Topping the Dorseyland poll of best-ever Jules Verne books, comic or otherwise.

One hundred and forty-five years ago last week, a book by an unknown author went on sale in France. “Five Weeks in a Balloon” was about three travellers who’d become the first outsiders to glimpse the uncharted interior of Darkest Africa. They’d done so in a hot-air balloon, and been through a horrendous ordeal.

The book seemed to be a genuine journal, filled with detailed descriptions of places visited and events witnessed, but what an exciting story! A reviewer in Le Figaro demanded confirmation as to whether the account was truth or fiction. Jules Verne was suddenly the centre of attention.

He grew up with stars in his eyes and a stout breeze in his sails. His teacher at the school on Place du Bouffay had lost husband at sea; perhaps he would one day return. Jules made sure that he did, years later: The protagonist of his story “Mistress Branican” went out herself after 14 years’ wait and found her long-lost spouse.

In a later grade at school Verne had a professor who would design the US Navy’s first submarine. As a kid Jules rented little skiffs for cruises along the Loire River that flowed past his house in Nantes. One time the boat sank and Jules was stranded on a tiny islet until the tide went out. What a marvellous adventure. He was keen to have more.

His father was a lawyer, though, and that’s what he wanted Jules to be, so he sent him to Paris to study. Big mistake. Paris! The theatre alone in Paris was a fantasy come true! He met Victor Hugo, and Jacques Arago, who’d written the bestseiller “Journey Around the World”, and Alexandre Dumas, the author of “The Three Musketeers”, and became best pals with Dumas’ son. Jules was prodded to try writing plays. He kept at it for a decade, finishing his law studies but leaving it at that, and yet foundering in his literary efforts. “Blind Man’s Bluff” did fairly well, and there were 25 others, but he was far from rolling in francs. His father had cut him off, so he got a job as a stockbroker, and only then did he have enough money to get married.

Honorine Hebe du Fraysse de Viane Verne had buried one husband, the father of her two daughters, and she knew enough to encourage Jules in his writing. He’d had a story in mind since reading Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax”, about an accidental crossing of the Atlantic, and “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall”, about a trip all the way to the moon in a balloon! And he’d met the greatest living balloonist as well — the photographer Felix Nadar. One day Verne would join his Society for Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier-Than-Air Craft (but decline at the last minute to ride aloft in the club’s monstrous balloon Geante).

Jules had been reading the geographical magazines, too, full of compelling yarns about faraway places. He’d found out quite a bit about Africa, or at least as much as Europeans thought they knew. Between his newfound writer and scientist friends and the imagination nurtured in his childhood, he had his own tale to tell now.

“Five Weeks in a Balloon” was a remarkably successful debut, and Verne was ready with another novel for thrill-seeking readers, about one Captain Hatteras and his North Pole odyssey. “I’m in the middle of my subject at 80 degrees latitude and 40 degrees centigrade below zero,” he wrote gleefully to his publisher. “I’m catching cold just writing about it!”

It turned out to be two books, “The English at the North Pole” and “The Wilderness of Ice”, and Verne had yet another already in the works, called “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. These were the Fantasic Voyages of Jules Verne, and these were the books that got me airborne with excitement when I was a boy, starting with the Classics Illustrated comic versions.

Reading Verne’s biography makes you sometimes wonder how the stories ever managed to become such iconic successes. So many times were they edited and rewritten and repackaged and mistranslated — not to mention being banned and censored — that it’s little surprise to learn that even today many of the English-language editions are a shadow of what they were intended to be.

The changes were almost always for either political or commercial reasons, when, in hindsight, Verne should have been instead been shown the error in his racism and anti-semitism. Perhaps he was too busy being a pornographer: Not that I ever noticed, but the stories have been exposed as a Freudian toyland.

Consciously or not, he poured sexual connotations into his writing, mostly of a homosexual nature at that, and at the same time offered an autobiography of a man confined yet determined to be free. Trapped at the Pole. Constrained to the basket of a balloon, marooned on a desert island, wandering deep underground. His heroes invariably found a way out.

Jules-Gabriel Verne was born on February 8, 1828, an aquarian ostensibly for all mankind. His birthplace on Cours Olivier de Clisson was smack dab in the middle of the riverine island of Feydeau, which JMW Turner depicted over and over. Manmade to begin with, Feydeau has now returned to the land, the water channels that girdled it having bubbled up in green parkland flanked by highways. You can pick it out easily in the Google Earth image below, with the Loire ambling by unaware that its stepdaughter has been abducted.

It’s hard to believe that the Loire used to roar past the island carrying tall ships, often laden with African slaves, which was Nantes’ chief trade. In the spring the river flooded and in the winter it hefted huge ice floes downstream. To young Jules it was the island itself that always seemed to be moving. When he later wrote about a floating island, this is where the dream originated.

This is the Church of St Nicholas nearby. Verne watched it being erected in 1844; his father was on the building commitee. When Jules wrote “A Priest in 1839″, this is where it took place. Not far from his boyhood home as well was a pet shop that sold parakeets and canaries, as well as monkeys, and in the summer his family would take the steamship just along the river to the hamlet of Brains, where his Uncle Prudent, a world traveller, lived. You can see where the ideas came from.

This house in Chantenay, right next door to Nantes, was the Verne family’s original summer hideaway. It was well out in the country at the time, but now is just part of the urban landscape. From here Jules and his kid brother Paul (not me), filled with notions of the Swiss Family Robinson, strolled to the river and rented sailboats, graduating from single-mast skiffs to three-mast sloops, and they ventured as far north as Erdre and as far south as Sevre.

More importantly, this is also purportedly the place where Verne, much later of course, wrote “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “From the Earth to the Moon”.

In 1866 Verne fashioned a summer residence of his own here beside the coastal swirls of Le Crotoy, a village famous for having imprisoned Joan of Arc. His rented three-storey house near the port, on the nub you can see projecting into the sea from the top of the picture, was called “La Solitude”.

The following year Jules and Paul rode the steamship Great Eastern across the Atlantic. In the space of just a week they saw New York, Albany and Niagara Falls, enough memories for many more stories. His other travels weren’t nearly as ambitious — to Scotland and England, Norway and Denmark — although he did make his own way around the Mediterranean, skippering his yacht, the Saint-Michel.

Verne knew his way around Scandiniavia, but that didn’t extend to Iceland. Yet it was there that one of his greatest adventures began, 1864’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”. Well, actually, it began on the tower pictured here, the 250-year-old, 90-metre-high Vor Frelsers Kirke in Copenhagen, up which Professor Otto Lidenbrock dragged his nephew Axel. The idea was to get Axel climbing and, once up high, looking far, far below; the predictable obstacle was Axel’s fear of heights.

One he was prime2, though, Axel was brought here, to Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull volcano, and, a message in ancient runes in hand, he and the professor descend into the unknown.

“Journey to the Centre of the Earth” is my second-favourite novel by Verne. The first is “Off on a Comet”, published in 1897 as “Hector Servadac, Or the Career of a Comet”, in which the comet Gallia grazes against the earth and carries off 40 people, who take some time to realise their predicament. His publisher had to talk him into changing the ending: Verne wanted everyone to die when Gallia returned on its orbit and smacked into Earth again — “Servadac” spelled backwards is “cadavers”. Jules instead gave the space travellers a balloon in which to land safely, satisfying no readers at all, other than myself, of course.

Fans have to swallow their shame, but the various editions of “Off on a Comet” to this day contain Verne’s appallingly stereotyped descriptions of one of the central figures, a Jew. The chief rabbi of Paris demanded changes and the publisher skitted around a few on Verne’s behalf, but offensive passages remain.

I’ve boarded a comet and jumped ahead in the chronology. After “From the Earth to the Moon” and “20,000 Leagues under the Sea” came, in 1872,
“Around the World in 80 Days”, and the following year “The Mysterious Island”. Back to the island again for Jules, only this one was far, far away in the South Pacific. According to the coordinates he gave in the novel, it was here:

Another island emerged from the sea and even took flight with 1895’s “Propeller Island”, deemed the first novel written in a European language in the present tense and third person.

In 1871 the family settled in Amiens for good. The image above shows the third of their three homes, at 2 Rue Charles-Dubois, this one with the tower where many people assume he must have burned the midnight oil with pen and quill. In fact his study was elsewhere upstairs, down a hallway lined with maps, a little corner room with a plain camp bedstead, a bay window and a fireplace on whose mantlepiece sat statuettes of Molière and Shakespeare.

This satellite image is Verne’s second house in Amiens, and his last — he moved back to 44 Boulevard Longueville in 1901. The first house was along the same avenue as the other two, what is now the Boulevard Jules Verne, separated by a mammoth disc of a building that houses the Municipal Circus, seen below. This was Verne’s pet project after he was elected to the city council in 1888, launching a 15-year career in politics.

Why did Verne leave his home on Charles-Dubois and go back to the place on the Boulevard Longueville? Maybe because it was outside the former residence that his nephew tried to kill him.

In 1876 Verne had his son committed to an insane asylum. Michel, then 15, had always been a problem child. Mettray Penal Colony apparently seemed the answer, and he did marry following his release, but then he took a 16-year-old mistress and scaled a mountain of debt. When the old man died Michel, by then somewhat rehabilitated, took charge of the unfinished novels, including “The Lighthouse at the End of the World”, adding “missing” chapters and perhaps even coming up with his own works under his father’s name.

On March 9, 1886, Gaston Verne, who had been the son to Jules that Michel failed to be, waited on the sidewalk, Mark Chapman-like, for his uncle to return home. Uncle Jules had declined to finance his trip to England, so he aimed a revolver at his lower gut. The wound ended up in the ankle. Verne remained hobbled for the rest of his days, but wanted the whole affair kept quiet, and Gaston was merely walled up overseas for five years. Verne paid the fare after all.

With 70 books on shelves around the globe, and finishing, fittingly enough, with “The Master of the World”, Jules Verne died of diabetes on March 24, 1905, at age 77. The novels kept coming for years — “Invasion of the Sea”, “The Lighthouse at the End of the World”, “The Golden Volcano”, “The Hunt for the Meteor”, “The Danube Pilot”, “The Survivors of the Jonathan”, “The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz”, “Humbug”, “The Eternal Adam”.

Verne is buried here in Amiens’ Madeleine Cemetery, his tomb sheltered by trees. It has a startling sculpture called “To immortality and eternal youth”. Made by Amiens’ own Albert Roze, it depicts Verne rising from the earth and reaching toward heaven.

Edouard Riou did the illustrations for most of Verne’s initial editions, though Henri de Montaut assisted him with “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. Montaut did “From the Earth to the Moon” by himself.

Anyone looking for more information on Jules Verne need look no further than Zvi Har’El’s extraordinarily thorough Jules Verne Collection, although Andrew Nash also has a fine website called the Jules Verne Collecting Resource Page.