Backwards to Britain

Lore & Background

The novel's plot follows Jacques Lavaret, a young Parisian eager to visit Scotland, and his friend Jonathan Savournon, a composer. Their journey begins with a free steamer trip from Saint-Nazaire to Liverpool, but delays force them to travel 'backwards' to Bordeaux, 500 kilometers south of Paris, before finally embarking. After a 24-day voyage, they arrive in Liverpool, then travel by rail to Edinburgh, exploring landmarks such as the Scott Monument, Arthur's Seat, and Edinburgh Castle. They continue through Glasgow, Loch Lomond, Loch Katrine, and Stirling before heading to London, where they visit St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and see a production of Macbeth. After a week in Britain, they return to France, ready to 'travel backwards through their memories.'

Reader's Guide

Backwards to Britain is significant as an early, unpublished work by Jules Verne that reveals his formative literary influences and his fascination with Scotland. The novel's rejection by publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1862 led Verne to submit Five Weeks in a Balloon instead, launching his successful Voyages Extraordinaires series. The manuscript remained unpublished until 1989, when it was edited by Christian Robin and published in Paris. The novel's central motif of moving backwards—reflected in its title—prefigures themes Verne would explore throughout his later works, where progress involves revisiting and understanding the past. The book also demonstrates Verne's deep debt to Sir Walter Scott and other writers, and his interest in Scotland as a land blending legendary past with modern innovation. Its English translation by Janice Valls-Russell appeared in 1992.

Did You Know?

• The novel was written in 1859–1860 but not published until 1989.
• Verne submitted the manuscript to publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1862, who rejected it.
• The protagonist Jacques represents Verne, and Jonathan represents Verne's friend Aristide Hignard.
• The novel's central motif of 'backwards' travel is reflected in both the French and English titles.

Composition in the Shadow of the Voyages

In 1860, Jules Verne composed a travel narrative set in England and Scotland that would come to be known as Backwards to Britain (Voyage en Angleterre et en Ecosse). Unlike the celebrated Voyages Extraordinaires sequence that defined his public reputation, this text was categorized among his other novels, a grouping that also includes works like The Wreck of the Cynthia and the unfinished A Priest in 1839. Its placement outside Hetzel's flagship series signals that it occupied a different creative lane within Verne's prolific output. The novelist, who was also a poet, playwright, and essayist, was in full creative stride during this decade, producing serials, short stories, and nonfiction geography volumes alongside his adventure fiction. Backwards to Britain thus belongs to a broader, less monolithic portrait of Verne as a writer of multiple genres and registers, one whose work would later be recognized for its influence on science fiction, its engagement with surrealism, and its layered blend of positivist and romantic sensibilities.

A Century of Silence: The 1989 Recovery

For nearly 129 years after its composition, Backwards to Britain existed only as a manuscript. Verne died in 1905, and the text did not reach readers in book form until 1989, when it was finally published for the first time. This long gap places it squarely within the broader phenomenon of Verne's posthumous literary recovery, a process in which scholars and publishing houses gradually brought suppressed, lost, or simply shelved works back into the public domain. The research underpinning much of what is known about these texts is credited to a team including Volker Dehs, Jean-Michel Margot, Zvi Har'El, and William Butcher. Their scholarly labor helped distinguish original Verne material from the heavily revised versions his son Michel had circulated in the early twentieth century. Backwards to Britain, like other posthumous novels such as Paris in the Twentieth Century (published 1994) and the unfinished A Priest in 1839 (published 1992), represents a chapter of Verne's career that the reading public had been denied for generations.

Outside the Canon: The Other Novels Shelf

Backwards to Britain occupies a distinctive position in Verne's bibliography because it was never absorbed into the Voyages Extraordinaires, the serialized adventure sequence that made him a household name. Instead, it sits on what scholars call the other novels shelf, a category that gathers works published during his lifetime, such as The Wreck of the Cynthia (1885, co-written with André Laurie), and a long list of posthumous titles. This distinction matters because the Voyages Extraordinaires followed a strict publishing protocol under Pierre-Jules Hetzel: serialization in the Magasin d'Éducation et de récréation, followed by in-18 book editions, then lavishly bound grand in-8º deluxe copies for the holiday market. Backwards to Britain bypassed all of that machinery. It was a standalone project, a travel narrative through England and Scotland that never received the multi-format treatment of its more famous siblings, and it remained invisible to general readers until the late twentieth century.

Verne Beyond the Adventure: Genre and Ideology

Although Backwards to Britain is a travel narrative rather than a speculative adventure, it inherits the full complexity of Verne's literary identity. The French novelist, active from the 1840s through the 1890s, wrote across an extraordinary range: short stories like Master Zacharius and Dr. Ox's Experiment, plays including The Broken Straws and The Inn in the Ardennes, nonfiction geography volumes, and critical essays on artists and on Edgar Allan Poe. His body of work has been recognized for its profound influence on science fiction and surrealism, for its innovative use of modernist techniques such as self-reflexivity, and for its intricate weaving together of positivist and romantic worldviews. A 1860 travel piece set in Britain would naturally engage with questions of geography, culture, and national character that Verne explored in his nonfiction works like Illustrated Geography of France and its Colonies and Discovery of the Earth. Backwards to Britain thus offers a window into the essayist and geographer behind the adventure writer, a dimension of his craft that the Voyages Extraordinaires only partially reveal.