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In the United States and England, Jules Verne's novel The Mysterious Island was divided into three volumes due to its length (195,000 words). The three volumes were entitled Dropped from the Clouds, Abandoned, and The Secret of the Island. The purported translator, W. H. G. Kingston, was a famous author of boys' adventure and sailing stories who had fallen on hard times in the 1870s due to business failures, and so he hired out to Sampson Low as the translator for these books. However, it is now known that the translator of The Mysterious Island and his other Verne novels was actually his wife, Agnes Kinloch Kingston, who had studied on the continent in her youth. The Kingston translation changes the names of the hero from "Smith" to "Harding"-"Smith" is a very common name in the U.K. and would have been associated, at that time, with the lower classes. In addition many technical passages were abridged or omitted and the anti-imperialist sentiments of the dying Captain Nemo were purged so as not to offend English readers. This became the standard translation for more than a century.

This edition includes not only the original illustrations, but a fascinating new introduction by literary scholar Darrell Schweitzer.