Around the World in Eighty Days

About this book

Around the World in Eighty Days is Jules Verne’s story of an Englishman who bets that he can circle the globe in eighty days using only the trains, steamships, and other ordinary transport of 1872. It first appeared in installments in a Paris newspaper that year, and readers followed Phileas Fogg’s progress as if it were news. It is the most widely read of Verne’s books and one of the most adapted.

Unlike most of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, it involves no invented machines. Its point is that the real world had just become small enough for such a trip: the Suez Canal had opened in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad in the United States the same year, and a rail line across India had recently been completed. The novel is a celebration of timetables, and its comedy comes from the gap between Fogg’s calm precision and everything that goes wrong.

The story

Phileas Fogg is a wealthy, solitary, and extremely regular London gentleman about whom nothing is known except his habits. On the day he hires a new French servant, Jean Passepartout, a discussion at the Reform Club about a newspaper article turns into a wager: Fogg bets half his fortune that he can go around the world and be back in the club’s card room in eighty days. He leaves that evening.

The route runs through Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York, and home. Fogg is pursued by a Scotland Yard detective named Fix, who is convinced that a man leaving England so suddenly with so much cash must be the bank robber everyone is looking for. Along the way the party rescues a young Indian widow, Aouda, from a funeral pyre, loses and finds Passepartout, crosses the American plains by train and sled, and runs steadily short of time.

Themes and historical context

Verne wrote the book during a period of enthusiasm for global travel. Thomas Cook had begun organizing round-the-world tours, and newspapers had published estimates of how quickly the trip could be made. The novel is partly a tour guide for armchair travelers, with each stage described from a European tourist’s point of view, which includes attitudes toward India, Asia, and the American West that date it plainly.

The character of Fogg is a comic portrait of the English gentleman as the French imagined him: unflappable, wordless, and devoted to routine. Passepartout, who is talkative, warm, and prone to disaster, is his opposite, and the friendship between them is the book’s emotional center. The detective Fix, pursuing the wrong man with total conviction, adds a thread of farce.

The novel’s final twist, which turns on a detail of geography and timekeeping, has been widely discussed since publication; it is one reason the book was taken up in schools as a painless way to teach the idea of time zones and the date line.

Who should read it

At around 65,000 words it is one of Verne’s shortest novels, with thirty-seven brisk chapters. The humor and pace make it suitable for readers of almost any age, and it has none of the technical digressions that slow down Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Readers should expect nineteenth-century attitudes toward other cultures to appear without comment.

Edition notes

This Project Gutenberg text is the English translation by George M. Towle, one of the earliest English versions of the novel and the one most often reprinted in the nineteenth century. Towle was an American journalist and author.