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Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
HarperCollins is proud to present a range of best-loved, essential classics.'Phileas Fogg was one of those mathematically exact people, who, never hurried and always ready, are economical of their steps and their motions. He never made one stride too many, always going by the shortest route. He did not give an idle look. He did not allow himself a superfluous gesture.'When Phileas Fogg wagers a bet that he can travel across the globe in just 80 days, little does he know about the epic journey that he is about to undertake. With his faithful French servant, Passepartout, Phileas Fogg embarks on the adventure of a lifetime, travelling across four continents by whatever means he can - train, elephant, steam ship - and experiencing endless surprises and mishaps along the way.
Collins Classics
History of Collins (#ulink_bd0f8bf3-d2a3-51b8-8b46-1f45d5daf6ff)
In 1819, Millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
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Life & Times (#ulink_ddffbc3e-9512-5980-a3a6-0142e0a49cbb)
About the Author
Jules Verne was an unusual author as he was a French writer whose work was accepted and absorbed by the machine of English literature. Verne had invented the genres of science fiction, or ‘sci-fi’ as it is often abbreviated and there was no other English author writing on this subject at the time. Curiously Verne was thought of as an auteur pour les enfants in France. His fascination with futuristic science and fantastic situations was seen as rather puerile and fatuous alongside the serious and heavyweight novelists of his time, such as Honoré de Balzac.
In Britain it was another story. Scientific and technological progress had shaped the success of the British Empire and people were consequently far more open to Verne’s flights of fancy. He anticipated phenomena that seemed quite likely to occur from the British point of view, because they as a nation had been responsible for the lion’s share of advancements in science and technology that the world then enjoyed.
The translations of Verne’s work, however, often left something to be desired. They were heavily edited so that any perceived anti-British sentiment was erased, thus making the works unfaithful to Verne’s original manuscripts for the sake of political correctness. In addition to this political censoring, the translators had problems with transliterating measurements and calculations from metric to imperial standards. Verne had been fastidious in his scientific accuracy, thereby lending his work a weight of scientific realism and authenticity, while the translators in contrast had been rather lackadaisical in their efforts so that the precision was lost, literally, in translation. Educated and learned English readers, thinking the translations to be true, thought of Verne as a little facile, coming up with sound basic ideas but failing in his attention to detail. Even in the mid-19th century people understood the importance of research in making a novel credible.
Despite these setbacks, Verne became the ‘Father of sci-fi’ by pioneering the genre. His canon includes Voyage au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). He even anticipated space flight with De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) and Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon). His modus operandi was to have a group of people embark on a journey of adventure and he wrote an incredible 54 novels using this theme, which have become known collectively as Les Voyages Extraordinaire (The Extraordinary Voyages).
These days literary types tend to look down their noses at science fiction, as if the genre is inferior to others. This is partly because of the over abundance of poorly conceived science fiction novels, but it is also due to the relative lack of characterization and exploration of human themes. While literary works tend to rely on investigating the nature of relationships and behaviour, science fiction stories pay scant attention to such topics and focus instead on the events and situations in which the characters find themselves. The same is true of thrillers, adventures and fantasies, which are often frequently accorded similar disregard.
In Victorian times, such distinctions between novel genres had yet to germinate and grow, because things were still in a stake of flux. As Verne had invented the concept of science fiction story telling, most of the work immediately influenced by him, such as that by H.G. Wells, was also of a high quality. It was really the age of pulp fiction – so called because of the throwaway nature of paperback books – that standards began to fall.
Rampant consumerism meant that substandard writers had their material go to print and so it became ever more difficult to see the wood for the trees in terms of writing quality. It became necessary to invent the term ‘literary novel’ as a badge of distinction to mark a book out as having supposedly been written by someone with a little more creative integrity than the rest.
Verne’s Prophecy
With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back at the novels of Jules Verne to analyse the extent to which his predictions came true. Verne wasn’t a dystopian science fiction writer, so he didn’t portend future catastrophes. He was more utopian in his imaginings, although curiously his stories are not set in the future as such. Instead, they are presented in a parallel world, where new sciences and technologies enable 19th-century adventurers to go about their business. They are therefore ‘science fiction’, but not strictly futuristic. The first book to take a character forwards in time was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Of course, the central character also travels backwards in time, to prehistory.
Verne’s agenda was really about asking the question ‘what if?’ What if people could dig to the centre of the earth, travel beneath the waves, journey to the moon or fly around the world? As a consequence, he quite logically invented the vehicles and equipment he imagined they would need. He was being pragmatic and he implemented his contemporaneous understanding of science in both designing paraphernalia and deciding what problems different environments might throw up.
As scientists did not understand earth dynamics until the latter half of the 20th century, it was conceivable at the time that one could dig to the centre of the planet, just as his characters do in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Similarly, in From the Earth to the Moon he has his characters employing a canon to fire them to the moon. This wouldn’t work on two levels. Nevertheless, Verne did anticipate space flight, the submarine, mechanical flying machines, tunnelling machines and so on. Some of these were already in the embryonic stages of their development into operational and practical devices of course, although it is not entirely clear whether Verne knew about any of them or was genuinely basing his ideas on original thought.
No matter, for Verne was a novelist, not an inventor and his application of science and technology was all about creating the necessary illusion to make the reader believe in the adventure. By the time anyone knew any better he and his readership were consigned to history.
