The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig Holberg

you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation … by ascertaining the secret of the magnet’. The ever shifting patterns of terrestrial magnetism remained a problem that challenged navigators as well as natural philosophers, and in only the second paragraph of Frankenstein, her fictional explorer Robert Walton echoes real life ambitions when he proclaims that he is travelling towards the North Pole in search of ‘the wondrous power which attracts the needle. Most famously, she engaged with controversies about electricity and the nature of life, but she also considered magnetism and the potential rewards of Arctic exploration.

Mary Shelley was well informed on contemporary scientific debates. The aim of examining these writers together is not to search for direct mappings from one project to another, but instead to introduce Holberg’s unfamiliar yet important book and also to cast new light on Frankenstein, one of England’s most famous works of literature. Attention is focussed on how the ambiguous presentation of these and other texts blurs any straightforward classification of genres.

To explore these relationships, this paper links Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein-a book often hailed as the first science fiction novel-to two earlier works which are now less well known: Edmond Halley’s article about terrestrial magnetism, in which he suggested that God had created inhabited illuminated cavities inside the earth and a satirical fantasy voyage written by the Danish author Ludvig Holberg, but published anonymously as Niels Klim’s journey to the underground and immediately translated into many languages. During the long eighteenth century, boundaries between theology and natural philosophy, between imaginary and factual travel narratives, between fiction and social commentary, were far more fluid than they are today.

The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig Holberg