A Journey into the Interior of the Earth – Chapter 1

The episode opens not with the story itself, but with narrator Brie Carlisle describing her love of reading and the mission behind her podcast, Bite at a Time Books, which presents classic novels in short, manageable installments. She also plugs a companion podcast, Behind the Story, which explores the lives of classic authors and the historical context of their works. Then, after a brief ad break, she launches into the first chapter of Jules Verne's A Journey into the Interior of the Earth.

The Discovery That Sets Everything in Motion

The chapter is narrated by a young man named Harry, who looks back on his extraordinary adventures with disbelief. He explains that his uncle, Professor Von Hardwig, is a German scholar who married Harry's English aunt and took in his orphaned nephew. The professor is a man of immense learning—philosophy, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, and "many other ologies"—but he is also choleric, impatient, and deeply eccentric. Harry describes him as someone who "studied, he consumed midnight oil, he pored over heavy tomes, and digested huge quartos and folios in order to keep the knowledge acquired to himself." The professor also has a stammer, which becomes especially troublesome when he gets excited about scientific names, and he tends to replace difficult words with "a very powerful adjec