The Kip Brothers. Jules Verne

AND PHOTOS

      During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, as photography became increasingly popular, many publishers (including Hetzel) began to use photographs, photolithography, and two-toned lithography to illustrate their books. These new technologies gradually replaced the older woodcut-engraving methods because they were cheaper, faster, and less labor intensive.

      To see a kind of historical “snapshot” of this technological (r)evolution in the publishing industry, one need only to examine some of Verne’s later Voyages extraordinaires from 1890 to 1905 to see a fascinating mixture of old-fashioned woodcuts, halftone illustrations (some in color), and photographs.

      The illustrated edition of Verne’s The Kip Brothers constitutes an excellent example of this trend. One discovers therein four different types of illustrations:

      1. Forty drawings by George Roux, engraved by Froment.¹⁹ Twelve of the drawings, which appeared as black-and-white illustrations in the Magasin, were reproduced in color in the in-octavo edition (described on the title page as “grandes chromotypographies,” full-page chromotypographs—a kind of early color print). The frontispiece and the title page illustration are also new in the in-octavo edition.

      2. A dozen illustrations “borrowed” from other books. Seven, for example, were recycled from the nonfiction works of Jules Verne himself—his three-volume Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs (History of Great Voyages and Great Navigators)—and one was taken from a book called Voyage of the Griffin (identified as “adapted by P.-J. Stahl” [a pseudonym of Hetzel] and, one assumes, published by him). But three other illustrations in The Kip Brothers were borrowed (should we say copied or stolen?) from a British four-volume work of geography,²⁰ and one—a mosaic of three woodcuts depicting Dunedin, New Zealand, along with a local volcano crater and a geyser—is not credited (although it too probably came from the same British work).

      3. Six reprinted photographs.²¹ The source for two of these photographs was a German book published in 1902, the same year that The Kip Brothers itself was published. It is somewhat ironic that though the text of The Kip Brothers dated from years before, such was certainly not the case for some of the photographs that Hetzel chose to illustrate the book—they were often last-minute selections.

      4. Two maps²² of the areas visited in the novel—New Zealand and the Bismarck Archipelago—engraved by a certain “E. Morieu.” The first one was recycled from Verne’s Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century (volume 2 of his History of Great Voyages and Great Navigators).

      SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

      As a general rule, all of Verne’s novels are derived from two types of sources: one for the science (broadly defined to include not only physics, chemistry, and biology but also geography) and one for the fiction.

      Verne’s sources included those many nineteenth-century dictionaries and atlases of which he made constant use, such as Privat-Deschanel and Focillon’s Dictionnaire général des sciences théoriques et appliquées²³ and Reclus’s Nouvelle géographie universelle.²⁴ He also consulted and quoted from a variety of reference books written in layman’s language with the goal of teaching the natural sciences to the general reader—such as Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la science²⁵ or Flammarion’s L’Astronomie populaire.²⁶ Verne was also very well read in the published travelogues and histories of exploration of his time, such as Arago’s Voyage autour du monde,²⁷ Agassiz’s Voyage au Brésil,²⁸ Chaffanjon’s L’Orénoque et le Caura,²⁹ and Charton’s Voyageurs anciens et modernes,³⁰ along with similar accounts published in magazines like Le Journal des voyages and Le Tour du monde. Finally, Verne was also a voracious reader of scientific journals and the bulletins of scientific societies such as Malte-Brun’s Nouvelles annales des voyages, de la géographie, de l’histoire et de l’archéologie and the Comptes-rendus des scéances de l’Académie des Sciences, from which he often gleaned ideas for his novels.³¹

      So what were Verne’s principal scientific sources for The Kip Brothers? Clearly, an important one was the author’s own multivolume history of world exploration, Histoire des grands voyages et des grands voyageurs (History of Great Voyages and Great Navigators, 1878–1880), from which, as mentioned above, a number of illustrations were reprinted. And three other works that helped to provide much of the geographical and historical documentation for Verne’s descriptions of the South Seas islands in this novel were Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde,³² Dumont d’Urville’s Voyage au pôle sud et dans l’Océanie,³³ and Duperrey’s Voyage autour du monde.³⁴

      As for the discussions of retinas and ophthalmology presented in the surprise ending of the novel, Verne scholar Marcel Moré and family biographer Jean Jules-Verne have both indicated that Verne probably consulted the L’Encyclopédie française d’ophtalmologie by Lagrange and Valude³⁵ for details about such “optograms” (retina-photos). But these claims seem rather dubious since this nine-volume encyclopedia appears to have been first published in 1903, one year after Verne’s The Kip Brothers came into print and five years after the story was written. It seems more likely that Verne read about the various retina experiments done in the 1870s and 1880s by scientists such as Félix Giraud-Teulon (1816–87) in Paris, Franz Boll (1849–79) in Rome, or Willy Kühne (1837–1900) in Heidelberg. Accounts of these experiments were published in journals that Verne perused on a regular basis such as the Comptes-rendus of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, the Musée des familles, or the Revue des Deux Mondes.

      There exist at least two other possible (nonscientific) sources for this idea of optograms used by Verne. One, also mentioned by both Moré and Jean Jules-Verne, is a short story called “Claire Lenoir,” first published in 1867 by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (and later reprinted in 1887), a copy of which was found in Verne’s personal library. Interestingly, in Villiers’s narrative, the fictional protagonist supposedly reads an article describing optograms published in the minutes of the Académie des Sciences de Paris.³⁶ The other possible source is Jules Claretie’s novel L’Accusateur, published in 1897. This detective novel features a sleuth named Bernardet who, having read Boll’s and Kühne’s articles, photographs the eyes of a victim whose murder he is investigating. He finds inscribed on the dead man’s retinas the image of one of the victim’s friends and promptly has him arrested. It is eventually discovered, however, that the incriminating image is a small portrait that the murdered man was staring at when he was killed. It is interesting to note that Jules Claretie, elected to the Académie Française in 1888, was also responsible for one of the first books of literary criticism on Verne (Jules Verne, Paris: A. Quantin, 1883), so it is quite likely that Verne was familiar with his work.³⁷

      From beginning to end, The Kip Brothers stands as one of Verne’s more explicitly visual novels. References to perception and sight abound in the text: from the opening Zolaesque scene in the Three Magpies tavern where the villainous characters Vin Mod and Flig Balt are on the lookout for new recruits; to the trial where the fate of the Kip brothers hangs on the testimony of various eyewitnesses; to the efforts of Mr. Hawkins who “sees” the goodness in the heroes despite the visible evidence against them; to the “eye-opening” conclusion where only an enlarged photo of the victim’s retinas ultimately proves they were framed.³⁸ Again and again, the twists and turns of the plot hinge on what can be seen, on what is hidden from view, and on what looks to be but is not. Given this thematic focus, it is significant that, during this time of his life, Verne was suffering from vision problems—severe cataracts, especially in his right eye. He described his condition in a 1901 letter to his old friend Nadar, saying, “I’m almost blind, and will remain so until my cataract operation. I no longer recognize anyone in the street, barely see what I write, and live in a fog.”³⁹ Verne also frequently refers to his condition in his correspondence with his publisher Hetzel fils. In 1902, for example, during their discussions about adding a subtitle to each of the two volumes of The Kip Brothers (the second volume would be subtitled, interestingly, “The Eyes of the Dead”), Verne writes, “I still have not undergone that cataract operation, and I won’t decide on it until I can no longer read. … But up until now, my left eye has been