Technology and progress in Jules Verne, or anticipation in Reverse

Abstract

In 1994 a long lost Jules Verne manuscript re-emerged after an absence of no less than one hundred and thirty-one years. Its publication was an immediate cause celebre, both in the world of literary scholarship and among the wider reading public. This novel would, we were told, throw new light on the entire corpus of the Voyages extraordinaires, notwithstanding the fact that Verne's editor Hetzel had summarily rejected the manuscript and that Verne himself had subsequently lost interest in it. Clearly, the discovery of this text so long after the event was serendipitous, for, while there are explicit references to it in Verne's correspondence and elsewhere, its contents had remained a matter of pure speculation among scholars.