea stands out. In it, Verne used techniques he perfected in his previous books. Near-death beneath the ice caps and strangulation in the tentacles of giant squids made his readers squirm in their armchairs, while observation windows and an encyclopedia-toting sidekick educated as they entertained. At times remarkably lyrical, at other times strictly scientific, Verne’s writing took readers places they had never gone before—indeed, to places few of them had even imagined. But unlike in his other novels, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea he did more than paint a realistic picture of an unreal voyage. The book is Verne’s masterpiece not for the wonders of the sea he describes, but for the realistic creation of a singular man. It’s Captain Nemo, to the maelstrom and to the end.
In his other books, Verne’s heroes are acted upon. The outside world intrudes on the voyage of discovery; it supplies the adventure and propels the books, and their narrators, onward. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne turns the drama inward by making Nemo the central figure and the propelling force. The book follows the adventures of Verne’s scientist-hero, Aronnax, and his two friends Ned Land, the harpooner, and Conseil, Aronnax’s manservant, during a period of captivity and scientific discovery in Captain Nemo’s submarine. It is through Nemo’s genius and his secret (and possibly malevolent) motives that the three captives find themselves on their voyage. Verne knew that, for the book to work, Nemo had to be almost larger than life. “It is important that this unknown character refrain from contact with other human beings, from whom he lives apart,” wrote Verne in a letter to his publisher. “He is no longer on earth, he manages without the earth” (quoted in Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography, p. 130). A natural leader living on a ship inhabited by a crew of ghostlike men, a noble scientist in search of the unknown, a child marveling at the bounty of the seas, a genius and a lunatic, Nemo is the most complex character Verne ever created. He destroys ships without conscience and yet cries over lost companions. He is genial, affable, and terrible all at once. Nemo is Verne’s work of genius, ranking alongside Melville’s Captain Ahab and London’s Sea Wolf as the most fearsome and complex man sailing the fictional seven seas.
But what combination of luck and craft brought Verne to Nemo, or Nemo to Verne? For a writer whose pen traveled more than sixty times over continents and through atmospheres, how did Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea come to be Verne’s masterpiece? And how did Verne—part bourgeois, part bohemian—become the grandfather of scientific fiction, the creator of a new genre in the world of letters, and the master of extraordinary voyages?
Jules Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France, a prosperous commercial port still thriving at the tail end of the French maritime boom and the African slave trade. He grew up watching three-masted schooners glide into the harbor and studying the workings of steel-making machines that fed the maritime industry. His father was a successful provincial lawyer and a devout Catholic, his mother a gifted lyricist with the temperament of a poet. As a child, he read James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo. He also read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, survival tales that captured his imagination. “It is man set out on his own, solitary man, the one who one day finds the imprint of a bare foot on the soil,” Verne wrote in his incomplete memoir. “It is a family: father, mother, and children, with their diverse talents. How many years did I spend on their island! How eagerly I became wrapped up in their discoveries! How much I envied their fate” (quoted in Lynch, p. 20).
Verne was the first of five children. His closest brother, Paul, would go on to become a naval officer. But in an age when fathers more or less controlled the fate of their first-born sons, Verne would not be allowed to indulge his fantasies of traveling on the open seas. After a spotty academic history in primary and secondary school—“studious children invariably turn into half-witting grownups,” he wrote (quoted in Schoell, Remarkable Journeys: The Story of Jules Verne, p. 13)—Verne followed his father’s plan and enrolled at law school in Paris. He studied the first year in Nantes, then moved to the capital in the winter of 1848 to be closer to his classes.