Journey to the Center of the Earth Study Guide

Jules Verne was born in Nantes in 1828. His father was an attorney who expected Verne to follow him into the legal profession, but Verne’s passions lay in science and literature. He had a childhood interest in geography and science, and as he grew up he began to visit literary salons, where he met and befriended fellow writer Alexandre Dumas. In 1863, he published his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. It became a bestseller, and Verne quit his job as a stockbroker to write full-time. He is most famous for his meticulously researched adventure novels, which are now acknowledged as predecessors to modern science fiction. Verne was popular in his own time, and that popularity has only increased since his death; he has become one of the most translated authors in the world. He died at age 77 from complications of diabetes.

The mid-19th century was a period of scientific innovation. As scientists like Charles Darwin challenged commonly accepted beliefs, people increasingly grappled with the notion that the world might not be as simple as they once thought. The scientific impulse to question conventional wisdom drives the plot of Journey to the Center of the Earth, as Lidenbrock advocates for his radical geological theories while Axel doubts them. Lidenbrock’s theories about the center of the earth reference real scientist Humphry Davy, a British chemist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Davy’s theory argues that the geological role attributed to earth’s core is instead enacted by volcanoes. By 1820, however, Davy no longer argued this theory. Journey to the Center of the Earth, like other books in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires series, also reflects 19th-century European imperialism. The main characters’ journey to dangerous and foreign locales in search of glory mirrors colonial explorers’ nationalist desire for glory as they violently established colonies outside of Europe.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is part of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages) series. The stories in the series, which include Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, all detail scientific exploration in unique locations. H.G. Wells was another early science-fiction writer whose works shaped the genre. His 1895 novel The Time Machine popularized time travel fiction, while The War of the Worlds (1898) popularized the narrative of an alien invasion. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) provides a darker perspective on Journey to the Center of the Earth’s themes of scientific inquiry. Verne’s interest in travel and adventure also echoes a literary tradition of travel stories and diaries, which Jonathan Swift satirized in his 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels.