Around The World in Eighty Days

Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic adventure novel. The story starts in London on 2 October 1872. Phileas Fogg is a wealthy, solitary man with regular habits, who fires his former valet for getting wrong the temperature of his shaving water by two degrees. He hires Passepartout as a replacement. Later that day at the Reform Club, he gets involved in an argument over and article in the Daily Telegraph stating that, with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in eighty days. The technological innovation of the nineteenth century had opened the possibility of a more rapid circumnavigation than ever before, and the prospect fascinated Verne and his readership. The exciting, if now dated, adventure of Fogg and Passepartout which resulted will entertain modern readers as much as it did their Victorian predecessors.