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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approached the Straits of Malacca, which gave access to the China seas.
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Judge Obadiah had unfortunately caught Passepartout’s rash exclamation, which the poor fellow would have given the world to recall. “Inasmuch,” resumed the judge, “as th…
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The railway turned around the sides of the mountains, and did not attempt to violate nature by taking the shortest cut from one point to another. The train entered the S…
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The estimable beast certainly deserved some consideration. Fogg choose to make him, Passepartout, a present of Kiouni, he would be very much embarrassed; and these thoug…
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But, before going, he had said to the soldiers, “My friends, I will divide five thousand dollars among you, if we save the prisoners.” It was then a little past noon. Ao…
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it’s you, is it, Englishman?” cried the colonel; “it’s you who are going to play a spade!” “And who plays it,” replied Phileas Fogg coolly, throwing down the ten of spad…
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This personage, who had taken the train at Elko, was tall and dark, with black moustache, black stockings, a black silk hat, a black waistcoat, black trousers, a white c…
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grinning scarecrows protected from the sparrows, pigeons, ravens, and other voracious birds.
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Opposite them, on the other side of the street, between a coal wharf and a petroleum warehouse, a large platform had been erected in the open air, towards which the curr…
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Now that he was fully convinced, Fix had quite recovered his equanimity. He passes himself off as an odd stick who is going round the world in eighty days.” “Then he’s a…
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Fogg was certainly ruined, his bet was lost, and he himself perhaps arrested and imprisoned! Ah, if Fix ever came within his reach, what a settling of accounts there wou…
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There, suspended by one hand between the baggage-car and the tender, with the other he loosened the safety chains; but, owing to the traction, he would never have succee…