Verne is filed under science fiction, and the Around the World in 80 Days book contains none.
No submarine, no underground world, no moon gun, nothing invented. Every train, steamer and elephant in it existed in 1872, and the eighty days was a genuine calculation rather than a fantasy.
Three pieces of infrastructure had just made it possible: the Suez Canal, the American transcontinental railroad, and a newly completed stretch of Indian railway.
The book is a timetable, and the plot is a man trying to keep to it.
So was the publication.
Fiction by René Rehn
It Ran in Real Time, and the Newspaper Left the Deadline Day Blank
This is the best fact about the book and almost nobody carries it.
Le Temps began serializing it on November 6, 1872, and ran it across forty-five days.
Fogg’s journey happens on those same dates.
Chapter thirty-five appeared on December 20. Nothing appeared on December 21, which is the day Fogg’s eighty days run out. The final chapters came on December 22.
The paper held the deadline day empty.
A novel about a man racing a clock was printed against the same clock, so a reader in Paris opened the paper each morning at the point in the calendar the characters had reached, and on the day everything turned there was nothing to read.
Readers Thought It Was Actually Happening
Which follows from the above and is the part that sounds invented.
Some readers took the serial for reportage and placed bets on whether Fogg would make it.
And railway and shipping companies wrote to Verne lobbying to have their services used in the book.
Think about what that means. Commercial operators tried to buy placement in a fictional itinerary, in a story they had worked out was fiction, because the readers betting on it had not. That is 1872.
What Happens
serialized in Le Temps from November 6, 1872 · published as a book 1873 · Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
Phileas Fogg is a rich Londoner of mathematically precise habits who lives alone, says almost nothing, and spends every day at the Reform Club.
On October 2, 1872 he dismisses his valet for bringing shaving water at the wrong temperature, and hires a Frenchman called Jean Passepartout to replace him.
That evening the Club is discussing a robbery at the Bank of England and a newspaper report that the new Indian railway section makes it possible to circle the world in eighty days.
Fogg wagers twenty thousand pounds that he can do it.
Which is half his fortune, and he takes the other half with him to pay for the journey. So the entire estate is committed: staked on one side, spent on the other. Twenty thousand pounds in 1872 is somewhere around two and a half million today.
He leaves that night, and a detective called Fix follows him across the world in the belief that he is the Bank of England thief, because a man leaving the country abruptly with twenty thousand pounds in a bag looks exactly like one.
The Trick at the End, and It Is Played on You as Well
Fogg arrives back in London five minutes late and accepts that he has lost everything.
Then Passepartout discovers that the date is a day earlier than they had thought.
Traveling east, they had crossed the International Date Line and gained a day without noticing, and Verne had simply not mentioned it.
Fogg walks into the Reform Club at a quarter to nine on Saturday December 21, 1872 and wins.
The reason it works is that the reader has been keeping the same diary as the characters. You are not watching somebody make an error. You made it too, and the book let you.
That is a modern device in an 1872 adventure novel, and it is the reason this book has outlived most of what was published alongside it.
A Real Man Said It Was Him
George Francis Train was an American businessman, adventurer and serial candidate for president who had gone around the world in eighty days himself, in 1870.
Two years later this novel appeared.
Verne never acknowledged him.
Train’s own verdict, delivered afterward, was blunt: Verne stole my thunder, and I am Phileas Fogg.
Make of that what you like. The coincidence of the number is hard to wave away, Verne was a documentary researcher who worked from newspapers, and Train’s circumnavigation had been in the newspapers. Nobody has ever proved it and Verne never discussed it.
What is certain is that Verne had not been around the world when he wrote it. He researched the routes, the timetables and the connections, and constructed the journey from documents. The book’s authority is the authority of a very good reference library.
And Then People Went and Did It
The novel produced a small industry of attempts to beat it, which is not something most nineteenth-century fiction can claim.
Nellie Bly, for the New York World, went around in seventy-two days in 1889, and stopped at Amiens on the way to meet Verne. She wrote it up as Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.
She was racing somebody. Elizabeth Bisland left the same day in the opposite direction for The Cosmopolitan and came home in seventy-six and a half.
George Griffith took it to sixty-five days in 1894. And in 2017 Mark Beaumont did it on a bicycle in seventy-eight days, fourteen hours and forty minutes.
A wager in a gentlemen’s club, invented in 1872, is still setting the target.
Two Details Worth Having
Passepartout’s name is a joke in two directions. Literally it means goes everywhere. It is also the ordinary French word for a skeleton key.
And Fogg gives his winnings away. He splits them between Passepartout and Fix, which is to say between his servant and the policeman who spent three months trying to arrest him.
Aouda, the Indian princess rescued from her husband’s funeral pyre in the middle of the book, marries him. She is the daughter of a Parsi merchant from Bombay, married against her will to the old rajah of Bundelkhand, and she is the only person in the novel who gets Fogg to do something not on the schedule.
Which Edition
William Butcher’s Oxford World’s Classics translation of 1995.
This is the easiest recommendation on any Verne page, because the humor is the thing the Victorian versions most comprehensively removed, and it is the thing Butcher is best at.
Verne is funny here in a way that almost nothing in the nineteenth-century English Verne suggests.
The one to recognize and avoid is the 1873 text by George Makepeace Towle, which is what the cheap paperbacks and the free files carry, for the usual reason: nobody has to pay for it.
Two notes on buying.
The original illustrated editions carry plates by Alphonse de Neuville and Léon Benett, and de Neuville also illustrated Twenty Thousand Leagues. Worth looking for in a modern reprint.
And beware the film tie-ins. The 2004 version makes Fogg an inventor, adds a Jade Buddha and a Chinese general, and bears almost no relation to the book. It is a Jackie Chan vehicle with Verne’s title on it.
Where to Go Next
How Verne’s reputation in English was wrecked, and by whom, is the story of my Jules Verne books guide. The Victorian translation problem with a name attached to it, a translator who never got her credit, is on my Mysterious Island page, and the one with the science, and the publisher who censored it, is covered on my Twenty Thousand Leagues page. The biggest term in the sub-cluster, where a Victorian rewrite still outsells the real thing, is my Journey to the Center of the Earth guide, and the rest of the tradition is on the French classics hub.
