In the gap created on the one side by scientific discoveries and the march of industrial progress, and on the other side by reactionary educational practices, Verne found his home. With the help of his shrewd publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and Hetzel’s showpiece publication, Magasin d’education et de recreation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), within a year of the publication of the novel Five Weeks in a Balloon Verne’s name was known throughout France.
Hetzel had been a successful and influential publisher in Paris until, in 1851, French Emperor Napoleon III banished him from the country. Even while living in exile, Hetzel had managed to bring to print some of the most important French writers of his time, including Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine, de Vigny, and Sand. During the amnesty of 1859, Hetzel returned to Paris with a new mission. Instead of “art for art’s sake,” or high literature, Hetzel targeted an emerging market created by France’s changing education system. Founding the handsome bimonthly Magazine of Education and Recreation, Hetzel sought fiction and articles that educated as they entertained. Verne, with his experience writing stories for Musée des familles and his self-education through years of scientific research, turned out to be the very man Hetzel was looking for. When Verne approached Hetzel with his manuscript, Hetzel snapped it up. If Verne agreed to rework the text into an adventure story, Hetzel would publish the story in his magazine. Beyond that, Hetzel offered Verne a long-term contract, and one of the most productive relationships in modern literary history was born.
In the preface to the first issue of his new magazine, Hetzel wrote, “We are attempting to create a journal for the entire family that is educational in the true sense of the word; one that is both serious and entertaining, one that would be of interest to parents and of profit to children. Education and recreation—these two terms, in our opinion, should complement each other.... Our ambition is to supplement the necessarily arduous lessons of the classroom with a lesson that is both more personal and more trenchant, to round out public education with family readings ... to fulfill the learning needs of the home, from the cradle to old age” (Evans, p. 24).
Hetzel’s magazine was not the first to discover this niche market. In addition to Musée des familles, started in 1833, there was the Journal of Education in 1768, the Magazine of Pictures in 1833, and World Tour in 1860, the last a version of the modern-day National Geographic. But if Hetzel’s magazine wasn’t the only one of its kind, it was the best. With the most illustrations, with stories by the famous Verne, and with good binding and high-quality paper, Hetzel’s magazine appealed to every generation of French readers with a taste for both adventure and science.
There were, however, downsides to the deal. Hetzel, exploiting Verne’s hunger for fame, negotiated a deal in which Verne made the equivalent of $2 million throughout his relationship with the publisher and Hetzel made three times that much. In addition, Hetzel required Verne to work at breakneck speed. In the eleven years between publication of Five Weeks in a Balloon and The Mysterious Island, Verne wrote ten complete novels as well as a series of travel books dealing with the natural history of each region of France.
But the most disturbing aspect of this writer-publisher relationship was hinted at in Hetzel’s own mission statement. “We have created a Magazine wherein everything is tailored to different age groups and nothing displeasing to anyone,” Hetzel wrote (Evans, p. 24). The articles and stories in this magazine were to be “fundamentally wholesome and good” (Evans, p. 24), and Hetzel worked closely with Verne to ensure that his stories met these criteria. It was a recipe for censorship. Hetzel struck many of Verne’s references to God, as well as any mention of sex or sensuality. For instance, in the original manuscript of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the paintings in Captain Nemo’s library included a “half-clothed woman” (Evans, p. 29) and a courtesan. These were changed to a Leonardo da Vinci virgin and a portrait by Titian, respectively.
At other times Hetzel attacked his star author. “Where’s the science?” Hetzel wrote when Verne presented him with a manuscript of what would become The Mysterious Island. “They [the characters] are too dumb! ... 82 pages of text and not a single invention that a cretin couldn’t figure out! ... It’s a collection of totally listless beings; not a one of them is alert, lively, witty.... Drop all these guys and start again, from scratch” (Evans, p. 27).
Verne, eager to keep his name at the top of Hetzel’s literary roster, compromised himself to please his editor. After Hetzel presented Verne with a laundry list of edits on his manuscript of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Verne responded in a letter, “I promise you that I will take them into account, for all your observations are correct.... I have not yet achieved total mastery over myself.... Have you ever found me to be recalcitrant when it came to making cuts or rearrangements? Didn’t I follow your advice in Five Weeks in a Balloon by eliminating Joe’s long narrative, and without pain?” (Evans, p. 27).
These influences—Hetzel’s pedantic morality along with the proven formula of Verne’s previous successes—gave rise to the Jules Verne Novel, a mold from which most of his works were cast. In later years especially, his formula sometimes became wooden; his plots hung like cloaks on the frames of his familiar characters. Whether a tale of adventures under the sea, scientific discoveries circling the moon, or a race against time around the earth, nearly all of Verne’s novels track the adventures of a scientist-turned-hero, from Phileas Fogg to Professor Aronnax. The scientist-hero is aided by a worthy servant, and this pair is complemented by a “common man,” a figure like Ned Land in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There is usually a library or a museum somewhere in the story—as in Nemo’s paintings, books, and display shelves—as well as an obsessive desire to take bearings and locations, as in Aronnax’s consultation of the naval charts for longitude and latitude or a group of people clambering up a mountain in The Mysterious Island to read the land. In addition, Verne’s adventures nearly always take place in microcosmic societies: on a ship, in a balloon, in a submarine, on a space projectile, on an island, on the ice. The scientist-hero always returns to his departure point—for Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea it is to dry land—to publish the discoveries made during the course of his trip. This recurring structure provided Verne a ready-made narrative arc that proved useful. Not only did it excuse the sometimes endless categorizing of scientific knowledge—“ I end here this catalogue, which is somewhat dry, perhaps, but very exact, with a series of bony fish that I observed,” Aronnax writes (p. 260)—it also lent credence to the claims made in the course of the tale. By couching his findings in a book that serves the greater good of science, it is as if the fictional Professor Aronnax says, “It really did happen. We really did see an army of gigantic squid.” Verne’s novels are fiction presented as fact, and fact presented in fiction. The structure, formulaic as it was, served its author well.