Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South

• 1. Introduction

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  Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South is a Jules Verne novel that most readers have never heard of, and that may be exactly the point. Published in France in 1887, the book arrived in the United States the same year and promptly sank. Critics found Verne's grasp of the American Civil War unreliable, and the novel has lived in relative obscurity ever since, overshadowed by the author's more celebrated adventures. But the story it tells is a charged one: a battle between two men on opposite sides of the slavery debate, set deep in Confederate territory, with a kidnapping, a mob, a ruined plantation, and a mystery at its center. Who is the real Texar? And what did Verne, a Frenchman writing about a war he had not witnessed, get right and get wrong?

• 2. Two Men, One Town

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  James Burbank is a northerner living near Jacksonville, Florida, and in the world of this novel, that makes him a marked man. His view of slavery as an evil is, as Verne frames it, an unpopular stance among his neighbors deep inside the Confederate States of America. Texar, a pro-slavery southerner, directs particular hatred at Burbank for reasons that run beyond politics. Burbank had once brought legal trouble down on Texar, and even though Texar managed to construct an alibi airtight enough to escape conviction, the grievance festered. Verne gives Texar time and patience. Rather than strike immediately, he accumulates power within the Jacksonville community until he stands as a prominent and influential figure. From that position, he turns his neighbors against Burbank, building resentment into a mob that eventually descends on the Burbank plantation, known as Camdless Bay, and destroys it.

• 3. Kidnapping and Mystery

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  After the destruction of Camdless Bay, a man claiming to be Texar abducts two women: Burbank's daughter Dy and the family caretaker Zermah. They are reportedly taken to a place in the Everglades called Carneral Island. The search for them draws in the United States Navy, and it is during that search that Burbank's party encounters something unexpected: a separate group also hunting Texar, but for crimes that appear to have taken place at the same time as the attack on Camdless Bay, and in a completely different location. The logical impossibility is the engine of the plot. One person cannot be in two places simultaneously, which means the Texar the mob followed and the Texar wanted elsewhere cannot both be the same man. Verne structures the chase so that finding Dy and Zermah becomes inseparable from resolving which Texar is real.

• 4. A Tangled Publication History

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  Nord Contre Sud first appeared in a fully illustrated edition in November 1887, published by J. Hetzel et Cie in Paris. The American translation arrived the same year through a New York publisher named George Munro, translated by Laura E. Kendall as part of a series called the Seaside Library. That edition carried a different title: Texar's Vengeance, quickly revised to Texar's Revenge. The original French title was demoted to a subtitle. Over the following two decades, cheap editions circulated through American publishers including W. L. Allison and Hurst, and the title drifted further. Some editions called the book The Texar's Revenge; others dropped the revenge title entirely and simply used North Against South. Some publishers split the novel into two volumes, labeling them Burbank the Northerner and Texar the Southerner. Meanwhile, a separate English translation had appeared in London in December 1887, published by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, with full illustrations and an anonymous translator different from Kendall. That London edition would not reach American readers in its original illustrated form until 2007, when the Choptank Press of St. Michaels, Maryland released a replica republication through Lulu Press.

• 5. The Critic's Verdict

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  One contemporary reviewer captured the reception with memorable bluntness. The story of Texar, they wrote, amounted to a very thin streak of narrative padded to almost unwieldy proportions by a quantity of remarkably inaccurate information about the rebellion. The reviewer added that it would be easy, if anyone thought the game worth the candle, to point out the various comical inaccuracies in the historical part of the story. Verne was, by the time this book appeared, one of the most recognized adventure writers in the world, but his knowledge of the American Civil War was limited, and American readers noticed. The tepid reception the novel received in the United States contributed to its gradual drift into obscurity, a fate that contrasts sharply with the enduring fame of his more technically grounded works. The Choptank Press reissue of 2007 offered one of the few modern attempts to bring the book back to wider attention.