Around the World in Eighty Days

Around the World in Eighty Days Review

Phileas Fogg is the most enigmatic hero in Victorian adventure fiction. He lives by railway timetable and chronometer, his Savile Row suits immaculate, his emotions entirely unreadable. He has no apparent reason to circle the globe in eighty days — and yet, when a casual argument at the Reform Club turns into a £20,000 wager, he rises from his chair and departs within the hour. Jules Verne understood that the best adventures begin not with grand ambition but with the specific, ridiculous logic of a bet.

What follows is one of the most satisfying plots in popular literature. Fogg and his newly hired valet Passepartout — impulsive, warm-hearted, perpetually alarmed — travel by steamer and railway and elephant and sledge across India, Hong Kong, Japan, America, and the Atlantic, always precisely on schedule and always, somehow, imperilled. The engine of comedy and suspense is Detective Fix, a Scotland Yard man who mistakes Fogg for a bank robber and shadows him across three continents, disrupting the journey at every opportunity.

Verne’s genius is architectural: every setback is calibrated, every rescue earned, and the final twist — involving the International Date Line — is one of those solutions that seems both inevitable and completely surprising. The novel’s deeper argument is equally elegant: that a world connected by railways and steamships is both smaller and richer than the insular gentleman imagined, that the journey transforms the traveller even when the traveller refuses to notice.

Fogg begins the novel as a mechanism and ends it as a man. The eighty days it takes him to discover this is time extremely well spent.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Around the World in Eighty Days apart: Ingeniously plotted with mounting tension and a brilliant final twist; Fogg and Passepartout make one of Victorian fiction’s great comic double-acts; and Each destination is rendered with vivid geographical and cultural detail. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Around the World in Eighty Days give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Precise planning and imperturbable calm are more powerful than improvisation under pressure. The world shrinks when you commit to crossing it — and expands in human interest along the way. A wager is only as good as the terms: time zones can be your greatest ally. Adventure finds those who move; Fogg never waits for the world to come to him. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Why It Endures

Around the World in Eighty Days belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. Jules Verne’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

Fogg’s emotional detachment can make him feel more puzzle-box than person. Some colonial attitudes toward non-European cultures reflect the era uncomfortably. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — One of the great adventure novels, perfectly constructed and still irresistible after 150 years.

Serial Publication, the Real-World Premise, and the Oscar-Winning Film

Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours was published as a serial in Le Temps between 6 November and 22 December 1872, then as a book in January 1873. The premise was topical: the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the American Transcontinental Railroad in the same year had made a complete circumnavigation within eighty days theoretically possible for the first time. Verne was working from a calculation published in a French newspaper when he began writing.

Phileas Fogg’s character — precise, phlegmatic, almost inhuman in his regularity — is the antithesis of the romantic adventurer; the real adventure is provided by his companion Passepartout and the comic pursuit of the detective Fix, who mistakes Fogg for a bank robber. The novel’s treatment of global travel as a matter of calculation and timetable, rather than discovery and risk, reflects the transformation of long-distance travel by steam and rail. Verne stipulated in his contract with Hetzel that the Extraordinary Journeys should provide both entertainment and reliable scientific and geographical education, a constraint Hetzel enforced through extensive editorial correspondence.

The 1956 film adaptation, produced by Michael Todd and starring David Niven as Fogg and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout, won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 29th Academy Awards — a result considered surprising given the film’s lightweight tone. It also won Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. The production featured cameo appearances by Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, and dozens of other stars, and was noted for its lavish use of the Todd-AO widescreen process.

Nellie Bly’s Real Journey

In 1889, journalist Nellie Bly completed a real circumnavigation in 72 days, beating Fogg’s fictional record, as a publicity stunt for the New York World. Bly’s journey, which she documented in her book Around the World in 72 Days (1890), was directly inspired by Verne’s novel; she telegraphed Verne from Amiens, where she stopped to visit him, and he wished her success. The competition between Bly and a rival journalist (Elizabeth Bisland) who attempted the journey simultaneously attracted enormous public interest.