[citation needed] As a boy, he was timid and his health delicate, so he was educated at home until the age of ten, when he was sent to Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia).

[citation needed] The following year, Jókai was appointed the editor of Életképek [hu], the then-leading Hungarian literary magazine, and gathered a circle of young writers around himself.

Before the revolution, he had been a moderate liberal who opposed excesses, but the revolutionary victories of April and May 1849 persuaded him support Lajos Kossuth's deposition of the then-reigning House of Habsburg.

He intended to commit suicide to avoid imprisonment, but his wife, Róza Laborfalvi helped him escape on foot through Russian lines to Pest.

He devoted himself to the rehabilitation of the Hungarian language,[clarification needed] writing thirty novels and volumes of tales, essays, and literary criticism.

He was a long-time supporter of Kálmán Tisza's administration, sitting for over twenty years in parliament and founding the government paper A Hon [hu] in 1863.

[clarification needed] His Jövő század regénye (Novel of the Next Century, 1872) is an important early work of science fiction, though the term did not yet exist at the time.

[5] In spite of its romantic elements, this monumental two-volume novel includes some acute observations and foresights, such as the prediction of a revolution in Russia and the establishment of a totalitarian state there, or the arrival of aviation.