Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (34 page)

1
(p. 5)
Humphry Davy... Saint Claire-Deville:
British chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) discovered several chemical elements. German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) contributed crucially to the Earth sciences. British explorer of the Arctic Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) discovered the Northwest Passage. British astronomer Sir Edward Sabine (1788-1883) traveled to the Arctic and was a pioneer in magnetism. Antoine-César Becquerel (1788-1878) and his son, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel ( 1820-1891 ), were both physicists. Jacques-Joseph Ebelmen (misspelled “Ebelman” by Verne) (1814-1852) was a French chemist. Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster (1781-1868) invented the kaleidoscope. Jean-Baptiste-Andre Dumas (1800-1884) was a French chemist. French zoologist Henri Milne-Edwards (1800-1885), professor at the Sorbonne and director of the Museum d‘Histoire Naturelle in Paris, researched crustaceans, mollusks, and corals. Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville (1818-1881) was a French chemist; his brother Charles Sainte-Claire Deville (1814-1876) was a French geologist who published a book on the Stromboli volcano.

2
(p. 6)
Grauben:
Verne uses a spelling for the goddaughter’s name that could not exist in German. Some translators have therefore chosen to normalize the name to “Gräuben,” but this variation still does not render a name that would be likely to be used in German. For this reason, Verne’s original spelling is preserved here.

3
(p. 14) “Arne
Saknussemm
...
a famous alchemist!”:
Verne may have based this character on the Icelandic philologist Arni Magnússon (1663-1730), who specialized in the early history and literature of Scandinavia and built up an extensive collection of books and manuscripts from Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. He was not an alchemist, however.

4
(p. 14) “Avicenna...
Paracelsus”:
The Iranian doctor and philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) exerted enormous influence, especially in the areas of philosophy and medicine. British philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (1220-1292) studied alchemy as well as mathematics, astronomy, and optics; he was the first European to give a detailed account of the manufacture of gunpowder. Catalan writer and mystic Ramon Llull ( 1232/33-1315/ 16) proposed a general theory of knowledge in his Ars
magna
( 1305-1308). The German-Swiss doctor and alchemist known as Paracelsus, whose real name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim ( 1493-1541 ), was responsible for giving chemistry a crucial role in medicine.

5
(p. 34)
“a visit that the celebrated chemist ... born nineteen years later”:
By this accounting, Axel was born in 1844 and he would be nineteen at the time of the expedition in 1863; Uncle Lidenbrock, who Verne has said was fifty in 1863, would have been only twelve years old in 1825—a rather young age to be receiving visits from famous scientists!

6
(p. 57)
“Olafsen ... scholars aboard the
Reine Hortense”: Icelandic poet and natural historian Eggert Ólafsson (1726-1768) carried out a substantial scientific and cultural survey of his country from 1752 to 1757 and recorded the results in his
Travels in Iceland
(1772); together with Bjarni Pálsson (pseudonym Povelsen), he undertook the first ascent of the Snaefells volcano in 1757. Uno von Troil (1746-1803), archbishop of Uppsala, Sweden, traveled to Iceland in 1772 and published a report on his journey in 1777. French naturalist Joseph Paul Gaimard (1796-1858) undertook expeditions to Iceland in 1835 and 1836 and published a nine-volume study as a result of this journey, with the collaboration of Eugène Robert (1806-1879). French navigator Jules Alphonse Rene Poret de Blosseville and members of an expedition team, to whom Verne refers simply as the “scholars,” sailed to Iceland and Greenland aboard the
Reine Hortense
in 1833 and disappeared in the Arctic.

7
(p. 162)
leptotherium ... mericotherium:
Verne seems to have invented these names. There is an orchid genus but no animal called
leptotherium,
which combines the Greek words for “slender” and “wild beast.” The name
mericotherium
is similar to those of such other prehistoric species as the
hyracotherium,
a small ancestor of the horse, but has no specific zoological referent.

8
(p. 192)
Boucher de Perthes ... by the ages:
Verne moves events that actually took place in the 1830s and 1840s to the 1860s. Jacques Boucher de Perthes, an archaeologist, was director of the custom house at Abbeville in France and made important discoveries of Stone Age tools in the area that demonstrated the ancient origins of the human species. His research remained controversial until 1859, when it was supported by British scientists.

9
(p. 192)
Falconer, Busk, Carpenter:
Hugh Falconer (1808-1865) was a Scottish naturalist and paleontologist. British surgeon, zoologist, and paleontologist George Busk (1807-1886) had a specialization in polyzoa, a fossil marine species, and an interest in vertebrate fossils. William Benjamin Carpenter (1813-1885) trained as a medical doctor and published in diverse fields, including mental physiology, microscopy, marine biology, and religion, with particular achievements in marine zoology.

10
(p. 194)
“I know the story... the pre-adamites of Scheuchzer”:
Pausanias, a Greek scholar and writer from the second century A.D., tells the story of a man who claimed to have found the skeleton of the Greek hero Ajax; he described it as gigantic and said the kneecap was the size of a pentathlon discus, which would make it more than 7 inches wide. Asterius is a mythological giant whose tomb Pausanias claimed to have seen. Herodotus, a Greek historian from the fifth century B.C., reports the story of Orestes’ body being found by a Spartan who simply takes the word of a blacksmith for the authenticity of the remains. Polyphemus is a one-eyed giant who imprisons Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey; Trapani and Palermo are cities in Sicily. Felix Platter (1536-1614; spelled “Plater” in Verne’s text) was a Swiss doctor who identified bones found near Lucerne as those of a giant, but they were actually the remains of a mammoth. Jean de Chassanion (1531-1598) was a French clergyman and author of a book on giants in human history. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French naturalist who examined bones said to be those of Teutobochus, king of the Cimbrians, and found them to belong to the elephant relative deinotherium; the Cimbrians were a Germanic tribe. Peter Camper (1722-1789; spelled “Campet” in Verne’s text) was a Dutch anatomist best known for his work on anatomy and human races. In 1725 Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733), a Swiss naturalist, claimed to have discovered the fossil remains of one of the victims of the biblical flood; in the nineteenth century, Georges Cuvier identified these fossils to be those of a giant salamander.

11
(p. 197)
Hoffmann’s fantastic character who has lost his shadow:
In the short story “The Wonderful Tale of Peter Schlemihl” (1814), by German Romantic author Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), the protagonist sells his shadow. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), another German writer of the period and friend of Chamisso’s, mentions the story in his own “Adventures of New Year’s Eve” ( 1815).

Inspired by
Journey to the Center of the Earth

Oscar Wilde supposedly once remarked that H. G. Wells was a “scientific Jules Verne.” It is hard to determine which author Wilde wished to slight more, but it doesn’t really matter: Verne and Wells are the two progenitors of modern science fiction. Without these authors, science fantasy writing—a category that includes such notables as Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Anthony Burgess, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and J. R. R. Tolkien—would not exist as we know it today.

Herbert George Wells supported himself with teaching, textbook writing, and journalism until 1895, when he made his literary debut with
The Time Machine,
which was followed before the end of the century by
The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man,
and
The
War of the
Worlds
—books that established him as the first original voice in the realm of scientific fantasy since Verne. Where Verne dealt with scientific probabilities—for example, the
Nautilus
from
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea serves as the forerunner to the modern submarine—time travel, interplanetary warfare, and invisibility and other fantasies are the subjects of Wells’s conceptual fiction.

Perhaps because of this fundamental difference in their artistic aims, Wells was famously loath to be compared to his literary ancestor. In a letter to J. L. Garvin, the editor of
Outlook,
Wells refused to attack Verne publicly, though he had openly denied having been influenced by the latter: “A good deal of injustice has been done the old man [Verne] in comparison with me. I don’t like the idea of muscling into the circle of attention about him with officious comments or opinions eulogy. I’ve let the time when I might have punished him decently go by.” Although the prolific Wells delved into social philosophy and criticism, history, utopian and comic novels, literary parodies, and even feminism, he was always best remembered for his auspicious beginnings as a science fiction writer.

Underground worlds have fascinated mankind for millennia—consider the Hades of the Greeks and the subterranean inferno of Dante—but Verne’s story is an important nineteenth-century manifestation. With Verne as a thematic predecessor, so-called Lost World and Lost Race novels took strong hold in the English-speaking world. In fact, Verne himself took inspiration from
Journey to the Center of the Earth
to write another underground tale, the little-known Les
Indes
Noires (1877), which chronicles a family living in a coal mine beneath the surface of Scotland. In English, the novel has been published under titles as various as Underground
City, The Child of the Cavern, Strange Doings Underground, Black Di
amonds, and the literal
The Black Indies.
The African adventure tales of British author H. Rider Haggard, including the treasure-hunt classic
King Solomon’s Mines
(1885) and the mystical
She: A
History
of Adventure
(1887), utilize the underground as a key setting and metaphor. Two of the best-selling fictions of their time, Haggard’s novels are still read today and also are known for helping inspire the Indiana Jones movie franchise of the 1980s. Lost World and Lost Race themes appear in works as wide-ranging as the science fiction of H. G. Wells, the anti-imperialism works of Joseph Conrad, the Professor Challenger novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Tarzan and Pellucidar series of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The first adaptation of Verne’s novel,
Voyage au centre de la terre
(1909; A Journey to the Middle
of the
Earth), was by Spanish director Segundo de Chomon; no copies are known to exist today. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, film audiences were quite familiar with Verne. The Czech Cesta do
Praveku
( 1955; Journey to the Beginning of Time), directed by Karel Zeman, was inspired by Verne’s novel, though this story of traveling to past epochs is not really an adaptation. That came in 1959 with Journey to the Center of the Earth. James Mason plays Professor Oliver Lindenbrook and a frequently shirtless Pat Boone sings musical numbers in his role as Alec McEwen, Lindenbrook’s student. Arlene Dahl is the strongwilled Carla Goetaborg, a role created for the movie. Director Henry Liven portrays realistic-looking dinosaurs with footage of lizards blown up to monstrous proportions, and the magnificent settings include crystal gardens, forests of giant mushrooms, and footage of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. Bernard Herrmann’s excellent score completes this classic. America also saw a wave of other Verne adaptations in the 1950s: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) were popular hits, the latter winning an Academy Award for Best Picture.

An admirable Spanish adaptation, Viaje al
centro
de la Tierra, by director Georges Méliès (1976), appeared in the United States in 1978; it is sometimes known as Where Time Began and Fabulous Journey to the Center
of
the Earth. The creative opening sequence shows a pastiche of early, silent Verne films from prolific director Georges Méliès. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1989), featuring model-actress Kathy Ireland, takes little from Verne’s novel but the name; the same holds true for a 1993 television movie. A loosely adapted miniseries starring Treat Williams, Journey to the Center
of
the Earth (1999), moves the action to New Zealand and focuses on a dinosaur plot and a missing-person saga.

Director Gavin Scott’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (2005) depicts four young people who discover the original manuscript for Verne’s novel. When they find a map of Verne’s travels under the Earth’s surface, they realize that the author based the book on his real-life adventures and agree to go underground and follow Verne’s path. Part of this story rings true to actual events: Verne’s original manuscript for the novel, lost for decades, came to light in 1994.

Comments
&
Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives
o
n the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The com
mentary
has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporane
ous
with the work,
letters
written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history.
Following
the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.