Grove Koger

Today’s post is about the early life of an enormously influential French novelist who was born February 2, 1828—Jules Verne. It’s drawn from my article “Extraordinary Voyages: Jules Verne’s Geographical Imagination,” which originally appeared in the September/October 2002 issue of Mercator’s World.

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When Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a child, he decided to run away to sea. Accompanied by two friends, he rowed out to a ship anchored near his family’s summer home on the Loire River and signed on as a cabin boy. Had the Coralie not put in subsequently at the nearby port of Paimboeuf, allowing Verne’s father to catch up with him, he might well have reached the Indies. It was 1839, and Jules was eleven.

It’s a fine story, and it offers a handy key to the mind of a writer who set so many of his stories at sea, or beneath it. Yet Verne published no account of the escapade during his lifetime, and it almost certainly never took place, even though it became enshrined in family legend and has been repeated in many biographies. Verne grew up in the western French port of Nantes, and like many youths he dreamed of ships and the sea, but in the story of the Coralie we meet the daring boy that Verne and his readers wanted him to be, not the timid boy he really was.

What is beyond doubt is that the writer subsequently underwent a young man’s typical struggle between his father’s expectations and his own ambitions. Verne studied law, but he lived and breathed literature. That his legal studies had taken him to Paris in 1846 was surely fortuitous. Verne’s first literary efforts were boulevard dramas, but what little success he enjoyed in the theatre seems to have been due to his friendship with Alexandre Dumas pere and fils. Several short stories Verne published in 1851–“The First Ships of the Mexican Navy” and “A Balloon Trip”–suggested a different direction, but it was to be more than a decade before he found a winning formula.

By 1863 European explorers such as Richard Burton and Heinrich Barth had penetrated deep into Africa. The public anxiously awaited word from James Grant and John Speke about the source of the Nile River. In January of that year, Parisians woke up to read the exciting account of one Dr. Samuel Ferguson, who, thanks to the backing of the Daily Telegraph in London, had set out to cross the continent with two companions—by hydrogen balloon! According to the report, Ferguson had solved some of the most vexing problems involved in long balloon flights—the apparent necessity of releasing precious gas or dropping ballast from time to time in order to control the craft’s  altitude.

Five Weeks in a Balloon was the first of an array of novels, novellas, and short stories that Verne and his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, would call “Les Voyages extraordinaires.” Hereafter, most of Verne’s works made their first appearance in Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de recreation. The astute publisher contracted with Verne to handle the author’s works in periodical form, followed by book publication. Over the years this arrangement, revised several times, would make Verne rich, allowing him to move his family to the quiet northern French town of Amiens and to buy a series of yachts.