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22.Apr.2010 Jules Verne, Author of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

Filed In: 2009-2010 Season, Around the World in 80 Days, Program Notes, St Francis Hospital & Health Centers present Around the World in 80 Days, Theatre

Author Jules Verne
1828-1905

Universally acknowledged as the father of science fiction, Jules Verne wrote nineteenth century novels that featured many wonders not yet invented. He is often credited with predicting skyscrapers, submarines, helicopters and airplanes, film projectors, and jukeboxes, as well as expeditions to the north and south poles, the use of hydrogen as an energy source, and exploration of the moon.

Born in 1828 to an attorney and his wife in the bustling port of Nantes, France, Jules would be the eldest of five children in a family with a summer house on the banks of the Loire. No doubt the constant coming and going of ships in the harbor or up and down the river must have sparked the young boy’s taste for travel and adventure. He wrote short stories in boarding school, but when he grew up he studied law in Paris as his father had done.

When Verne got his law degree in 1850, however, he got a job as secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique,
publishing short stories and scientific essays in the periodical Musée des familles and writing librettos for operettas. His father disapproved of his bohemian lifestyle and soon cut off his allowance, so Verne went to work on the Paris Stock Exchange, a job he hated but did well. In 1857 he married Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow with two daughters; together they would also have a son. Verne continued to write, spending hours on research at the Bibliothèque Nationale, dreaming of a new kind of novel that would combine scientific fact with adventure fiction. He met literary legend Victor Hugo (Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), who offered writing advice; and he became good friends with Alexandre Dumas père (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers).

After years of rejections, Verne met Victor Hugo’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who saw something in Verne. Hetzel worked closely with the author, encouraging him to add comic touches, turn sad endings into happy endings, and tone down his politics. In 1863 they published Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen. It was an international best seller, and the start of a 40-year author-publisher relationship that led to more than 60 of Verne’s voyages extraordinaires.

Published at the rate of two or more a year, Verne’s early successes included Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and From the Earth to the Moon (1865). In 1867 he sailed to the United States, spending just a few days in New York City and Niagara Falls; this was the only time in his life he traveled beyond Europe and the Mediterranean. More acclaim followed with Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), and The Mysterious Island (1875). Many of his novels were first serialized in Hetzel’s Magazine d’Éducation et de Récréation; once completed, they were published in three book editions: standard, small and cheap, and large and lavishly illustrated. His books brought him a fortune, but the real money came from the royalties on theatrical adaptations of his novels, particularly Around the World in Eighty Days. Although now based in Amiens, France, Verne spent much of his time sailing around Europe on a series of yachts, each called the Saint-Michel.

In 1886, Verne was shot in the leg by his mentally ill nephew; for the rest of his life, he walked with a limp.
His publisher Hetzel died in 1887. In 1888 Verne was elected councillor of Amiens, serving 15 years in office. During this time his rebellious son, Michel, became an even greater challenge, and Verne experienced financial difficulties that cost him his beloved yacht. His books—such as Floating Island (1895) and Master of the World (1904)—became darker, less about the joys of discovery, more about the dangers of technology and the hubris of scientists.

Suffering from diabetes, Jules Verne died in 1905 at the age of 77. His desk drawers were filled with nearly finished manuscripts which his son Michel published posthumously, including The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905), The Golden Volcano (1906), and The Hunt for the Meteor (1908). In 1926, the year after Michel died, Amazing Stories, the first science fiction literary magazine, began publishing.

Jules Verne’s fiction has inspired generations of real scientists, inventors, and explorers. In 1954 the first nuclear-powered submarine was named for Verne’s Nautilus. After 135 years, people still attempt to break records while traveling around the world. Next to Agatha Christie, Jules Verne is the second most translated author of all time.

Verne’s second novel, Paris in the 20th Century, looked forward to a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, air conditioning, television, and a worldwide communications network. Despite these wonders, the book’s hero cannot find happiness and comes to a tragic end. Declaring that the novel’s pessimism would damage Verne’s fledgling career, Hetzel refused to publish it, and Verne locked away the manuscript in 1863. The author’s great-grandson discovered it in 1989, and the book was finally published in 1993, re-affirming Jules Verne’s place among the world’s great writers as a man of unparalleled vision and imagination.

—Richard J Roberts, Dramaturg

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