It would be easy to credit Walt Disney with making Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea an adventurous cultural phenomenon, but in fact, credit should actually go to French author Jules Verne, whose penned this futuristic novel in 1870, almost one hundred years before Disney Studios shared it with the movie-going masses. Written originally in Verne's native French, the first publication of the novel was illustrated by Alphonse de Neuville and Edward Riou, both of whom also illustrated Verne's best-known novel, Around The World In Eighty Days.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was not intended to be a novel; Verne wrote in serialized form for the periodical Magasin d'Education et de Recreation, over an eighteen month period that began in March 1869. The serial was so well received that publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel decided to publish them as a book.
The story is futuristic and almost science-fiction in nature, following the undersea journey of Captain Nemo, an abrasive and possibly slightly insane submarine captain whose submarine, the Nautilus, is initially mistaken for a large and threatening sea monster by explorers who set out to capture it. On finding out that the monster they are seeking is actually a machine, they join Nemo for a while, marveling at the magical world that exists underwater, but all the while feeling intensely uncomfortable and threatened by the volatile Captain. It was astonishingly well acclaimed on its publication, and this acclaim has not dimmed despite the novel's age.
Verne had taken a scientific approach to writing the novel, basing the Nautilus on a model of the French submarine Plongeur (the Diver) that he had seen at the Paris World's Fair in 1867. As well as creating a fascinating hero in Nemo, Verne also included several characters who were based on real-life ocean explorers, in much the same way that he inserted several real-life adventurers in his Around The World In Eighty Days. A successful author, Verne seemed constantly to yearn for a life more adventurous than that of a writer, and his work shows a clear admiration for those who had harnessed their adventurous side and undertaken their individual voyages of discovery.
Verne wrote a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that picked up the story of Nemo, but The Mysterious Island was never embraced by the reading public in the way that the original adventure had been. People found it rather confusing because the later book seemed to make several contradictions of the first.
The first English translation was made in 1873 by Reverand Lewis Page Mercier, who also translated Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, and a Trip Around It. His first effort was not so much a translation as an abridgment, as Mercier left out a whopping twenty five per cent of the original text, altering not only the content of the adventure but also a great deal of Verne's literary intentions within it. It was not until one hundred years later that another translation was made, this time including the missed-out sections. The 1966 version was embraced almost like a new book, because it was different when translated verbatim than it had been when abridged so abruptly by Mercier.
In 1954, Walt Disney popularized the novel with the movie of the same name. It was technicolor, and the magic of the underwater world as penned by Verne was brought to life. The movie attracted another generation of fans of Verne's work, although most people's interpretation of the book is now an amalgamation of both page and screen.
Always intrigued by the line where science stops and fantasy starts, Verne also wrote Journey To the Center of the Earth, He is considered a luminary of French literature and had a great influence on the avant-garde in his own country; outside France, he is viewed more as a children's author, thanks in large part to the Disney-fication of his work, and in small part to a series of translations that emphasize the adventure within the novels without paying much attention to the complex psychological make-up of the characters. Considered one of the forefathers of science fiction, Verne is the third most-translated author in the world, behind Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. Ray Bradbury, an acclaimed avant-garde author in his own right, once said that "we are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."
