Around the World in 80 Days

By Victor Hugo

Around the World in 80 Days is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne.

In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager (the approximate equivalent of £2 million in 2016) set by his friends at the Reform Club. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works.

The story starts in London on Tuesday, 1 October, 1872.

Phileas Fogg is a rich British gentleman living in solitude. Despite his wealth, Fogg lives a modest life with habits carried out with mathematical precision. Very little can be said about his social life other than that he is a member of the Reform Club. Having dismissed his former valet, James Forster, for bringing him shaving water at 84 °F (29 °C) instead of 86 °F (30 °C), Fogg hires a Frenchman by the name of Jean Passepartout as a replacement.

At the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an 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 80 days. He accepts a wager for £20,000 (equal to about £1.6 million in 2015) from his fellow club members to complete such a journey within this time period. With Monsieur Passepartout accompanying him, Fogg departs from London by train at 8:45 P.M. on 2 October; if he is to win the wager, then he will have to return to the club by this same time on 21 December, 80 days later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781387299324

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) was a French poet and novelist. Born in Besançon, Hugo was the son of a general who served in the Napoleonic army. Raised on the move, Hugo was taken with his family from one outpost to the next, eventually setting with his mother in Paris in 1803. In 1823, he published his first novel, launching a career that would earn him a reputation as a leading figure of French Romanticism. His Gothic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) was a bestseller throughout Europe, inspiring the French government to restore the legendary cathedral to its former glory. During the reign of King Louis-Philippe, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the French Second Republic, where he spoke out against the death penalty and poverty while calling for public education and universal suffrage. Exiled during the rise of Napoleon III, Hugo lived in Guernsey from 1855 to 1870. During this time, he published his literary masterpiece Les Misérables (1862), a historical novel which has been adapted countless times for theater, film, and television. Towards the end of his life, he advocated for republicanism around Europe and across the globe, cementing his reputation as a defender of the people and earning a place at Paris’ Panthéon, where his remains were interred following his death from pneumonia. His final words, written on a note only days before his death, capture the depth of his belief in humanity: “To love is to act.”