Undermining Body and Mind? The Impact of
the Underground in Nineteenth-Century
Children’s Literature
Kiera Vaclavik
Abstract: Considering not only Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre
but also lesser known works by George MacDonald, Hector Malot, R.
M. Ballantyne and Mme de Gériolles, this chapter analyses how the
age-old narrative device of a descent into the underworld is employed
to popularize science for a young audience. These texts not only reflect contemporary thinking on the geological composition of the
earth’s crust and core but also play, via their narrative forms, with
notions of geological time and the relative age and development of the
human species.
In classical literature, the journey down into the underground, known
to the Ancient Greeks as katabasis, was also a journey back in time.
Virgil’s Aeneas, for example, “journeys amidst the sorrows of the
past” in his encounters with Palinurus, Deiphobus and Dido.
1 Moreover, the episode can itself be seen as an intertextual return, harking
back to the katabasis of book XI of the Odyssey where Homer’s hero
also revisits figures from his past.
2 Journeys like those of Odysseus
___________________________
1 R. D. Williams, “The Sixth Book of the Aeneid”, in Oxford Readings in Vergil’s
Aeneid, ed. by S. J. Harrison (Oxford/New York: OUP, 1990), pp. 191-207 (p. 194).
2 At the beginning of book XI of the Odyssey, widely referred to as the nekyia, it
seems that it is the dead who rise up to Odysseus rather than the hero who journeys
down to the underworld. Yet the subterranean situation of the land of the dead is
firmly established in the course of the narrative and, even though it is impossible to
establish the precise point of departure, it is nevertheless clear from both the Greek
the Underground in Nineteenth-Century
Children’s Literature
Kiera Vaclavik
Abstract: Considering not only Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre
but also lesser known works by George MacDonald, Hector Malot, R.
M. Ballantyne and Mme de Gériolles, this chapter analyses how the
age-old narrative device of a descent into the underworld is employed
to popularize science for a young audience. These texts not only reflect contemporary thinking on the geological composition of the
earth’s crust and core but also play, via their narrative forms, with
notions of geological time and the relative age and development of the
human species.
In classical literature, the journey down into the underground, known
to the Ancient Greeks as katabasis, was also a journey back in time.
Virgil’s Aeneas, for example, “journeys amidst the sorrows of the
past” in his encounters with Palinurus, Deiphobus and Dido.
1 Moreover, the episode can itself be seen as an intertextual return, harking
back to the katabasis of book XI of the Odyssey where Homer’s hero
also revisits figures from his past.
2 Journeys like those of Odysseus
___________________________
1 R. D. Williams, “The Sixth Book of the Aeneid”, in Oxford Readings in Vergil’s
Aeneid, ed. by S. J. Harrison (Oxford/New York: OUP, 1990), pp. 191-207 (p. 194).
2 At the beginning of book XI of the Odyssey, widely referred to as the nekyia, it
seems that it is the dead who rise up to Odysseus rather than the hero who journeys
down to the underworld. Yet the subterranean situation of the land of the dead is
firmly established in the course of the narrative and, even though it is impossible to
establish the precise point of departure, it is nevertheless clear from both the Greek