Around the World in Eighty Days
A fast-moving adventure of travel, precision, and surprise in which discipline meets chance across a rapidly changing world.
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The book
Around the World in Eighty Days follows the precise and seemingly emotionless Phileas Fogg, who undertakes a wager to circumnavigate the globe within an astonishingly short time. Accompanied by the lively Passepartout, Fogg moves through a world shaped by steamships, railways, schedules, and imperial connections. Yet the journey is constantly disrupted by delay, misunderstanding, pursuit, and unexpected attachments. Jules Verne turns global travel into a narrative of suspense and transformation, showing how measured order collides with the unpredictability of lived experience. Beneath its brisk surface, the novel reflects on time, modern mobility, and the contrast between rigid habit and human spontaneity.
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Significance
This novel is one of Verne’s most accessible and enduring works, celebrated for its pace, charm, and inventive use of modern travel as narrative structure. It captures the nineteenth century’s fascination with speed, technology, and global interconnectedness while preserving a sense of play and unpredictability. Its continuing appeal lies in the balance between mechanical precision and emotional surprise: the world may be measured, but it cannot be fully controlled.
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Fragments from this book
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The _Times, Standard, Morning Post_, and _Daily News_, and twenty other highly respectable newspapers scouted Mr. Fogg’s project as madness; the _Daily Telegraph_ alone …
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The conjecture was at least a plausible one, and the detective began to seriously regret that he had embarked on the affair. As for Captain Speedy, he continued to howl …
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Had an accident then happened to the sledge, the travellers, attacked by these beasts, would have been in the most terrible danger; but it held on its even course, soon …
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Aouda, cosily packed in furs and cloaks, was sheltered as much as possible from the attacks of the freezing wind. As for Passepartout, his face was as red as the sun’s d…
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But a single delay would suffice to fatally break the chain of communication; should Phileas Fogg once miss, even by an hour; a steamer, he would have to wait for the ne…
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It might be thought that, in his anxiety, he would be constantly watching the changes of the wind, the disorderly raging of the billows—every chance, in short, which mig…
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The celebrated East India Company was all-powerful from 1756, when the English first gained a foothold on the spot where now stands the city of Madras, down to the time …
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Fix evidently was no longer an enemy, but an ally; he was faithfully keeping his word. Dinner over, the coach which was to convey the passengers and their luggage to the…
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Fogg was marching at their head, and just behind him were Passepartout and the other two travellers, rescued from the Sioux. They had met and fought the Indians ten mile…
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Passepartout was dispatched in search of the steward, and soon returned with two packs of cards, some pins, counters, and a shelf covered with cloth. Aouda understood wh…
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“Twelve!” he exclaimed; “why, it’s only eight minutes before ten.” “Your watch is slow.” “My watch? A family watch, monsieur, which has come down from my great-grandfath…
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Passepartout, who had been purchasing several dozen mangoes—a fruit as large as good-sized apples, of a dark-brown colour outside and a bright red within, and whose whit…