Around the World in Eighty Days Summary | Chapterly

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne: A Complete Summary "The unforeseen does not exist." Overview Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) is Jules Verne's most popular novel and a celebration of Victorian-era confidence in progress, technology, and human determination. Phileas Fogg, an eccentric and meticulous English gentleman, makes a wager at his London club that he can circumnavigate the globe in exactly eighty days. What follows is a breathless adventure across continents and oceans, using every available mode of transport: steamships, railways, elephants, wind-powered sledges, and sheer ingenuity. The novel was a sensation when it was serialized. Readers followed Fogg's progress as if it were real, and newspapers organized their own races to beat his fictional schedule. Verne captured the spirit of an age that believed technology could conquer geography, that schedules could master time, and that anything was possible with sufficient planning and British composure. But the novel is also subtler than it first appears. Fogg, who begins as a human machine governed by routine, gradually discovers something no timetable can account for: human connection. Plot Summary Phileas Fogg lives with clockwork precision in London. His routines are so exact that he fires his servant...