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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Omaha is connected with Chicago by the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, which runs directly east, and passes fifty stations. Fogg and his party reached the station, and…
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This man, whom he had just followed around the world, was permitted now to separate himself from him! He began to accuse and abuse himself, and, as if he were director o…
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Fix was on the point of entering another carriage, when an idea struck him which induced him to alter his plan. I’ve got my man.” Just then the locomotive gave a sharp s…
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There remained the guide: what course would he adopt? In default of his assistance, it was necessary to be assured of his neutrality.
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The “China,” for Liverpool, had started three-quarters of an hour before! IN WHICH PHILEAS FOGG ENGAGES IN A DIRECT STRUGGLE WITH BAD FORTUNE The “China,” in leaving, se…
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IN WHICH A NEW SPECIES OF FUNDS, UNKNOWN TO THE MONEYED MEN, APPEARS ON ’CHANGE Phileas Fogg rightly suspected that his departure from London would create a lively sensa…
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Between this and the railway extended vast plains, plentifully irrigated. On the right rose the lower spurs of the mountainous mass which extends southward to the source…
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“How long will she stop at Suez?” “Four hours; long enough to get in her coal. It is thirteen hundred and ten miles from Suez to Aden, at the other end of the Red Sea, a…
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Stuart, Fallentin, Sullivan, Flanagan, and Ralph, after consulting each other. “The train leaves for Dover at a quarter before nine. I will take it.” “This very evening?…
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There was a general disappointment among the passengers, who, without reckoning the delay, saw themselves compelled to trudge fifteen miles over a plain covered with sno…
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Phileas Fogg, like a racehorse, was drawing near his last turning-point. The bonds were quoted, no longer at a hundred below par, but at twenty, at ten, and at five; and…
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He demanded damages for the “breakage” of the pyramid; and Phileas Fogg appeased him by giving him a handful of banknotes. Fogg and Aouda, followed by Passepartout, who …