Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (16 page)
Authors: David Standish
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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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He spent the 1850s in a long struggling apprenticeship, inching crablike toward the new fictional form he would create. Hoping to generate some extra income, in 1851 he wrote the first of many pieces for
Musée des familles,
a magazine devoted to articles and fiction with an educational underpinning. These pieces needed to be solidly researched—even the fiction—and entertainingly didactic, both qualities he would bring to his novels. His theatrical work continued. For two years he became the secretary—unpaid—to the Théâtre Lyrique’s director, which put him in the thick of things. But despite years of trying and occasional small successes, his theatrical writing never developed into much. He did gain a sense of shaping discrete scenes that carried over into the novels, and presumably his skill at writing dialog was honed as well. By 1856 he had given up the pretext that he would ever become a lawyer. He had also snagged a potential wife, Honorine, a young widow with two small children and an attractive dowry. He tried to persuade his father to pay 50,000 francs to buy him a share in a stock brokerage in Paris, where Jules would invest for his father and his father’s friends, make everybody rich, and still have plenty of time for his writing. His father wasn’t buying. In the end his father-in-law made a place for him in a brokerage office he was opening in Paris. Jules and Honorine were married on January 10, 1857.
Musée des familles,
a magazine devoted to articles and fiction with an educational underpinning. These pieces needed to be solidly researched—even the fiction—and entertainingly didactic, both qualities he would bring to his novels. His theatrical work continued. For two years he became the secretary—unpaid—to the Théâtre Lyrique’s director, which put him in the thick of things. But despite years of trying and occasional small successes, his theatrical writing never developed into much. He did gain a sense of shaping discrete scenes that carried over into the novels, and presumably his skill at writing dialog was honed as well. By 1856 he had given up the pretext that he would ever become a lawyer. He had also snagged a potential wife, Honorine, a young widow with two small children and an attractive dowry. He tried to persuade his father to pay 50,000 francs to buy him a share in a stock brokerage in Paris, where Jules would invest for his father and his father’s friends, make everybody rich, and still have plenty of time for his writing. His father wasn’t buying. In the end his father-in-law made a place for him in a brokerage office he was opening in Paris. Jules and Honorine were married on January 10, 1857.
In the meantime, he continued to write pieces for
Musée des familles,
gaining considerable facility in conducting detailed research—scientific, geographical, historical—taking meticulous notes and then synthesizing the information, threading it into an agreeably entertaining article or story. Whether he was aware of it or not, these pieces were moving him closer to becoming the “real” Jules Verne. He also made a friend who would be a great influence. Jacques Arago was an explorer, travel writer, artist, playwright, and theatrical impresario. Nearly forty years Verne’s senior, Arago had traveled to the world’s remotest parts and then written and illustrated books about his adventures. Blind and in his sixties when Verne met him, Arago embodied the been-there, done-it-all, know-everything character who would play the lead in so many of Verne’s novels. He also had theories about writing that Verne listened to. “He argued that travel books,” writes Herbert R. Lottman in his 1996
Jules Verne,
“when the explorer avoided pedantry, were second only to memoirs as the most interesting of all books, with a minimum of description and a maximum of pithy dialogue.”
Musée des familles,
gaining considerable facility in conducting detailed research—scientific, geographical, historical—taking meticulous notes and then synthesizing the information, threading it into an agreeably entertaining article or story. Whether he was aware of it or not, these pieces were moving him closer to becoming the “real” Jules Verne. He also made a friend who would be a great influence. Jacques Arago was an explorer, travel writer, artist, playwright, and theatrical impresario. Nearly forty years Verne’s senior, Arago had traveled to the world’s remotest parts and then written and illustrated books about his adventures. Blind and in his sixties when Verne met him, Arago embodied the been-there, done-it-all, know-everything character who would play the lead in so many of Verne’s novels. He also had theories about writing that Verne listened to. “He argued that travel books,” writes Herbert R. Lottman in his 1996
Jules Verne,
“when the explorer avoided pedantry, were second only to memoirs as the most interesting of all books, with a minimum of description and a maximum of pithy dialogue.”
In 1862 Verne began assembling the pieces of his long apprenticeship into the first of his
Voyages extraordinaires
series:
Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Its sources were disparate and spread over many years, not the least of which were two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Balloon Hoax” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall.” What came to be known as “The Balloon Hoax” had first been presented as fact, appearing as an extra edition of the
New York Sun
on April 13, 1844, under the headline
Voyages extraordinaires
series:
Five Weeks in a Balloon.
