Jules Verne

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a French novelist, born in Nantes on 8 February 1828, whose adventure stories of travel and invention, such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days, have led some to call him the father of science fiction; he died in Amiens on 24 March 1905.

His career turned in 1862, when the Paris publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted the novel that became Five Weeks in a Balloon, published on 31 January 1863. Hetzel then tied Verne to a long contract for three volumes a year, serialising most of the novels in his Magasin d'Education et de Recreation before book publication. From 1866 Hetzel marketed them as a series, the Voyages extraordinaires. Journey to the Centre of the Earth appeared in 1864 and From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was serialised in 1869 and 1870, and a large illustrated edition with 111 pictures by Alphonse de Neuville and Edouard Riou followed in 1871. Around the World in Eighty Days ran in Le Temps from 6 November 1872 and came out from Hetzel as a book on 30 January 1873. The Mysterious Island, which settles the story of Captain Nemo, followed in 1874 and 1875.

For collectors

Hetzel published the original French editions. English translations began in 1869, but early versions were often heavily cut or altered: the first English Twenty Thousand Leagues (1872, translated by Lewis Page Mercier) dropped about a quarter of the text, and an 1872 Griffith and Farran Journey to the Centre of the Earth is notorious for its liberties. Early English editions are collected as artefacts rather than as faithful texts.