Jules Verne
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 30 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
A professor decodes a runic note, drags his reluctant nephew to an Icelandic volcano, and climbs down it. Underneath is an ocean with a sky, forests of giant mushrooms, and animals that stopped existing a long time ago. They are fired back out of a different volcano on a raft.
Why Gustave Doré
Verne's novels were illustrated from the start. Hetzel published them as the 'Voyages Extraordinaires' with hundreds of wood engravings by Édouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville and Léon Benett — and those engravings are so bound to the books that most readers cannot picture the Nautilus without them.
Doré was in that same Paris, in those same decades, working the same medium with the same engravers' studios, and he was better at it than any of them. He never took a Verne commission. So this is not a translation into a foreign idiom — it is the original idiom, with the period's strongest hand doing the drawing.
What to look for
Descent, which is Doré's home ground — his Dante is four hundred plates of figures going down through vaulted dark toward light from an unseen source. The subterranean sea is the plate the whole cycle is built around.
