The first English translation of The Mysterious Island was credited to W. H. G. Kingston. It was made by his wife, Agnes Kinloch Kingston.
She had studied on the continent and had the languages. He was a popular author of boys’ adventure stories who ran into money trouble in the 1870s.
So she did the work and his name went on it.
It was then the standard English text for more than a century, and it made three kinds of change.
It renamed the hero. Verne’s engineer is called Cyrus Smith. The translation calls him Cyrus Harding, on the grounds that Smith was common and would associate him with the lower classes.
It abridged or dropped a great deal of the technical writing, which in a novel that is three-quarters engineering is most of the point.
And it cut Nemo’s politics.
The dying captain’s anti-imperialist speech was removed so as not to offend English readers. In a novel whose central figure is an Indian prince who spent his life fighting the British Empire, published in Britain, that is not a translation decision. That is an edit.
The prince in question, and what the screen did to him afterward, is the whole subject of my Captain Nemo page.
Fiction by René Rehn
What it is
serialized 1874 to 1875 · L’Île mystérieuse · the twelfth Voyage Extraordinaire
Richmond, Virginia, during the Confederate siege. Five Union prisoners escape by hijacking a balloon.
A storm carries them across the world and drops them on an uncharted volcanic island in the South Pacific, which they name Lincoln Island.
They are a railroad engineer, a journalist, a sailor, a boy, and Neb, who is Cyrus Smith’s former servant. Verne states repeatedly that Neb is not a slave but a freed man. He also has Neb go on calling Smith master for the length of the book, which is the sort of thing worth knowing before you meet it.
Then they build a civilization. Pottery, iron, glass, nitroglycerin, a telegraph, a boat. Three quarters of the novel is competent men solving problems, and it is more gripping than that makes it sound.
And things keep happening that they cannot explain. Smith survives a fall from the balloon. Their dog is saved from a dugong by something in the water. A box of tools and guns appears. A fire beacon guides them home through a storm.
Nemo turns up in the last fifty pages and accounts for all of it.
Verne is meticulous about chemistry and careless about his own books
Two facts side by side, and together they tell you what kind of writer he was.
The explosives are right. The castaways are cut off from the world in early 1865, before dynamite existed, when nitrocellulose was available and extremely dangerous to make. Verne knew that and wrote it correctly.
The chronology is impossible.
Twenty Thousand Leagues begins in 1866. This novel opens during the siege of Richmond, which ended in March 1865, and it is supposed to take place sixteen years after the events of that book.
So the sequel starts a year before the novel it is a sequel to, and then claims to be set sixteen years later.
It contradicts the other book it ties in to as well. In In Search of the Castaways, Ayrton is marooned on the Australian coast in April 1862 and again on Tabor Island in March 1865. This novel cannot accommodate both.
Verne welded three novels into one continuity and did not check the dates. There is no reading order that fixes it, and readers have been arguing about it for a hundred and fifty years.
The book The Mysterious Island cannot be reconciled with has a page of its own in my Twenty Thousand Leagues guide.
Three English titles, none of them the title
The British edition of September 1875, from Sampson Low, Marston Low and Searle, came out in three volumes, and each volume got its own name.
Dropped from the Clouds. The Abandoned. The Secret of the Island.
The American edition followed in November using the same translation.
So a reader encountering any one of those three volumes secondhand has a third of a Verne novel under a title Verne never wrote.
Which edition, and this has been fixed
For a long time the honest answer here was that there was no good one. That answer is out of date, and it was out of date by a quarter of a century.
Two complete scholarly translations appeared in the same year, 2001.
Sidney Kravitz, for Wesleyan University Press, illustrated. This is the one to buy. Wesleyan has done the serious Verne restoration work in English, and Kravitz is unabridged.
Jordan Stump, for the Modern Library. Also complete, more widely available, and the better choice if you want a normal paperback rather than a scholarly edition.
There is a third name worth knowing for a different reason. Stephen W. White’s translation of 1876 was closer to Verne than Kingston’s and restored Nemo’s death scene, which tells you that the death scene had been cut. It is still condensed, so it is a historical curiosity rather than a recommendation.
What to avoid is easy. The Kingston text is out of copyright, so it is what the free files and the cheapest paperbacks carry. Check the engineer’s name. If he is Cyrus Harding, you are holding the version with the politics taken out.
Two things about its ancestry
An early draft was called Shipwrecked Family: Marooned with Uncle Robinson, which tells you exactly what Verne thought he was writing.
Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, with better engineering.
One of the two books The Mysterious Island is answering is covered on my Swiss Family Robinson page.
And the original Hetzel edition carries illustrations by Jules Férat, which are worth seeking out in a reprint.
Where to go next
Where Verne sits as a whole, and why so much of him arrived in English damaged, is on my Jules Verne books guide. The character whose second origin this novel invents has his own page in my Captain Nemo guide. Verne’s other survival novel, with a worse textual problem still, is covered on my Lighthouse at the End of the World page, and the other novel this one is a sequel to, where Ayrton comes from, is on my In Search of the Castaways page. The rest of the tradition lives on the French classics hub.
