A letter to Jules Verne, who is well beyond receiving letters but who, I suspect, would have enjoyed the idea that one of his American readers was still thinking about his second-best novel a hundred and fifty years after publication.
Monsieur Verne,
I have finally read L’Île mystérieuse in the Jordan Stump translation, which is the first English edition that does not cut the book in half and does not bowdlerize Captain Nemo into a sanitized Victorian stereotype. It is your third novel of the Nemo cycle — the third because you insisted on it, though the publishers had wanted the story to end with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — and it is not as famous as Leagues, and not as short as Around the World in Eighty Days, and not as tight as Journey to the Center of the Earth. It is, on the other hand, the book in which you finally answered the question your readers had been asking since 1870 — who is Captain Nemo — and the answer you gave was so unwelcome to your American publishers that they simply deleted it from the first English translations for the better part of a century.
This is the matter I want to write to you about.
You revealed, in The Mysterious Island, that Nemo was Prince Dakkar of Bundelkhand, an Indian prince who had led a failed uprising against the British in the Great Mutiny of 1857, whose family had been murdered by British officers, and who had retreated into the sea to wage a private, anti-colonial war on British shipping for the remainder of his life. Your American translators, the Kingston and Stephens editions of the 1870s, removed every reference to the British, every reference to India, every reference to the Mutiny, and replaced Nemo’s biography with a vague Polish backstory because the American publishing industry of the 1870s was largely aligned with British imperial interests and did not want American boys reading an adventure novel in which the most charismatic character was an anti-colonial terrorist. The censorship stood, in English, for the better part of a century. Generations of American and British readers grew up thinking Captain Nemo was a Polish aristocrat with a grievance against Russia. He was not. He was an Indian prince with a grievance against Britain. You wrote it that way on purpose. The correction has only become available to English readers in my lifetime.
I want to tell you that it was worth insisting on. You were a colonialist’s son writing in colonialist France, and you had every commercial incentive to make Nemo a more palatable figure. You refused. You made him unambiguously an anti-imperial rebel whose judgment on European colonialism was that it required the destruction of European shipping at any cost. This was not a safe artistic choice in 1874, and it is not a safe artistic choice now, and I suspect it is why you never quite achieved the literary respectability in France that Hugo and Zola achieved — because you wrote for boys, which was dismissible, and because the boys you wrote for were being quietly radicalized against the imperial order their schoolteachers were defending, which was not dismissible.
The Mysterious Island itself — the book’s frame, the five American Civil War prisoners who escape in a balloon and crash on an unmapped Pacific island and proceed to rebuild industrial civilization from scratch over the course of four years — is doing something else. It is a Robinsonade, in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe, and it is the most optimistic industrial novel of the nineteenth century. Your five castaways — Cyrus Smith the engineer, Gideon Spilett the journalist, Pencroff the sailor, Herbert the young naturalist, Neb the former slave — work together as a small, egalitarian, functional society. They make iron. They make glass. They make gunpowder. They domesticate animals. They draft a civic constitution. Smith, the engineer, is never portrayed as superior to Neb, the freed slave — this is 1874, written by a Frenchman, about an interracial American company, and there is not a single condescending scene between them. This was an argument. It still is.
What I want to tell you is what you could not have known. The three-act structure of your novel — shipwreck, reconstruction, revelation of Nemo’s identity and the island’s fate — has been imitated, unknowingly, by almost every major lost-island narrative of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Lord of the Flies inverts your optimism. Gilligan’s Island parodies your cast. Lost, the twenty-first-century American television series, plagiarizes your architecture so directly that viewers who had read you knew the show’s plot trajectory before it had finished airing. The form you perfected in 1874 has become one of the defining structures of popular storytelling, and you are given less credit for this than almost any major writer of your century. This is, I think, because your prose is not literary in the nineteenth-century French sense. It is clean. It is reportorial. It is didactic. It explains the metallurgy and the astronomy and the botany at length, because you wanted your boy readers to finish the book knowing something they had not known before. The literary critics of your century and mine have been embarrassed by this didacticism. The boys were not. The boys learned what you were teaching. Many of them grew up to be the engineers who built the twentieth century. That is the credit you have never been given.
Monsieur Verne, you died in Amiens in 1905, partly blind, still writing, having published sixty-two novels and short story collections in your Voyages extraordinaires. Your grandson Jean-Jules Verne spent decades rescuing your reputation from your translators, and the rescue is, even now, incomplete. I am part of the slow correction. Your Mysterious Island is better than the version your first English-speaking readers were given. Captain Nemo is more interesting than the sanitized one your American publishers permitted. The five castaways are more egalitarian than the century that followed you wanted them to be. All of this is worth rediscovering. The American and English readers of my time are, finally, catching up to what you wrote. I am sorry it took so long. I am telling you now in the event the news reaches you by some route I cannot specify.
With respect, and the belated gratitude of an American boy who read the wrong translation first and the right one later —
CD Damitio
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of The Mysterious Island will really enjoy Future World 2323 — my own speculative novel, set three hundred years from now, about a small reconstructed society trying to build something livable out of the wreckage left by the last one. Verne’s optimism, adjusted for the century that followed his. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
