VERNE, JULES (1828-1905)

This article appears in Volume V27, Page 1030 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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VERNE, JULES (1828-1905) , French author, was born at Nantes on the 8th of February 1828. After completing his studies at the Nantes lycee, he went to Paris to study for the bar. About 1848, in conjunction with Michel Carre, he wrote librettos for two operettas, and in 185o his verse comedy, Les Pailles rompues, in which Alexandre Dumas fits had some share, was produced at the Gymnase. For some years his interests alternated between the theatre and the bourse, but some travellers' stories which he wrote for the Musee des Families seem to have revealed to him the true direction of his talent the delineation, viz., of delightfully extravagant voyages and adventures to which cleverly prepared scientific and geographical details lent an air of verisimilitude. Something of the kind had been done before, after kindred methods, by Cyrano de Bergerac, by Swift and

Defoe

DEFOE, DANIEL (c. 1.659—1731)

, and later by

Mayne

MAYNE, JASPER (1604-1672)

Reid. But in his own particular application of plausible scientific apparatus Verne undoubtedly struck out a department for himself in the wide literary genre of voyages imaginaires. His first success was obtained with Cinq semaines en ballon, which he wrote for Hetzel's Magazin d'Education in 1862, and thenceforward, for a

quarter

QUARTER (through Fr. from Lat. quartarius, fourth part)

of a century, scarcely a year passed in which Hetzel did not publish one ormore of his fantastic stories, illustrated generally by pictures of the most lurid and sensational description. The most successful of these romances include: Voyage au centre de la terre (1864); De la terre a la lune (1865); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869); Les Anglais au

pole

nord (187o); and Voyage autour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, which first appeared in Le Temps in 1872. The adaptation of this last (produced with immense success at the Porte St Martin theatre on the 8th of November 1874) and of another excellent tale, Michael Strogoff (at the Chatelet, I88o), both dramas being written in conjunction with Adolphe d'Ennery, proved the most acceptable of Verne's theatrical pieces. The novels were translated into the various European languagesand some even into Japanese and Arabicand had an enormous success in England. But after 1877, when he published Hector Servadac, a romance of existence upon a comet, the writer's invention began to show signs of fatigue (his kingdom had been invaded in different directions and at different times by such writers as R. M. Ballantyne, Rider

Haggard

HAGGARD, HENRY RIDER (1856– )

and H. G. Wells), and he even committed himself, somewhat unguardedly, to very gloomy predictions as to the future of the novel. Jules Verne's own novels, however, will certainly

long

LONG, GEORGE (1800-1879)
LONG, JOHN DAVIS (1838– )

continue to delight readers by reason of their sparkling style, their picturesque verveapparently inherited directly from Dumastheir amusing and good-natured national caricatures, and the ingenuity with which the love

element

ELEMENT (Lat. elementum)

is either subordinated or completely excluded. M. Verne, who was always extremely popular in society, divided his time for the most part between Paris, his

home

at Amiens and his yacht. He was a member of the Legion of Honour, and several of his romances were crowned by the French

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

, but he was never enrolled among its members. He died at Amiens on the 24th of

March

1905. His brother, Paul Verne, contributed to the Transactions of the French Alpine Club, and wrote an Ascension du Mont Blanc for his brother's collection of Voyages extraordinaires in 1874.

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