Forthcoming Jules Verne talks by John Lamb – an invite to British members of this forum and those on vacation in the UK in September.
John Lamb
Hello all,
I have four Jules Verne related talks lined up in September and October, three of which may be accessible to forum members, either in person or online. If somewhere in the UK or on vacation, please contact me personally and I will endeavor to get you a ticket or access to the Zoom presentation.
Firstly . 30th Liverpool Maritime Conference
September 11th 2026
John Foster Building, 80-98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ
2:30 p.m – 2:50 p.m.
Abstract
Comparisons between the Lairds of Birkenhead built Confederate Warship CSS Alabama and the Lairds of Birkenhead built submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne’s Novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas.
The French author Jules Verne’s classic 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas charts the adventures of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus. Jules Verne only once linked Captain Nemo’s origins to a real-life vessel and surprisingly it was to a wooden warship, the American Civil War Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama. The Alabama was commissioned at Nautilus House, Liverpool, England and built in 1862 under a veil of secrecy at Lairds shipyard of neighbouring Birkenhead. After leaving the River Mersey the Alabama was fitted with armaments on the remote Azores island of Terceira and joined by her captain, Raphael Semmes, a resident of Mobile, Alabama.
In a two-year cruise the Alabama sank 64 United States merchant ships and created a major diplomatic rift between Great Britain and the United States. In Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, the steel plates of the hull (basically the whole visible structure) of the Nautilus are built at Lairds shipyard of Birkenhead (Verne: Laird’s of Liverpool) and shipped in a veil of secrecy to a remote island where the submarine is fitted with an armament and finally completed. Nemo, whose motto is Mobilis in Mobile, like Semmes then proceeds to sink shipping worldwide. These striking similarities prompted me to compare Raphael Semmes’s memoirs to Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. The conclusion reached is that the sheer number and preciseness of replicated passages suggests that Verne created the abolitionist Captain Nemo as the satirical alter ego of Raphael Semmes and that Jules Verne deliberately hid this, his greatest literary secret, ‘in plain sight’.
Please see the website about attending this conference.
Secondly
Liverpool Maritime Society.
September 17th 2026
2:30p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Location: Quaker Meeting House, School Lane, Liverpool L1 3BT
Title: Jules Verne and Birkenhead.
This one-hour talk will explain the close relationship between Jules Verne and Birkenhead and why he referred to Birkenhead the CSS Alabama and Raphael Semmes in ten of his novels over a period of 45 years. The close literary relationship between Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and the CSS Alabama will be explained. The second half of the presentation will outline how Jules Verne ‘walked the field’ of Birkenhead and Wirral before formulating the plot of the sequel novel the Mysterious Island and uses 60 locations on the Wirral Peninsula as like for like locations on his ‘Lincoln Island’. Detailed reference will be made to those Birkenhead locations whose maritime history contribute to the novel. These include Hamilton Square (The Great Square of Richmond) the telegraph cable from Bidston Observatory to Lady’s Cave on Hilbre Island (Captain Nemo’s telegraph cable to Dakkar’s Grotto), and Thomas Brassey’s Great Culvert Sewer draining in to the Mersey at Jesse Hartley’s granite seawall (Granite House in the novel). 20 of Verne’s ‘like for like’ illustrations will also be shown as Verne openly hides his Mysterious Island in 'plain sight'.
Please contact me if you would like to attend and I will try to arrange it with the Liverpool Maritime Society.
Thirdly
September 23rd 2026.
Location: Athenaeum Club, Liverpool.
Title: James Cropper and Liverpool’s Major Contribution to the abolition of Slavery.
This is a private club venue and the talk is a result of Verne’s Interest in slavery and abolition. In 1853 the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne complained in his English notebooks about the muddy state of the River Mersey. His muddy thoughts were repeated by the author Harriet Beecher in her 'Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands' (1854). Stowe, who was in the same year staying just half a mile across the river from Hawthorne with the abolitionist Cropper family. Stowe, praised Liverpool as ‘the first to the abolitionist cause’ and wrote in praise in the same paragraph ‘The quality of Mercy is not strained’. Stowe’s husband was a school friend of Hawthorne and they all sailed back to America on the same sailing.
Jules Verne would copy Stowe’s pun on 'Mersey' and 'Mercy' and rename Birkenhead’s Tranmere Brook (the scene of the last Confederate surrender of the American Civil War) in The Mysterious Island as the ‘Mercy River’ in tribute to James Cropper the Liverpool abolitionist who did more than William Wilberforce to end slavery. The James Cropper (abolitionist) Wikipedia page can be found here James Cropper (abolitionist) - Wikipedia
The website was 90% written by myself. All the findings in this talk are due to the references to the Cropper family in the works of Jules Verne and others.
This is not available to the public, but I can ask if one or two members of the forum can accompany me.
Fourthly
Victorian science fiction Study Day
The influence of Birkenhead and Liverpool on the novels of Jules Verne.
Saturday 17 October 2026
York, England (exact venue to be arranged)
Abstract
Jules Verne did not leave France until at the age of 31 when he boarded a ship for Liverpool and the next day took the ferry to Birkenhead. The shipbuilding town of Birkenhead provided vessels for six of Verne's adventures including the fuselage of Captain Nemo's Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas. In this presentation John Lamb shows that the relationship between Verne, Birkenhead and Liverpool is much closer than previously thought and encompasses all of Verne's most well-known novels.
Born in 1963 in Birkenhead England, John Lamb was brought up on the feature film adaptations of Jules Verne’s novels such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days. After retiring as a geography teacher in 2018 he decided to investigate Jules Verne’s links with Liverpool and neighbouring Birkenhead, particularly in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and the sequel novel The Mysterious Island. John’s 2025 article in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction provided evidence that Birkenhead is the precise literary template for three Verne novels; Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), The Mysterious Island (1874) and The Floating Island (1895). This paper takes one location, Bidston Hill, Birkenhead and shows how Verne, as a former theatre director, recycles one particular piece of Birkenhead scenery and uses it as as inspiration for three novels.
I will most likely be conducting this particular talk as a zoom presentation and so it could be available to members of this forum. Please contact me if you would like to view the presentation and I will try to arrange it.