‘Edom’: the disturbingly modern short story published after Jules Verne's death in 1905. Its brilliant rehearsal of the whole Voyages extraordinaires in fifty dense pages has generated considerable controversy. But the short story published as ‘L'Eternal Adam’ still remains largely unknown. There has been little examination to date of, for example, the links with Vingt mille lieues, the real-world references, the ethnic allusions, the biblical borrowings, or the linguistic and evolutionary ideas. Nor has external evidence as to the tale's authorship been produced to date. The present essay will accordingly survey the background to ‘Edom’ before attempting to decipher the tale itself.

Until recently Verne studies were dominated by research in French, often carried out by non-literary specialists. Many imaginative and wideranging studies have thus been produced, revealing a multi-layered complexity and depth in what was once considered a straightforward corpus. Verne is now amongst the French writers generating the most critical material, in marked contrast with the situation only twenty years ago. What is surprising, nevertheless, is that the most basic extrinsic research has not been carried out. Whereas writers of lesser significance, however measured, have been minutely edited and had their least source investigated, even Verne's pivotal works still suffer from a lack of detailed exploration. Thus the correspondence has not been systematically collected; not one of the manuscripts of the pre-1905 works has been thoroughly studied to date, let alone published; nor is there available a systematic indication of published variants for any of the novels.

We should not be too surprised, therefore, at the lack of textual information on ‘Edom’. This story of about 13,200 words was first published in La Revue de Paris of 1 October 1910 (no. 19), under the title ‘L'Eternel Adam’ and with the subtitle ‘Dans quelque vingt mille ans…’ It was republished by Hetzel fils in the volume Hier et demain (1910) with the subtitle now an epigraph and with seven illustrations by Léon Benett. The proofs, edited by Louis Ganderax, normalien, are in the Bibliothèque nationale (B. N. n.a.fr. 17000, fo. 1–61), with the amended proofs generally corresponding to the published versions. The manuscript of ‘Edom’ was seen by scholars before 1981, but no information about it has been published to date.