is needed (159), together with lessons in geography, mineralogy, zoology, and botany, with a huge variety of plants and trees. The children learn to recognize the plants used to make common household items, again like Rousseau. However Rousseau was highly influenced by Robinson Crusoe, so Verne may simply be echoing Defoe directly.
8. Christian Robin, “Extraits,” in Christian Robin, ed., Un Editeur et son siècle, 343–59 (343). Complementary information appears in Hetzel’s letter of 21 July 1870.
9. Claudine Sainlot, Christian Robin, and Jacques Davy, “Notes,” in L’Oncle Robinson, 235–45 (238). Hetzel’s following reference to “Chester” is presumably encouraging Verne to imitate his own Histoire de la famille Chester et de deux petits orphelins (1873)—an irony when we consider the posterity of the two authors.
10. By an interesting parallel indicating the source of the name, “Smith” without further identification in Twenty Thousand Leagues (II, 7) means Rear Admiral William Henry Smyth, author of The Mediterranean (1854).
11. “1 [une] histoire de la domination anglaise aux Indes”: while this may be a title, the book can not be identified, unless it is simply Valbezen’s.
12. In the following list, each locality has four forms: the initial French name, the English name used by Verne in MS2, the final French name, and the name used in this translation:
• creek Yowa [sic], Red creek, Creek-Rouge, Red Creek
• Lac Ontario, Heart lake, lac Grant, Lake Grant
• Bois Caroline du Nord, Bois d’Arkansas, bois du Jacamar, Jacamar Woods
• Forêts du far West, — , Forêts du Far-West, Forests of the Far West
• Baie de l’union, Union Bay, Baie de l’Union, Union Bay
• Baie Washington, Washington Bay, Baie Washington, Washington Bay
• Mount Franklin, Franklin-Mount, Mont Franklin, Mount Franklin
• — , Serpentine Peninsula, presqu’île Serpentine, Serpentine Peninsula
• Promontoire Massachusetts, — , promontoire du Reptile (Reptile-end), Reptile End
• cap New Jersey (previously Halifax), — , cap Mandibule (Mandible-cape), Mandible Cape
• Cap Vineyard, — , Cap de la Griffe (Claw-cape)/le cap Griffe, Cape Claw
• Rivière Delaware, Mercy River, la Mercy, the Mercy
• Ilot Grant, — , îlot du Salut (Safety-island), Safety Island
• — , East Land, Plateau de grande-vue, Grand View Plateau
• Marais Kentucky, Ducks Fenn, Marais des tadornes, Tadorn Marsh
• Rock House, Rock-funnel, Les cheminées, the Chimneys.
Massachusetts, New Jersey, and “Vineyard” are presumably included in the initial list as the homes of Smith, Harbert, and Pencroff. The following manuscript names are absent from the book: canal du Maine, dunes d’Albany, Cap Gédéon, and baie Vermont.
13. From the manuscripts and correspondence of Twenty Thousand Leagues, we know that Nemo’s hatred was originally that of a Polish count against the Russians who had destroyed his country and raped his daughters, but Hetzel censored this for political reasons.
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
