Raymond N. MacKenzie · Platinum Noses: Jules Verne’s Fantasy
Platinum NosesRaymond N. MacKenzie
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Vol. 48 No. 12 · 9 July 2026
Platinum Noses<br>Raymond N. MacKenzie
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Journey to the Moon<br>by Jules Verne, translated by David Coward with William Butcher.<br>Oxford, 353 pp., £9.99, August 2025, 978 0 19 894178 1Show More
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By the last decades of the 19th century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one carefully cultivated by his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel – promising a specific mixture of scientific plausibility, adventure and moral instruction. ‘Jules Verne’ told readers roughly what they would get: a journey, maps, technological marvels, diagrams, rational wonder. A Verne book was, arguably, less the expression of a single imagination and more a tissue of scientific discourse and popular pedagogy, garnished with vivid illustrations. From the mid-1860s, Hetzel did not simply publish Verne; he curated him. Les Voyages extraordinaires appeared in a uniform format – distinctive bindings, illustrations, series numbering, prefatory material – that acted as a guarantee. Few writers could match Verne in sales or in spin-offs, including the hugely successful theatre productions. After its publication in 1873, Around the World in Eighty Days became one of the most frequently staged adventure spectacles of the late 19th century, selling out in Paris, London and New York.<br>Popular success did not, however, translate to literary prestige. Verne was largely ignored by Zola and the Naturalists, or treated with disdain when they did bother to notice him. For them, science meant determinism, heredity, pathology; not techno-optimist speculation. Verne’s science involves heroic inventors, awe-inspiring machines and encyclopedic exposition; this kind of material didn’t register at all as ‘literary’ science. Zola called Verne a ‘vulgariser’, adding that if his books sold well, so did ‘dictionaries and parish prayer books’, and they had ‘no importance whatsoever’.<br>Verne had a long-standing wish to be elected to the Académie Française, but despite the efforts of his friend Alexandre Dumas fils, the honour never came. Verne was categorised as a children’s writer or an adventure writer – not a serious novelist. One would think his sales figures would have been a solace, but he never cared much, leaving all that to his publisher; the literary establishment’s disdain stung, however. In a fine irony, he is now little read by young people – to whom he must seem hopelessly old-fashioned – but academics take him quite seriously, producing a regular stream of articles and monographs.<br>In another irony, those of us who grew up reading him or seeing film versions of his tales often remember him as the great storyteller of sheer motion, his characters always going somewhere: voyaging across oceans, descending into the Earth, taking balloon flights over Africa, projecting themselves towards the moon. Yet Verne travelled comparatively little, especially during the period when his most ambitious journeys were imagined and written about. Apart from a few cruises and modest European trips, his life unfolded largely between Nantes, Paris and Amiens, anchored to the routines of writing, family and publishing deadlines. He and his brother visited the US in 1867, but stayed only six days. The immensity of his fictional voyaging emerged from an intense imaginative compression of space – maps studied at a desk, scientific reports mined for narrative energy, a globe contained and rendered in print. Verne’s novels suggest that modern travel, far from requiring perpetual motion, could be generated out of stillness.<br>Verne attended law school to please his father, secretly hoping to become a writer, preferably for the theatre. In the late 1840s and the decade following, he took administrative or other jobs, often unpaid, at Paris theatres. Around 1849, he met Alexandre Dumas senior at the salon of a well-known palm reader, the Chevalier d’Arpentigny. Verne soon formed a friendship with the younger Dumas, closer to him in age and himself seeking to establish a literary career,...