Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I find this rather an odd comment on several levels and it ultimately comes across as false modesty. For one thing, I don’t think a taste for 19th century novels is necessarily something that has to be worked at, and it seems you didn’t, although you claim it’s an acquired taste. Lots of bookish kids sail into them and never look back, although certainly people can fall into them later, also. The Victorians are both plotty and character-driven, so what’s not to like? As you note, they were popular in their time, so why not now? The “too popular to be worthy of reading” honestly gets an eyeroll from me; it’s a paradox that makes no deeper sense and bespeaks snobbery, as if attesting to a superior discernment.
To the extent that people find the 19th century inaccessible now, I suspect it has to do with unfamiliar worlds and language and, frankly, length - although even there, people who plow through current doorstop fantasies should have no issue.  Ultimately, people like what they like, but the flip side of that is that it’s possible to make an objective assessment also. Verne is no Zola. However, that’s meant neither to criticize nor to belittle his achievements or his towering contributions to the genre.
Going back to your grade school comment, I’ve always said I might have loved Verne if I’d read him as an 10-year old boy. And here’s the issue, for someone who came to the Victorians early when you read at least in part to discover yourself, a Verne had nothing to offer. Where were the women? There was nothing there for this former 10-year old girl. And my inner 10-year old still found it quite tedious decades later. |
That's ok, I think your post comes across as snobbish. Different strokes to different folks. Fortunately, I'm talking about Jules Verne who tends to write rather short books that fit into the serialization method of publishing and were quite popular for the time. He belonged to the genre of adventure writers in a time period where large parts of the world were unexplored by Europeans. The whole genre of adventure writers was quite popular and really has remained popular up to today.
To a certain extent, I can see an echo of Jules Verne's writing style in some of the 20's pulps. I don't remember the same thing from the versions I read as a child. It could simply be that the children's version were edited and really re-written to match the audience while the version I'm reading makes more of an effort to stay true to the original. Or it could simply be that if I read them today, I would notice it more than I did back then.