![]() ![]() I carry ideas about in my head for years – ten, or fifteen years, sometimes – before giving them form’ The story was not written until long after. In the introduction to the original publication, Verne wrote of how the idea for this novel came to him: ‘One day in a Paris café, I read in the Siècle that a man could travel around the world in 80 days, it immediately struck me that I could profit by a difference of meridian and make my traveller gain or lose a day in his journey. In particular three technological breakthroughs occurred in 1869-70 that made a tourist-like around-the-world journey possible for the first time: the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in America (1869), the linking of the Indian railways across the sub-continent (1870), and the opening of the Suez Canal (1869). Writing in 1936, Jean Cocteau, the eminent French writer and film maker, said of the novel: ‘Jules Verne’s masterpiece … stimulated our childhood and taught us more than all the atlases: the taste of adventure and the love of travel’.Īround the World in Eighty Days was written at a time when the fascination with international travel was growing and the technological innovations of the 19th century had opened the possibility of rapid circumnavigation. One of his most popular works was Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). He then immersed himself in his work with unbridled enthusiasm and, over the course of the next ten years, he would create many of his classic novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The book garnered wide acclaim, and Verne knew that he had finally found his place in the world. After making the acquaintance of editor and publisher Jules Hetzel, who would become Verne’s champion, the author’s literary career truly began, with the 1863 publication of Five Weeks in a Balloon (serialized in Hetzel’s Magazine d’Éducation et de Récréation, as most of his works were). At first he wrote many works for the stage encouraged by his friend, Alexandre Dumas. Verne, born in Nantes, France in 1828, was a prolific writer all his life. No wonder that these novels, written in the mid-nineteenth century, are still in print and are still read avidly by those who desire adventures out of the ordinary. He wrote about space travel, journeying down into the depths of the earth and exploring the deep oceans of the world. ![]() However this wasn’t a path trodden by Jules Verne whose works of fiction explode with wild dreamlike imaginative ideas that take the reader away from reality into an exciting fantasy universe. One piece of advice given to budding authors is to write about what you know. David Stuart Davies looks at Jules Verne’s classic adventure, and the many TV, stage and film adaptions of it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |