2014 marks the 150th anniversary of French author Jules Verne’s pioneering fantasy classic Journey to the Center of the Earth. The story of a professor and his nephew who follow a guide down into an Icelandic volcano, Journey takes its readers into the Earth and into the ancient past as the adventurers soon find themselves in a dangerous land filled with prehistoric dinosaurs and landscapes brimming with natural hazards.
The first French edition of the book was heavily illustrated with the gorgeous drawings of Édouard Riou. Riou’s work graced six of Verne’s volumes — including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — demonstrating a successful collaboration between writer and artist that extended beyond the visualizing of the author’s words. Scholar Arthur B. Evans explains…
Moreover, the importance of these illustrations as visual aids to the explicit didactic intent of Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires cannot be overemphasized. The large number of purely pedagogical illustrations in Verne’s novels—those having very little to do with the fictional events narrated in the plot—is sometimes astonishing: species of fish enumerated by Conseil in Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers, the phases of the moon in De la Terre à la Lune, the planet Saturn and its moons in Hector Servadac, various types of hot air balloons and dirigibles in Robur-le-Conquérant, etc.
And even the non-pedagogical illustrations—those depicting the fictional plot—were also highly educational to French readers of the mid-late 19th century, especially to those who were less than 100% literate. As Marc Soriano has pointed out:
Let us not forget that [when Verne began to publish] we are in 1862-1865. The drive for literacy in France has been underway since the Guizot Law of 1833, but there is still much to do. Any well-advised editor must aid his readers who have not yet achieved a good reading proficiency….
Here’s a selection of some of Riou’s famous images for Journey…
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