Its sources were disparate and spread over many years, not the least of which were two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Balloon Hoax” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall.” What came to be known as “The Balloon Hoax” had first been presented as fact, appearing as an extra edition of the
New York Sun
on April 13, 1844, under the headline
ASTOUNDING
NEWS!
BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK!
THE
ATLANTIC CROSSED
IN
THREE DAYS!
This account of a wayward balloon (named Victoria, just like Verne’s) blown off course across the Atlantic during an attempted flight across the English Channel to France exactly mimicked the journalistic style of the time and was widely accepted as fact, for a day or two anyway. “Hans Pfall,” while more fantastic—Hans constructs a balloon that takes him to the moon—also tries to present itself as an account of actual events.
32
Verne’s
Five Weeks in a Balloon
achieves the same verisimilitude in recounting a balloon trip by three Englishmen across Africa, starting from Zanzibar and ending up in sub-Saharan Senegal. Just as Poe had played off the excitement surrounding the Wilkes expedition in
Arthur Gordon Pym,
Verne in
Five Weeks
was responding to the current fascination with Africa. Like the poles, it was a great unknown. Even as the novel was published in January 1863, John Speke was on his way home from having reached the long-sought-after source of the Nile in July 1862. He and Sir Richard Burton had made much-publicized African expeditions a few years earlier. Verne’s novel, essentially an adventure-filled, low-flying travelogue, caught this buzz, overlaying a concurrent fascination with the possibilities of aviation, and was an immediate hit.
32
Verne’s
Five Weeks in a Balloon
achieves the same verisimilitude in recounting a balloon trip by three Englishmen across Africa, starting from Zanzibar and ending up in sub-Saharan Senegal. Just as Poe had played off the excitement surrounding the Wilkes expedition in
Arthur Gordon Pym,
Verne in
Five Weeks
was responding to the current fascination with Africa. Like the poles, it was a great unknown. Even as the novel was published in January 1863, John Speke was on his way home from having reached the long-sought-after source of the Nile in July 1862. He and Sir Richard Burton had made much-publicized African expeditions a few years earlier. Verne’s novel, essentially an adventure-filled, low-flying travelogue, caught this buzz, overlaying a concurrent fascination with the possibilities of aviation, and was an immediate hit.
Part of its success was due to Verne’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Verne dropped off the manuscript for him and returned two weeks later to a rejection—of sorts. Hetzel told him he had the makings of a great storyteller but needed to make some revisions. Verne knocked them off quickly, and they were in business. Hetzel was both sympathetic and helpful in working with him as a close adviser on his stories, offering encouragement and suggestions Verne almost always followed. Their collaboration lasted many years. In spring 1864 Hetzel began publishing
Magazin d’education et de récréation,
a bimonthly illustrated magazine for a younger audience, another publication that aimed to entertain while edifying. From the first issue it began serializing novel after novel by Verne before they appeared in book form, which was usually at year’s end, just in time for the New Year’s gift-giving then popular in France.
Magazin d’education et de récréation,
a bimonthly illustrated magazine for a younger audience, another publication that aimed to entertain while edifying. From the first issue it began serializing novel after novel by Verne before they appeared in book form, which was usually at year’s end, just in time for the New Year’s gift-giving then popular in France.
