How Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea drew on The Count of Monte Cristo
A documented line of influence: Jules Verne demonstrably engaged Alexandre Dumas’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844
RomanticismThe influenced
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne · 1870
The Age of the NovelRelevance
5/10
On Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’s page
- Captain Nemo is Edmond Dantès moved underwater — Verne built his brooding, vengeful, self-exiled commander on Dumas's Count
- Read Monte Cristo first and Nemo's mystery reads as a sequel of temperament: the wronged man with a secret fortune, withdrawn from a world he means to punish
- The friendship was real — Verne knew Dumas — and the lineage so plain his editor quietly trimmed the acknowledgment from the manuscript
On The Count of Monte Cristo’s page
- Verne met Dumas in 1849 and the two became close friends — and Dumas's vengeful exile Edmond Dantès is the model behind Verne's Captain Nemo
- Nemo's isolation, his hidden fortune, his revenge nursed in self-imposed banishment: Dantès transplanted from a Mediterranean island to the deep sea
- Verne later called another of his heroes "the Monte Cristo of my Extraordinary Voyages" — the debt was conscious