to Germany. Most of the main fictional characters are therefore Anglo-Saxons and Germans, with the two heroes of the novel, the Kip brothers, being Dutch. This particular configuration in his cast of characters is a very unusual one for Verne, for two reasons. First, the majority of the protagonists in Verne’s works tend to be British, American, or French.58 The only French and American characters appearing in The Kip Brothers are secondary and clearly minor: the captain and sailors of the French ship Assomption, who announce the wreck of the Wilhelmina to the passengers and crew of the James Cook, and the unsavory American seamen Bryce recruited in the Three Magpies tavern at the beginning of the novel. Second, Verne depicts the British and Germans in this novel in a very sympathetic light. The Kips’ tireless advocate and friend Mr. Hawkins; the governor of Tasmania, Sir Edward Carrigan; and even the warden of the Port Arthur penitentiary, Captain Skirtle, are shown to be fine and honorable British gentlemen.59 And Mr. and Mrs. Zieger of New Mecklenburg as well as Mr. Hamburg of Kerawara exemplify the best of German warmth and hospitality as they welcome the captain of the James Cook and the Kip brothers into their homes during the ship’s layovers in the Bismarck Archipelago.
These approving portrayals contrast sharply with Verne’s more cynical representation of these same nationalities in several of his other later works. Note, for example, the many diatribes against the British in the pages of such novels as The Mysterious Island (their conquest and domination of India), Hector Servadac (their jingoistic “Gibraltar” mentality), Lit’l Fellow (their terrible treatment of orphans), and especially in his 1895 Propeller Island (the greedy English imperialists of “perfidious Albion” are “cursed down to their children and grand-children, until its detestable name is wiped from the memory of the world!” And Verne’s depiction of Germans follows a very similar trajectory. During the decade immediately after the Franco-Prussian war, Verne’s first truly evil scientist emerged in the person of the racist megalomaniac Herr Schultze of The Begum’s Millions. Other anti-Germanisms punctuated many of Verne’s subsequent novels, such as A Drama in Livonia (in which Germans brutally oppress the Slavs) or in Claudius Bombarnac (in which the contentious and crude Baron Weissschnitzerdörfer personifies most Germanophobic stereotypes of the fin de siècle). As Verne scholar Jean Chesneaux has explained, however, it is important to understand that Verne’s
hostility towards England hardly ever stems from simple national chauvinism; it is politically motivated. England is castigated as the oppressor of the Scottish, Irish, and French Canadian nationalists, or for being a great colonial Power. Verne’s Anglophobia is directed towards a country regarded as typical of certain negative political tendencies, much more than towards an ‘enemy’ nation. …
In the same way, Verne’s Germanophobia, with the exception of one or two casual and ridiculous characters, is invariably linked with political criticism. … Even in this case [The Begum’s Millions], symptomatic of the extreme vengeful chauvinism widespread in France in the 1880s, the ‘eternal German’ Schultze is indistinguishable from Schultze the armament industry magnate, the master of a gigantic totalitarian and, so to speak, proto-Hitlerian complex, a scientist who uses his knowledge in the service of destruction.60
Although there exists no iron-clad correlation between an author’s personal politics and those expressed in his fiction, it is nevertheless interesting that Verne’s portrayal of the British and the Germans in The Kip Brothers recalls those of a much younger Verne—a Verne of the 1860s whose earliest works featured the courageous and resourceful British explorer Samuel Fergusson in Five Weeks in a Balloon and the delightfully eccentric German geologist Otto Lidenbrock in Journey to the Center of the Earth.61
But perhaps in The Kip Brothers it is less a question of nationalities and more of nationalism. Consider, for example, Verne’s favorable portrait, late in the novel, of the Fenians, who have “the goal of freeing Ireland from the intolerable domination of Great Britain.” They also play a part in his novel about Ireland published in 1893, Lit’l Fellow, in which Verne describes the British aristocracy in the following terms: “It is nevertheless important to note that the aristocracy, which is rather liberal in England and Scotland, has shown itself to be quite oppressive in Ireland. Instead of offering a helping hand, it jerks on the reins. A catastrophe is to be feared. He who sows hatred will eventually harvest rebellion.”62 Throughout the Voyages extraordinaires, Verne repeatedly expresses his sympathy for oppressed peoples and his support for nationalist movements. Captain Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870) aids the revolutionaries of Crete in their fight against the Ottoman Empire by donating to them riches taken from the sunken galleons of Vigo Bay. The French Alsatians’ hatred of their post-1870 German occupiers is a leitmotif running through The Begum’s Millions (1879). The heroic Greeks are shown battling for their independence from the Turks in Archipelago on Fire (1884). The efforts of Hungarian patriots to regain their country’s freedom from the Austro-Hungarian Empire serves as the political backdrop for Mathias Sandorf (1885). Norwegian separatists occupy center stage in The Lottery Ticket (1886), set during a time when Norway is under Swedish rule. In Family without a Name (1889), the French Canadians struggle to free themselves from their British masters; in the preface to this novel, Verne even suggests that they are setting “an example that the French populations of Alsace and Lorraine must never forget.”63 And in A Drama in Livonia (1904), one of the last novels published before his death and another a novel of “judicial error” similar to The Kip Brothers, Verne focuses on the Slavic peasants and their struggle against the wealthy ruling classes, who are of German extraction. In novel after novel, Verne shows himself to be faithful to the republican ideals of the Revolution of 1848, which he experienced first-hand as a young man in Paris and whose precepts he adopted as his own. A strong believer in social justice, Verne continually embeds in his fiction a sense of brotherhood with the downtrodden peoples of the world who are fighting for their freedom.
But The Kip Brothers stands as one of Verne’s greatest tributes to brotherhood not only because of how the author portrays the rapport between the novel’s two heroes or his solidarity with certain nationalist political movements such as the Fenians. A strong sense of brotherhood also resonates throughout this novel on a more personal level—Verne’s fraternal love for his brother Paul who died in 1897, the year before he began to write The Kip Brothers.
Paul Verne was a year younger than Jules, and the two had always been very close. In an interview with a journalist in 1894, Jules Verne described their relationship, saying,
My brother Paul was and is my dearest friend. Yes, I may say that he is not only my brother but my most intimate friend. And our friendship dates from the first day that I can remember. What excursions we used to take together in leaky boats on the Loire! At the age of fifteen there was not a nook or a corner on the Loire right down to the sea that we had not explored. What dreadful boats they were, and what risks we no doubt ran! Sometimes I was captain, sometimes it was Paul. But Paul was the better of the two. You know that afterwards he entered the Navy.64
Paul enlisted as a midshipman in the French Navy in 1850 and joined the merchant marine in 1854. He soon retired from the sea and became a stockbroker, but he and his brother continued their seafaring excursions. In 1867 they crossed the Atlantic together on the Great Eastern (a voyage that became the basis for Verne’s 1871 novel A Floating City) and visited New York and Niagara Falls. And they often voyaged together aboard Verne’s yacht the Saint Michel III—in 1881 traveling to Copenhagen, for example, a trip that inspired Paul to publish an account of their adventure, “From Rotterdam to Copenhagen,” in the Nantes newspaper L’Union Bretonne that same year. Earlier, in 1872, Paul had published a similar travel chronicle in the same paper called “The Fortieth Ascension of Mont Blanc,” which was later reprinted in Verne’s first short-story collection, Doctor Ox (1874).
On many occasions, Paul Verne helped his brother with the technical aspects of the stories he was writing. For instance, when working on the manuscript of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea in 1868, Jules wrote to his father, saying, “In three or four months, when I have the proofs, I will try to send you and Paul the first volume so that you can clean
