Editorial Type:
Article Category: Research Article
 | 
Online Publication Date: 05 Nov 2007

Nothing New Under the Earth: The Geology of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth

and
Page Range: 36 – 54
DOI: 10.17704/eshi.22.1.l1677m76376ht687
Save
Download PDF

Voyage an centre de la Terre (1864, 1867: Journey to the Centre of the Earth) by Jules Verne (1828-1905) has been a bestseller in both French and English for well over a century. Literary scholars, however, have taken an almost exclusively intrinsic approach to studying the novel, without referring to its sources or writing. The source of the science has not been documented. Louis Figuier (1819-1894), a contemporary and compatriot of Verne, was a prolific writer on scientific and technological matters for the general public. His La Terre avant le déluge (1863: The World before the Deluge) sold an "unprecedented" 25,000 copies in four French editions in less than two years. Much of the scientific information in Verne's novel was taken directly from this work. Verne incorporates scientific details and concepts treated by Figuier in La Terre in the Journey and describes and discusses them in nearly identical language. Exact numbers are duplicated and lengthy lists are reproduced in the same order. The borrowing is widespread and blatant. Verne, nonetheless, exhibits considerable skill in integrating the material borrowed from Figuier into the Journey and interpreting it in specifically literary terms.

Boitard, Pierre, Paris avant les hommes: l'homme fossile, etc.: histoire naturelle du globe terrestre: illustrée d'après les dessins de l'auteur: ouvrage posthume publié par sa famille: suivi d'une nomenclature des règnes de la nature antédiluvian (Paris: Passard, 1861), 494 p.
Export Citation
Butcher, William, Verne's journey to the centre of the self: space and time in the voyages extraordinaires (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), xvii, 206 p.
Export Citation
Butcher, William, Long-Lost Manuscript, The Modern Language Review, October 1998, 93(4):961-971.
Export Citation
Carpenter, William B., Zoology; being a systematic account of the general structure, habits, instincts, and uses of the principal families of the animal kingdom; as well as of the chief forms of fossil remains, 2 vols. (London, 1857, re-issued 1866).
Export Citation
Chambers, Robert, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. with a new introduction by James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 254 p.
Export Citation
Dumas, Olivier, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs. eds., Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1863-1886), Volume 1 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1999).
Export Citation
Figuier, Louis, La Terre avant le Déluge: Ouvrage contenant 25 vues idéales de paysages de l'ancien monde, 325 autres figures dessinées par Riou, 3rd ed. (Paris: Hachette et Cie., 1864), 484 p.
Export Citation
Figuier, Louis, The World before the Deluge, Containing twenty-five ideal landscapes of the ancient world, designed by Riou, and two hundred and eight figures of animals, plants, and other fossil remains and restorations, translated from the 4th French ed., rev. ed. by H. W. Bristow (London: Chapman and Hall, 1865), 448 p.
Export Citation
Gillespie, Charles C., Genesis and Geology: The Impact of Scientific Discoveries upon Religious Beliefs in the Decades before Darwin (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 306 p.
Export Citation
Gould, Stephen J., The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), 352 p.
Export Citation
Hallam, A., Great Geological Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 182 p.
Export Citation
Lyell, Charles, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1863), 518 p.
Export Citation
Romer, Alfred S., Vertebrate Paleontology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
Export Citation
Rudwick, Martin J. S., The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 287 p.
Export Citation
Rudwick, Martin J. S., Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 280 p.
Export Citation
Ruse, Michael, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 320 p.
Export Citation
Van Riper, A. Bowdoin, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Export Citation
Verne, Jules, Voyage au centre de la Terre (Paris: Hetzel, 1864, revised 1867).
Export Citation
Verne, Jules, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, ed. and transl. with introduction and notes by William Butcher, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 234 p. First edition 1992.
Export Citation
  • Download PDF