A thousand leagues under the sea7/5/2023 ![]() ![]() The French title is plural – ‘seas’, not ‘sea’ – and twenty thousand leagues is, in fact, the distance that Professor Arronax travels with Captain Nemo. Thanks to an error in the English title, as shown here, Verne’s ‘twenty thousand leagues’ are commonly mistaken to be the depth to which the Nautilus dives. However, with the publication of modern, unedited translations, one can see the underlying pessimism of Verne’s vision. Hetzel, his publisher, persuaded him to modify his ideas in order to sell more novels and was correct about the effect on his success. His most famous works, collectively known as Les Voyages Extraordinaires, seem to promote the advance of science and technology, although Verne was doubtful about a technological future. In his writing Jules Verne attempted to ‘outline all the geographical, geological, physical and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science’. ![]()
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