Jules Verne published Around the World in Eighty Days in serial form in 1872. Phileas Fogg, a gentleman of meticulous habits and unexplained wealth, bets the other members of his Reform Club twenty thousand pounds, most of his fortune, that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days, a feat that the opening of the Suez Canal and the completion of the American transcontinental railroad have only recently made theoretically possible. He departs that evening with his new French manservant Passepartout, carrying almost nothing except a travel bag stuffed with banknotes and an intimate familiarity with timetables.
The novel's genius lies in the contrast between its two protagonists. Fogg is the English ideal of imperturbability carried to its comic extreme: he is indifferent to the wonders they encounter, calculating only whether each delay can be recovered and whether the schedule remains intact. Passepartout, his Gallic counterpart, is distracted by everything, temples, local customs, a beautiful woman in need of rescue, and it is precisely his impulsive departures from the schedule that repeatedly threaten and ultimately save their adventure. When Fogg rescues Aouda from a forced widow's pyre in India, accepting a significant delay, it is the novel's single concession to human feeling over pure logistics, and the one act that eventually gives the journey its meaning beyond the wager.
Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days as the globalization of his era reached its first great peak, and the novel's portrait of a world simultaneously shrunk by technology and still full of unpredictable hazards has not lost its satirical edge. Fogg's error at the novel's end, believing he has lost the bet by a day, not yet understanding that eastward circumnavigation gained him twenty-four hours, is resolved through one of fiction's more elegant structural jokes: the man who lives by the clock has been undone and then saved by the earth's rotation. That resolution is satisfying because Verne has earned it through the precision of everything preceding it.
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