‘“The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus”: A Nineteenth-Century Problematic and Its Representations’

I The first edition in English of Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864), published in 1871 as A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, like the original features an epic combat between two enormous marine reptiles but identifies one of them as “the world-renowned ichthyosaurus”. One of many alterations this British rendition imposes upon the second, expanded edition of Verne’s novel (1867), the spurious “world-renowned” was added not...