Voyage to the Center of the Earth de Jacques Collin De Plancy

Voyage to the Center of the Earth

Jacques Collin De Plancy

Brian Stableford

Forty-three years before Jules Verne, and ninety-three years before Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jacques Collin de Plancy, remembered today for his Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology, penned Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1821), which is both an adventure story and a utopian fantasy in the Voltairean tradition. An expedition is mounted to discover the hypothetical opening at the Earth's pole, the existence of which was popularized by Tyssot de Patot's Pierre de Mesange (1720), Ludwig Holberg's Nils Klim (1741) and Casanova's Icosameron (1788). There, they discover an alien world located inside the Earth populated by humans who only differ from us by size. Although there are satirical elements, this world within is treated as another planet, with its own geography and history, a mildly exotic fauna and flora, and nations with different politics and religions. Voyage to the Center of the Earth differs from its predecessors not merely because of its careful depiction of a society that has preserved happiness by rejecting progress, but because its heroes find it is too tedious to remain there."

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J. Collin de Plancy was born in France in 1793. He became a "freethinker" influenced by Voltaire. He was a printer-librarian in Plancy and Paris. In 1839, in Holland, he founded The Hague Society of Fine Arts. It was during his stay in the Netherlands that he was reconciled with God and the Catholic faith. In 1841, he made his conversion public, declaring that he condemned and trampled underfoot all that he had written against faith and morals. All his works would henceforth display ecclesiastical approval. His most important work is considered the Dictionnaire Infernal, in which he gathered all the knowledge of the time concerning superstitions and demonology. It underwent six editions while Plancy was alive. The first edition was published in 1818; the third edition, published in 1844, was re-worked to be in accordance with the Church, and features the approbation of the Archbishop of Paris.