(1873)
One day at the Reformers'' Club in London, Phineas Fogg, a cold-blooded, methodical Englishman, takes up
a wager to journey around the world in
eighty days and, with clocklike precision, to report at the Club at a specified time. Accompanied by his French valet, Passepartout, and by Detective Fix, assigned by the Club to check up his movements, Fogg starts out on his impossible voyage.
Adventure is piled on adventure. Being the cool and intrepid Englishman of popular legend, he overcomes the most forbidding obstacles with endless resourcefulness. In China, he saves Passepartout from a hostile mob. In India, despite his terrrific hurry, he takes time to rescue Aouda, a beautiful widow, from being burned alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband - and more time still to marry her. The book ends as Phileas Fogg nonchalantly walks into the Reformers'' Club, ten minutes ahead of schedule, as the waiting members look at their watches. "Here I am, gentlemen," he drawls . . . The story has survived the development of transportation facilities much father than those available to its hero.