Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page A

French government closed its eyes and stuffed its ears. “Any retreat from classical studies has the effect of shaking the very foundations of Christianity,” wrote Archbishop Kopp (Evans, p. 13), summarizing the reactionary sentiments of the time. In France science became an instrument of politics, and education vacillated between the Romantic ideal of classics-based studies and the religious ideal of the Bible. The backlash against science was profound and harsh. Romantic poets, watching the plundering of nature to feed the industrial revolution, wrote love songs to nature and recommended a return to a “natural” way of life.
    In the gap created on the one side by scientific discoveries and the march of industrial progress, and on the other side by reactionary educational practices, Verne found his home. With the help of his shrewd publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and Hetzel’s showpiece publication, Magasin d’education et de recreation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), within a year of the publication of the novel Five Weeks in a Balloon Verne’s name was known throughout France.
    Hetzel had been a successful and influential publisher in Paris until, in 1851, French Emperor Napoleon III banished him from the country. Even while living in exile, Hetzel had managed to bring to print some of the most important French writers of his time, including Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine, de Vigny, and Sand. During the amnesty of 1859, Hetzel returned to Paris with a new mission. Instead of “art for art’s sake,” or high literature, Hetzel targeted an emerging market created by France’s changing education system. Founding the handsome bimonthly Magazine of Education and Recreation, Hetzel sought fiction and articles that educated as they entertained. Verne, with his experience writing stories for Musée des familles and his self-education through years of scientific research, turned out to be the very man Hetzel was looking for. When Verne approached Hetzel with his manuscript, Hetzel snapped it up. If Verne agreed to rework the text into an adventure story, Hetzel would publish the story in his magazine. Beyond that, Hetzel offered Verne a long-term contract, and one of the most productive relationships in modern literary history was born.
    In the preface to the first issue of his new magazine, Hetzel wrote, “We are attempting to create a journal for the entire family that is educational in the true sense of the word; one that is both serious and entertaining, one that would be of interest to parents and of profit to children. Education and recreation—these two terms, in our opinion, should complement each other.... Our ambition is to supplement the necessarily arduous lessons of the classroom with a lesson that is both more personal and more trenchant, to round out public education with family readings ... to fulfill the learning needs of the home, from the cradle to old age” (Evans, p. 24).
    Hetzel’s magazine was not the first to discover this niche market. In addition to Musée des familles, started in 1833, there was the Journal of Education in 1768, the Magazine of Pictures in 1833, and World Tour in 1860, the last a version of the modern-day National Geographic. But if Hetzel’s magazine wasn’t the only one of its kind, it was the best. With the most illustrations, with stories by the famous Verne, and with good binding and high-quality paper, Hetzel’s magazine appealed to every generation of French readers with a taste for both adventure and science.
    There were, however, downsides to the deal. Hetzel, exploiting Verne’s hunger for fame, negotiated a deal in which Verne made the equivalent of $2 million throughout his relationship with the publisher and Hetzel made three times that much. In addition, Hetzel required Verne to work at breakneck speed. In the eleven years between publication of Five Weeks in a Balloon and The Mysterious Island, Verne wrote ten complete novels as well as a series of