Yearning for Verne. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas “Restored” Edition

Abstract

In 2022, the university press Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand, France) published the first scholarly edition of one of the most prominent works by Jules Verne — Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. The publisher, ex-professor at the University of Hong Kong, and author of Jules Verne’s English-language biography (2006), as well as numerous works about the writer, William Butcher, describes this edition as the novel’s “restored revision” (texte restaure). This book is the result of many years of research into restoring Jules Verne’s works in their original form, untouched by extensive editorial revisions. It is commonly known that all works in The Extraordinary Voyages collection underwent various amendments and adjustments by the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and later on, by Jules Verne’s son Louis-Jules. W. Butcher previously published English translations and the original versions of certain Jules Verne’s works, including Five Weeks in a Balloon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Around the World in Eighty Days and others. The pocket size of these editions, however, would not allow to carry out the ambitious editorial project. This review focuses on the core strategies of the Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas’s edition, which W. Butcher refers to as dehetzelisation. The edition also includes a comprehensive scholarly apparatus (an introductory article, rationale, name index, biographical background, detailed chronology of novel writing, annotated bibliography, etc.).

Keywords

• novel
• publication
• manuscript
• editing
• publisher
• reader
• cut
• character
• plot.