Verne’s first serialized novel turned to another mysterious place—the North Pole. His longest effort to date, it was subsequently published as two separate volumes:
The English at the North Pole
and
The Desert of Ice,
which were then combined under the title
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
During the 1840s and 1850s the world was captivated by the disappearance of legendary polar explorer Sir John Franklin; expedition after expedition was mounted to find out what had happened to him, and each one produced a fresh crop of polar narratives. Like Poe before him, Verne absorbed all such literature he could find, relying especially on Sir John Ross’s
Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage
(1835), when Ross’s nephew, James Clark Ross, discovered the magnetic pole. In Verne’s story, Captain Hatteras veers from his search for the Northwest Passage toward the pole, driven to be the first to plant the British flag on it. This showed a characteristic instinct for timely prediction on Verne’s part. From this time on the arctic focus shifted from pursuing the Northwest Passage to standing on the North Pole. In Verne’s novel we naturally find that old standby, the open polar sea, but he adds a fresh twist by explaining it through the presence of volcanoes—one of which sits atop the pole. Verne never buys into Symmes’ Holes, but in
The Desert of Ice
he does have Dr. Clawbonny observe:
The English at the North Pole
and
The Desert of Ice,
which were then combined under the title
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
During the 1840s and 1850s the world was captivated by the disappearance of legendary polar explorer Sir John Franklin; expedition after expedition was mounted to find out what had happened to him, and each one produced a fresh crop of polar narratives. Like Poe before him, Verne absorbed all such literature he could find, relying especially on Sir John Ross’s
Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage
(1835), when Ross’s nephew, James Clark Ross, discovered the magnetic pole. In Verne’s story, Captain Hatteras veers from his search for the Northwest Passage toward the pole, driven to be the first to plant the British flag on it. This showed a characteristic instinct for timely prediction on Verne’s part. From this time on the arctic focus shifted from pursuing the Northwest Passage to standing on the North Pole. In Verne’s novel we naturally find that old standby, the open polar sea, but he adds a fresh twist by explaining it through the presence of volcanoes—one of which sits atop the pole. Verne never buys into Symmes’ Holes, but in
The Desert of Ice
he does have Dr. Clawbonny observe:
In recent times it has even been suggested that there are great chasms at the Poles; it is through these that there emerges the light which forms the Aurora, and you can get down to them to the interior of the earth.
So he knew about Symmes and his holes, but in
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864) he found another way for his characters to get down there, courtesy of Athansius Kircher.
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864) he found another way for his characters to get down there, courtesy of Athansius Kircher.
There were two French precursors to Verne’s novel that he would have known.
Le voyage au centre de la terre
(1821) was written by Jacques Collin de Plancy, author of several books on vampires, ghosts, the living dead, that sort of thing. Clearly de Plancy’s novel owes a great deal to Symmes and eighteenth-century novels by Holberg and Casanova, which Verne’s doesn’t. The characters embark on a voyage to Spitzbergen, where on winter’s approach they nearly starve, but at the end of the first volume they find the
chute au centre de la terre
and head down into it. There they run into little people, s
auvages du petit globe,
and we’re off into a litany of their habits, customs, religion, government, and so on. In volume 3, they visit a series of countries with varying peculiarities, emerging from the opening at the South Pole and heading home. It is a considerably more old-fashioned take on the hollow earth than Verne provides.
Le voyage au centre de la terre
(1821) was written by Jacques Collin de Plancy, author of several books on vampires, ghosts, the living dead, that sort of thing. Clearly de Plancy’s novel owes a great deal to Symmes and eighteenth-century novels by Holberg and Casanova, which Verne’s doesn’t. The characters embark on a voyage to Spitzbergen, where on winter’s approach they nearly starve, but at the end of the first volume they find the
chute au centre de la terre
and head down into it. There they run into little people, s
auvages du petit globe,
and we’re off into a litany of their habits, customs, religion, government, and so on. In volume 3, they visit a series of countries with varying peculiarities, emerging from the opening at the South Pole and heading home. It is a considerably more old-fashioned take on the hollow earth than Verne provides.
The other predecessor was by Alexandre Dumas
père,
a strange concoction called
Isaac Laquédem,
whose main character was the Wandering Jew, which Dumas had conceived on an epic eighteen-volume scale but never completed. It has never been translated into English. The first parts appeared in 1852-1853. As Arthur B. Evans describes it in
Science-Fiction Studies
( July 1996), “In
Isaac Laquédem,
the hero Laquédem is guided to the center of the earth by Tyane, a scientist and disciple of Pythagoras. During the long subterranean descent, the former is obliged (much like Verne’s young Axel) to ‘build up an entire arsenal of Science’ by examining the geological history of the planet as shown in the successive strata of rock through which they pass.”
père,
a strange concoction called
Isaac Laquédem,
whose main character was the Wandering Jew, which Dumas had conceived on an epic eighteen-volume scale but never completed. It has never been translated into English. The first parts appeared in 1852-1853. As Arthur B. Evans describes it in
Science-Fiction Studies
( July 1996), “In
Isaac Laquédem,
the hero Laquédem is guided to the center of the earth by Tyane, a scientist and disciple of Pythagoras. During the long subterranean descent, the former is obliged (much like Verne’s young Axel) to ‘build up an entire arsenal of Science’ by examining the geological history of the planet as shown in the successive strata of rock through which they pass.”
But Verne’s scheme doesn’t owe a lot to either novel.
