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Jules Verne's essays and the making of Twenty Thousand Leagues

For readers who first met Captain Nemo through a battered Penguin paperback at a suburban Dymocks, the experience feels like diving without preparation. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is often treated as a Victorian adventure story, full of submarine phosphorescence and harpoon duels. Yet Jules Verne brought to the novel decades of accumulated research, lecture notes and short factual pieces, the kind of writing that today sits between journalism, popular science and the reflective essay. Knowing where the fiction meets the research is one of the quiet pleasures of reading Verne carefully.

In Australia, where bookshops like Readings in Melbourne and the independents along Sydney's Glebe Point Road keep nineteenth-century French literature in print, Verne still circulates as both childhood memory and serious writer. The essays that shaped him are a different kind of artefact: they explain the ocean currents, the chemistry of seawater and the politics of submarine warfare that Nemo carries on board. They let modern readers see the laboratory underneath the legend.

This exploration follows Verne's essayistic habits, the way they feed Twenty Thousand Leagues, and why that dialogue between fact and imagination still matters for Australian readers, students, and anyone curious about the deep.

The essayistic mind beneath the adventure

Jules Verne wrote like a man who kept two desks running. At one desk sat the novelist drafting chapters of the Voyages Extraordinaires series. At the other sat the essayist, producing pieces for magazines such as the Musée des Familles, the Journal des Débats and various illustrated reviews of the 1860s and 1870s. These short essays are dense, witty and quietly polemical, discussing the new technologies of steam, telegraphy and undersea travel with the same imagination Verne later gave to Captain Nemo.

When the reader enters Twenty Thousand Leagues, the texture of these essays is unmistakable. The opening chapters lay out the biology of the Gulf Stream, the salinity of the Atlantic and the behaviour of whales with the calm authority of a textbook. Professor Aronnax often sounds less like a fictional character than like the kind of essayist Verne himself might have been, patient, observational, occasionally dry. The book is an extended argument that knowledge is itself an adventure, and it shows how a novelist's essays can quietly inhabit a narrative.

Oceanography as a doorway to scientific wonder

Verne was fascinated by the new science of oceanography. Before the 1850s, the deep sea had been a matter of speculation, with sailors' stories filling the gap left by instruments. The laying of transatlantic telegraph cables changed that. Engineers dragged tools across the seabed, recovered samples, and began to describe a living world at depths once thought lifeless. Verne read these reports carefully and distilled them into essays that appeared in French popular magazines.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is, in many ways, a popular oceanography textbook disguised as a novel. The descriptions of the Sargasso Sea, the submarine forests of the Atlantic and the luminous creatures drifting past the porthole of the Nautilus are paraphrases of contemporary scientific findings, written with the clarity of a good essayist. For Australian readers interested in marine science, the novel offers an unexpected historical window onto a discipline that today thrives at institutions such as the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville.

The submarine as a vessel of philosophical reflection

Beyond science, Verne's essays reveal a writer preoccupied with the political and ethical implications of new technologies. The submarine in 1869, when he began drafting what became Twenty Thousand Leagues, was no longer purely hypothetical. The CSS Hunley had already sunk a Union warship during the American Civil War, and several European powers were developing their own designs. Verne understood that any serious novel about life under the sea would have to engage with the question of undersea warfare.

Captain Nemo is, in effect, Verne's essay on the conscience of the inventor. The Nautilus carries the latest technology, but it is also a refuge from a world Nemo despises. His famous monologue on the ocean as a great commons untouched by human tyranny reads like the climax of a long essayistic argument. For Australian readers, the resonance is sometimes uncomfortable. A country whose own defence industries have long grappled with the strategic use of submarine technology, from the Oberon-class boats of the Cold War era to the future AUKUS fleet, reads Nemo's speeches with a particular sharpness.

Reading Verne in Australian English

The English translation a reader in Brisbane or Hobart picks up carries layers of decision. Many Australian readers first met Verne through nineteenth-century British editions, which often smoothed over the French original. Modern translators such as William Butcher and Frederick Paul Walter have worked hard to recover the playful precision of Verne's prose, including the essayistic cadence that earlier versions flattened.

In Australian English, with its affection for understatement and dry humour, Verne's ironic narrator often feels at home. A line that would sound pompous in another register lands with deadpan wit when read aloud in the right voice. Book clubs from Fremantle to Fitzroy have discovered that the novel rewards being read aloud, partly because the dialogue between Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land has the rhythm of a small, slightly grumpy household debating a strange new flatmate. Australia's modest but loyal market for translated nineteenth-century literature, championed by publishers like Text Publishing and Allen & Unwin, keeps essayistic writers like Verne in active conversation with contemporary readers.

Gothic currents beneath the bright surface

The shadow side of Verne's imagination has long been undervalued. The underwater scenes in Twenty Thousand Leagues are not all luminous kelp forests and playful dolphins. They include shipwrecks, drowned sailors, and a chapter set in a coral tomb that anticipates the claustrophobic imagery of later gothic writing. The novel's essayistic precision only sharpens the horror: because Verne has trained the reader to trust his measurements, the moments where the sea becomes menacing feel overwhelmingly real.

This darker vein belongs to a broader nineteenth-century French tradition, one that combined scientific curiosity with a taste for melancholy, ruin and the irrational. Readers interested in tracing that thread can explore French gothic novels, where the same fascination with knowledge, dread and the limits of reason runs through writers from Charles Baudelaire to Gaston Leroux. For Australian readers used to the bright wash of Bondi Beach or the turquoise shallows of the Great Barrier Reef, the gothic depths of Verne's novel offer a useful counterweight. The ocean in his pages is the working sea that fishing communities along the Western Australian coast or the sailors of the Tasmanian ports would have known well.

Verne in the Australian classroom and beyond

Teachers across Australia have used Twenty Thousand Leagues as a gateway text for years. The novel sits comfortably in units on speculative fiction, the Victorian period, and science communication. What is often missed is how rich the surrounding essays are. Verne's short pieces on diving bells, polar expeditions, and the future of flight provide excellent companion reading. They let students see the connective tissue between a novelist's imagination and the wider public conversation of his time.

Australian school libraries, from the reading rooms of Melbourne Grammar to smaller collections in regional secondary schools, generally stock the novel in at least one translation. Many now subscribe to digital libraries that provide access to public-domain editions. For students preparing oral presentations or extended essays, the underlying magazine articles Verne drew on are an underused goldmine, full of quotable lines and clear explanations of complex ideas. The same approach works well in adult reading groups: a session that pairs chapters of the novel with Verne's short essays tends to generate richer discussion than one that treats the book as a simple adventure story.

Choosing a translation and a reading approach

A handful of practical pointers can help Australian readers get the most out of Verne, especially when reading alongside his essayistic magazine pieces. The book rewards preparation, but it does not demand a scholar's library. A curious reader, a borrowed translation and a notebook are usually enough to begin.

Different editions suit different moods. A literal translation will please readers who want the science intact. A looser nineteenth-century version moves quickly and reads well aloud. Either way, the experience improves when the book is read in conversation with Verne's shorter writings, including the magazine articles that fed directly into his depiction of the deep.

Dive into the essays, the magazine pieces and the novel itself through the BnF Collection eBooks library, where the public-domain texts are gathered in clean, readable editions and ready for Australian readers to explore. The deeper you read, the more the waters open up.