The Begum's Fortune

The Begum's Millions

Author	Jules Verne
Original title	Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum
Translator	Mrs. Agnes Kinloch Kingston and W. H. G. Kingston (1879), I. O. Evans (1958), Stanford L. Luce (2005)
Illustrator	Léon Benett
Country	France
Language	French
Series	Voyages extraordinaires #18
Genre	Utopian and dystopian fiction
Publisher	Pierre-Jules Hetzel
Publication date	1879
Published in English	1879
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Preceded by	Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen
Followed by	Tribulations of a Chinaman in China

The Begum's Fortune (French: Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum), also published as The Begum's Millions, is an 1879 novel by Jules Verne, with some elements which could be described as utopian and others which seem clearly dystopian. It is remarkable as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary and to some degree pessimistic about the development of science and technology.

As came out long after the book's publication, it is actually based on a manuscript by Paschal Grousset, a Corsican revolutionary who had participated in the Paris Commune and was at the time living in exile in the USA and London. It was bought by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the publisher of most of Verne’s books. The attribution of plot elements between Grousset's original text and Verne's work on it has not been completely defined. Later, Verne worked similarly on two more books by Grousset and published them under his name, before the revolutionary finally got a pardon and was able to return to France and resume publication in his own name.

The book first appeared in a hasty and poorly done English translation soon after its publication in French – one of the bad translations which are considered to have damaged Verne's reputation in the English-speaking world. W. H. G. Kingston was near death and deeply in debt at the time. His wife, Mrs. A. K. Kingston, who did the translation for him, was certainly otherwise preoccupied than with the accuracy of the text and may have had to rely on outside help. in 2005 a new translation from the French was made by Stanford Luce and published by Wesleyan University.

I. O. Evans in his introduction to his "Fitzroy Edition" of The Begum's Fortune suggested a connection between the creation of artificial satellites in this novel and the publication of The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale in 1879.

Two men receive the news that they are part-inheritors to a vast fortune due to being the last surviving descendants of a French soldier-of-fortune who many years before settled in India and married the immensely rich widow of one of its native princes – the begum of the title.