There are only three main characters: gruff but lovable Professor Lidenbrock; his orphaned nephew, Axel; and strong, stolid Hans, their Icelandic guide, who says about twenty words in the whole novel. The Professor has found an ancient manuscript written in old Icelandic that contains a coded parchment that says, “Descend into the crater of Yocul of Sneffels … audacious traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth. I did it. ARNE SAKNUSSEMM.” They travel to Iceland, gather supplies (including a few handy Verne inventions, such as an electric-powered gaslight and “a voltaic battery on the newest principle”), and hire Hans, an eider hunter, as their guide. Proceeding to Mount Sneffels, they find the right opening and head down into it. After a torturous descent, they finally arrive in the vault of the inner world—more than a third of the way into the novel. There they encounter a prehistoric realm that seems a succession of
tableaux vivant
of all the earth’s geological periods. They have a variety of adventures, including being blown across the Central Sea on a raft they construct, witnessing an epic battle between two huge prehistoric sea monsters, and encountering a giant tending a herd of mastodons, before trying to head for home. They find Arne’s rusty dagger and a stone-carved message amounting to “This way out.” A massive boulder blocks the passage, so they blow it up, using fifty pounds of gunpowder they somehow still have with them. It blows a hole in this layer of the inner earth, and suddenly they’re back on the raft, riding a torrent as the Central Sea rushes down the hole. Luckily, they’re thrown into a passage that proves to be a volcano’s chimney, so it’s then up up and away, riding an erupting lava flow that pops them, alive and intact, onto a Mediterranean landscape—the island of Stromboli, near Sicily.
tableaux vivant
of all the earth’s geological periods. They have a variety of adventures, including being blown across the Central Sea on a raft they construct, witnessing an epic battle between two huge prehistoric sea monsters, and encountering a giant tending a herd of mastodons, before trying to head for home. They find Arne’s rusty dagger and a stone-carved message amounting to “This way out.” A massive boulder blocks the passage, so they blow it up, using fifty pounds of gunpowder they somehow still have with them. It blows a hole in this layer of the inner earth, and suddenly they’re back on the raft, riding a torrent as the Central Sea rushes down the hole. Luckily, they’re thrown into a passage that proves to be a volcano’s chimney, so it’s then up up and away, riding an erupting lava flow that pops them, alive and intact, onto a Mediterranean landscape—the island of Stromboli, near Sicily.
Title page from the 1874 American deluxe edition of
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
showing two examples of the fifty-two engravings by Edouard Riou (1838-1900) appearing throughout the volume. (Courtesy of Sumner & Stillman, Booksellers)
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
showing two examples of the fifty-two engravings by Edouard Riou (1838-1900) appearing throughout the volume. (Courtesy of Sumner & Stillman, Booksellers)
Verne uses the framework of an adventure into a world below to instruct his readers about geological science—which, along with Africa and the North Pole, was also a hot topic at the time. The novel might have as easily been called
A Journey to the Center of Geology.
Verne revised the 1867 edition, adding three new chapters, all of them introducing incidents—and creatures—drawn from recent advances in paleontology. Dinosaurs and pterodactyls and ape men had captured the popular imagination, and Verne was opportunely tapping into it.
A Journey to the Center of Geology.
Verne revised the 1867 edition, adding three new chapters, all of them introducing incidents—and creatures—drawn from recent advances in paleontology. Dinosaurs and pterodactyls and ape men had captured the popular imagination, and Verne was opportunely tapping into it.
Geology as a true science was barely seventy-five years old when Verne was writing his novel. The revolution had begun with James Hutton (1726–1797), a Scotsman whose ideas of “deep time” and “uniformitarianism” in the late eighteenth century had amounted to thinking the unthinkable. According to the Bible the world was less than 6,000 years old and had been created by God in six days. Hutton (and Sir Charles Lyell after him) argued that time beyond measure had gone into the making of the earth as we found it, that no miraculous acts of creation were needed to account for the way it is, and that processes observable today would do the trick. Against this uniformitarianism stood the “catastrophists,” who believed changes in the earth occurred through a series of catastrophes—such as The Flood. They continued to have strong proponents well into the nineteenth century. Hutton also believed (correctly) that interior heat was the principle behind major geological processes, a theory that came to be called “Plutonist”—as distinguished from the more popular ideas of the “Neptunists,” led by German geologist Abraham Warner (1749–1817), who conceived of the earth much as Burnet had in the late seventeenth century, as a watery sphere with a crust gradually forming as it cooled, with rocks precipitating out of the liquid, and major landscape features caused by disruptions in this unstable crust.
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