Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic adventure novel that chronicles the attempt of an English gentleman and his French valet to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days in order to win a £20,000 wager.  The Englishman is Phileas Fogg, who is rich, solitary, and a creature of habits we might describe as obsessive compulsive. His social milieu is largely confined to his membership in the Reform Club, where an argument over an article depicting the opening of an Indian railway section leads to the wager, worth about $2 million today. Fogg develops an itinerary that takes him around the world by rail and steamship through Egypt, India, Hong Kong, Japan, and across the United States, departing October 2, 1872 and returning to London December 21, 80 days later.  Needless to say, things don’t always go as planned. Fogg is mistaken for a bank robber in Egypt by a Scotland Yard detective named Fix, who tails him in and out of English territory ever after. In India they rescue a young woman about to be sacrificed who joins their party. Mishaps, wrong turns, bad information, missed connections, kidnapping, hurricanes, and the International Date Line all figure in the tension to make the deadline.

The book appeared in 1873, just after three breakthroughs that made world travel significantly faster: the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the linking of the Indian railway system in 1870, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in America in 1869. It is very much a portrait of the British Empire just before its peak, “on which the sun never sets”, and is his most popular in English.

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