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PREFACES TO THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, TWO YEARS VACATION, AND SECOND HOMELAND

A. A Few Words to the Readers of The Mysterious Island¹

Who has not read and reread Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson with passion at the different ages of his life? … No one better than M. J. Verne had more right to say to himself that between these two works … there still had to be room for a truly original and new work on the subject of “the individual separated from his fellows” …

Would a contemporary Robinson, a Robinson in touch with the progress of science today need to demand from his author’s imagination ways to overcome the difficulties of his position? Thanks to modern progress, would he not find in himself, would he not bring to him the resources that at every instant Defoe and Wyss are obliged to demand on his behalf from all those strokes of miraculous fortune, which will not completely fool even the kindliest of readers? …

“Well,” M. Verne said to himself, “why should I not show either a man of our time or a group of men, faced with real nature and not with a generous Eden, fighting against realities and triumphing, not through strokes of luck, but thanks to the resources they find in their acquired knowledge, in the practice of science?” …

The heroes of M. Jules Verne’s MI have nothing but their brains. But science multiplies their strength a hundredfold. Their arms and their ten fingers, guided by practical ideas of every sort, will soon provide them with not only necessities but, should they so desire, luxuries.

The aim of M. Jules Verne’s new work, one of the most considerable he has attempted, will therefore be achieved if he succeeds in demonstrating that science is not only useful to man in society, but indispensable even to an isolated man, a man alone, and that it necessarily shortens his trials and sooner or later restores to him the well-being he has lost …

It emerges from M. Verne’s book that the man who despairs neither of God nor himself, that the individual, however separated from human help he is imagined to be, can in any place and in all circumstances overcome fortune and nature provided he is educated, hard-working, and intelligent.

There is no need to add that the progress of the action in which the heroes of MI move contains the thousand practical lessons implied when such a subject is treated by such a writer.

J. Hetzel

B. Preface to Two Years Vacation²

Many Robinsons have already aroused the curiosity of our young readers. Daniel Defoe, in his immortal Robinson Crusoe, presented a man alone; Wyss, in The Swiss Family Robinson, the family; Cooper, in The Crater, society with its many different elements. In MI, I confronted scholars or scientists [“savants”] with the necessities of this situation. People have further imagined the Robinson de douze ans, the Robinson des glaces, the Robinson des jeunes filles,³ etc. In spite of the infinite number of novels composing the series of Robinsons, it seemed to me that, in order to close the series, it remained to show a band of children of eight to thirteen years old, abandoned on an island, fighting for their lives in the midst of passions generated by differences in nationality—in short, a school for Robinsons.

In addition, in The Boy Captain, I undertook to show what a child’s courage and intelligence can achieve when faced with the perils and difficulties of a responsibility above his age. Now I considered that, if the teaching contained in that book was perhaps profitable to all, it needed to be completed.

It is with these twin aims that the new work has been written.

Jules Verne

C. Preface—Why I Wrote Second Homeland⁴

The Robinsons were the books of my childhood, and I still retain an indelible memory of them … It is clear that my taste for this sort of adventure instinctively engaged me on the path I was later to take. This is what led me to write The School for Robinsons, MI, and Two Years Vacation, whose heroes are close relatives of Defoe’s and Wyss’s …

These titles … were Le Robinson de douze ans by Mme Mollar [sic for Mallès] de Beaulieu and Le Robinson des sables du désert by Mme de Mirval. There were also of the same kind Les Aventures de Robert Robert by Louis Desnoyers, published in the Journal des enfants with so many other stories that I will never forget. Then came Robinson Crusoe, that masterpiece which is, however, only one episode in the long and tedious tale by Daniel Defoe. Finally, The Crater by Fenimore Cooper could only increase my passion for the heroes of the unknown islands of the Atlantic and Pacific …

If Mme de Montolieu was not the only person to translate The Swiss Family Robinson, she is also not the only one to have given it a sequel, since I have attempted to do so, under the title Second Homeland.

In addition, Hetzel and Co. published a new translation of this story in 1861 due to the collaboration of P.-J. Stahl and E. Muller, who revised it and gave it a more modern style and contents. Strictly speaking, it is from this edition, revised also from the scientific point of view, that Second Homeland follows on …

And then, by dint of dreaming … a phenomenon occurred: I came to believe that this New Switzerland really existed, that it was an authentic island situated in the northeast of the Indian Ocean …

Jules Verne

NOTES

1. Published only in the MER, vol. 19, first semester 1874, 1–2.

2. Published in the first illustrated edition of Two Years Vacation (1888).

3. Mme Mallès de Beaulieu (?-1825), Le Robinson de douze ans (1818). Ernest Fouinet, Robinson des glaces (1835—Gallica); Hetzel (using a draft by Verne) wrote in MER (March 1865, 2, 375) about Adventures of Captain Hatteras: “[the last part] could have been called the Robinson des glaces”; however, Fouinet’s novel shows few similarities to Verne’s works. Catherine-Thérèse Rieder Woillez, Emma, ou Le Robinson des demoiselles (1834/5).

4. Published only in the first illustrated edition of Second Homeland (1900).