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TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS  

1880's

BY: JULES VERNE 

TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS 

By: Jules Verne.

Red hardcover with gild lettering on spine. Publisher: Waverly Publisher Co.

Circa 1880's. Minimal wear to the the extremities of the covers. Tight binding.

Some yellowing of the pages. Very nice 19th century edition of this classic adventure.

Condition: Good to Very Good.

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Jules Gabriel Verne (February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) 

was a French author who pioneered the science-fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Journey to the Center of the Earth (written in 1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (written in 1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (written in 1873). Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before navigable aircraft and practical submarines were invented, and before any means of space travel had been devised. He is the third most translated author of all time, behind Disney Productions and Agatha Christie, according to Index Translationum. Some of his work has been made into films. Verne, along with H. G. Wells, is often referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".

The title: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas refers to the distance travelled under the sea, not to the depth, as 20,000 leagues is 20 times the radius of the earth. The greatest depth mentioned in the book is 4 leagues. A literal translation of the French title would end in the plural "Seas", thus implying the "Seven Seas" through which the characters of the novel travel. However, the regular English translation of the title uses "Sea", meaning the ocean in general, as in "going to sea".

The word leagues in the English title is a literal translation of lieues, but refers to French leagues. The French league had been a variable unit but in the metric era was standardized as 4 km. Thus the title distance is equivalent to 80,000 km (twice around the Earth) or roundly 50,000 statute miles. In common English usage 1 league equals 3 miles
The novel was first translated into English in 1873 by Reverend Lewis Page Mercier (aka "Mercier Lewis"). Mercier, under orders from British censors and performed or dictated by his editors at Sampson Low, cut nearly a quarter of Verne's original text and made hundreds of translation errors, sometimes dramatically changing the meaning of Verne's original intent. Some of these bowdlerizations may have been done for political reasons, such as Nemo's identity and the nationality of the two warships he sinks, or the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of his cabin which originally included Daniel O'Connell.Nonetheless it became the "standard" English translation for more than a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it - and its mistakes. Many of the "sins" of Mercier were finally corrected in a from-the-ground-up re-examination of the sources and an entirely new translation by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter between 1989 and 1991, published in 1993 by Naval Institute Press in a "completely restored and annotated edition."