Journey to the Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne
Summary
Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a Hamburg geologist with more enthusiasm than caution, decodes a runic cipher on a parchment slipped inside a twelfth century Icelandic manuscript and becomes convinced it marks a real route to the center of the earth, discovered centuries earlier by the sixteenth century Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm. He drags his nephew Axel, the novel's more skeptical narrator, to Iceland, where they hire the imperturbable guide Hans Bjelke and descend into the dormant volcano Snaefellsjokull in late June, following Saknussemm's markings down through miles of rock. The three nearly die of thirst deep underground before Hans taps into a hidden river, and the journey turns from ordeal into genuine expedition: they raft across a vast subterranean sea, discover a graveyard of fossilised prehistoric creatures, watch actual living marine reptiles fighting in the underground water, and glimpse, in one of the book's more unsettling scenes, what may be a giant, apelike herdsman driving a herd of mastodons through the dark. The expedition is finally thrown back to the surface not by choice but by a volcanic eruption that carries their raft up through a chimney of rock and out, far from where they entered, through the crater of Stromboli off Sicily.
Verne grounds even his wildest inventions in real, if sometimes outdated, science, and here he builds the entire premise on a real dispute of the period, having Lidenbrock side with the chemist Humphry Davy's theory that the earth's interior is not a molten mass, a scientific wrong turn that gives the book its permission to imagine a hollow world with room for lost prehistoric life inside it. The pace moves briskly between geological lecture and genuine peril, and it remains one of the most purely adventurous of Verne's novels, light on the philosophical digression that slows some of his other work.
Verne revised and expanded the book for a second edition in 1867, adding two new chapters of prehistoric material that are now considered part of the standard text.
Historical Context & Significance
Journey to the Center of the Earth was first published in French in 1864 by Pierre Jules Hetzel as Voyage au centre de la Terre, with the expanded edition following in 1867 and the first English translation arriving in 1871. It appeared as part of Verne's long running Voyages Extraordinaires series for Hetzel, the publisher who shaped and printed nearly all of Verne's major novels.
The book's underground world, populated with creatures science had already declared extinct, helped establish the lost world as a durable subgenre of adventure fiction, and Verne's influence on later writers who returned to the idea, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and J. R. R. Tolkien, is well documented. It remains one of Verne's most frequently adapted books, most famously as the 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth starring James Mason and Pat Boone.