A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: A Journey To The Center Of The Earth
Original: “Voyage au centre de la Terre” (French)
Author: Jules Verne
Year: 1864 (mine was 2017 Barnes & Noble special edition)
Pages: 375
Genre: Adventure, Science Fiction
Publisher: Barnes & Noble / Sterling Publishing
ISBN 978-1-4351-4473-6 (hardcover)
Wikipedia page
Author’s Wikipedia page

Summary

Interestingly, this beautifully bound hardcover special edition (by Barnes & Noble) doesn’t include any preface, introduction, or foreword — as so many such works do. Nothing to place it in historical context. And there’s no “About the Author” section. The reader must learn on her own that this book contains the 1871 English translation of Verne’s French original, and that this translation (available for free on Project Gutenberg) is widely considered “a complete re-write of the novel, with portions added and omitted, and names changed”. Additionally: “its text as a whole has been excoriated by scholars as one of the poorest extant Verne translations.” The far more faithful 1877 translation (also availabe free at Project Gutenberg) was there for the taking, but someone at Barnes & Noble made the decision to use this one and didn’t bother explaining why.

So, as I read, I had no idea that Professor von Hardwigg was originally “M. Otto Liedenbrock” or that the first-person narrator Harry was originally called “Axel” or that Harry’s betrothed, Gretchen, was named “Gräuben” in Verne’s original. (All these things I only found out later, when composing this review.) I later learned that the unnamed 1871 translator had also added chapter titles (the original had none) and “completely recomposed” many paragraphs and details.

All that being said, when I directly compare portions of this version to the comparable portions in the “better” translation, I admit I prefer this one.

The story is, I think, fairly well-known, so I won’t recount a summary here. It is a simple adventure story with no great plot twists or surprises — other than the common and expected disasters that writers spring upon their characters in adventure stories. There are few characters so it’s easy to keep track of them. There are handful of named female characters, and some of them even have brief speaking roles, but the great majority of the book only concerns Harry, Hardwigg, and their Icelandic guide — a sturdy man named Hans.

While reading, one must remember that Plate Tectonics wasn’t accepted scientific dogma until the mid-1900s. At the time Verne wrote, scientists were still guessing about the age of the Earth and the methods of its formation (it was 1862 when Lord Kelvin dated the Earth as being older than 20 million years) — and humanity generally had no idea what was underground (beyond the few hundred feet of the deepest wells or mines). So, as the characters descend into the interior of the planet — through a volcanic cone in Iceland — they discuss prevailing scientific theories of the day, such as how much temperature increase to expect and what conditions below might be like. As it turns out (in the story), they are perfectly able to survive hundreds of miles below the surface — and much further, though they’re never sure how far down they actually made it, due to all their instruments being lost in a catastrophe.

The reader must also deal with old-style European measurement terms like fathom (the distance of a man’s outstretched arms, about 5 or 6 feet), league (roughly, the distance a man can walk in an hour, generally considered three miles in the English speaking world, though I have often walked four or more miles in an hour), the Reaumur temperature scale (which placed the freezing point of water at zero and the boiling point at 80) — the last of which I’d never heard of before.

Speaking of “in those days”, there are several places where a modern outlook on social issues makes this book seem as old as it is. Like when the professor experiences “womanly weakness” on page 146 (he is concerned for his nephew’s health), or when the narrator comments that Hans, the guide, is “Oriental” in outlook (because he is placid and equanimous), or when the explorers return to the surface and Harry worries about “the superstitious character of the Italians”.

There is also an odd passage when Harry gets separated from Hans and the professor, and his only recourse is to pray to God, which not only makes him feel better but results in him being reunited with his companions. I say it’s “odd” because it’s something rarely seen in modern science fiction — and, for that matter, even in 19th Century science fiction (though I found Dracula to be almost entirely a Gospel tract). I simply wasn’t expecting it here because I’d read that Verne was generally a deist (though he’d been raised Roman Catholic).

Like H.G. Wells, Verne has sometimes been called the “Father” of science fiction, though it (the genre) clearly existed before these two men who wrote in the late 1800s. Honestly, I far preferred Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as an early example of science fiction.

Conclusion

The adventure yarn was fun, and Harry’s constant surprise at his uncle’s dogged persistence gets hilarious after a while, but there were enough downsides to keep this from being a “great” novel.