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Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u2e24e577-003f-5546-b983-0c1da7c88b0d)
Title Page (#u7dd814c5-82aa-5888-9a2f-bc03c71a5d48)
History of Collins (#ucca29675-9435-5365-8864-7294ce3c0370)
Life & Times (#u4a7c1ab5-da22-568b-8c90-4914d2a531cc)
CHAPTER 1 (#u79e2edbe-a92b-5666-83fa-54480f6f19b7)
CHAPTER 2 (#uebaffe49-c49f-53f3-9c4e-9e8e673c338c)
CHAPTER 3 (#ua74a10d7-302d-50a7-8857-a2794e8d8866)
CHAPTER 4 (#u478686c0-cc7a-59c6-a55e-6bebc810648e)
CHAPTER 5 (#u0f0a88b0-3c09-522c-981e-54333b54b166)
CHAPTER 6 (#u3c35726b-1f8a-59a1-ac8c-65d62f1298c3)
CHAPTER 7 (#uc7cbabac-386f-52c6-b024-5856f21d1038)
CHAPTER 8 (#u1cce6902-de3b-5379-a105-84f363783ec8)
CHAPTER 9 (#u5de57e1c-232e-5198-97c7-55c2ceb3c08e)
CHAPTER 10 (#ucd86d1d8-68fb-5c98-9b6d-2df986a33a02)
CHAPTER 11 (#u263efe10-4ebd-519b-a239-12fa7c2bd1ad)
CHAPTER 12 (#uc8df8165-292c-5542-888f-bfe500b77041)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_57984fe3-8971-5cee-a1be-a53dbec6ab68)
In which Phileas Fogg and Passepartout accept each other—the one as Master, the other as Servant
In the year 1872, the house No. 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens—the house in which Sheridan died, in 1814—was inhabited by Phileas Fogg, Esq., one of the most singular and most noticed members of the Reform Club of London, although he seemed to take care to do nothing which might attract attention.
This Phileas Fogg, then, an enigmatic personage, of whom nothing was known but that he was a very polite man, and one of the most perfect gentlemen of good English society, succeeded one of the great orators that honour England.
An Englishman Phileas Fogg was surely, but perhaps not a Londoner. He was never seen on ‘Change, at the Bank, or in any of the counting-rooms of the “City.” The docks of London had never received a vessel fitted out by Phileas Fogg. This gentleman did not figure in any public body. His name had never sounded in any Inns of Court, nor in the Temple, nor Lincoln’s Inn, nor Gray’s Inn. He never pleaded in the Court of Chancery, nor the Queen’s Bench, nor the Exchequer, nor the Ecclesiastical Courts. He was neither a manufacturer, nor a trader, nor a merchant, nor a gentleman farmer. He was not a member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, or the London Institution, or the Artisan’s Association, or the Russell Institution, or the Literary Institution of the West, or the Law Institute, or that Institute of the Arts and Sciences, placed under the direct patronage of Her Gracious Majesty. In fact, he belonged to none of the numerous societies that swarm in the capital of England, from the Harmonic to the Entomological Society, founded principally for the purpose of destroying hurtful insects.
Phileas Fogg was a member of the Reform Club, and that was all.
Should anyone be astonished that such a mysterious gentleman should be among the members of this honourable institution, we will reply that he obtained admission on the recommendation of Baring Brothers, with whom he had an open credit. Thence a certain appearance due to his cheques being regularly paid at sight by the debit of his account current, which was always to his credit.
Was this Phileas Fogg rich? Undoubtedly. But the best informed could not say how he had made his money, and Mr Fogg was the last person to whom it would have been proper to go for information. He was by no means extravagant in anything, neither was he avaricious, for when money was needed for a noble, useful, or benevolent purpose, he gave it quietly, and even anonymously. In short, no one was less communicative than this gentleman. He talked as little as possible, and seemed much more mysterious than silent. But his life was open to the light, but what he did was always so mathematically the same thing, that the imagination, unsatisfied, sought further.
Had he travelled? It was probable, for none knew the world better than he; there was no spot so secluded that he did not appear to have a special acquaintance with it. Sometimes, in a few, brief, clear words, he would correct the thousand suppositions circulating in the Club with reference to travellers lost or strayed; he pointed out the true probabilities, and so often did events justify his predictions that he seemed as if gifted with a sort of second sight. He was a man who must have travelled everywhere, in spirit at least.
One thing was certain, that for many years Phileas Fogg had not been from London. Those who had the honour of knowing him more intimately than others, affirmed that no one could pretend to have seen him elsewhere than upon the direct route, which he traversed every day to go from his house to the Club. His only pastime was reading the papers and playing whist. He frequently won at this quiet game, so very appropriate to his nature; but his winnings never went into his purse, and made an important item in his charity fund. Besides, it must be remarked, that Mr Fogg evidently played for the sake of playing, not to win. The game was for him a contest, a struggle against a difficulty; but a motionless, unwearying struggle, and that suited his character.
Phileas Fogg was not known to have either wife or children—which may happen to the most respectable people—neither relatives nor friends—which is more rare, truly. Phileas Fogg lived alone in his house in Saville Row, where nobody entered. There was never a question as to its interior. A single servant sufficed to serve him. Breakfasting and dining at the Club, at hours fixed with the utmost exactness, in the same hall, at the same table, not entertaining his colleagues nor inviting a stranger, he returned home only to go to bed, exactly at midnight, without ever making use of the comfortable chambers which the Reform Club puts at the disposal of its favoured members. Of the twenty-four hours he passed ten at his residence either sleeping or busying himself at his toilet. If he walked, it was invariably with a regular step in the entrance hall with its Mosaic floor, or in the circular gallery, above which rose a dome with blue-painted windows, supported by twenty Ionic columns of red porphyry. If he dined or breakfasted, the kitchens, the buttery, the pantry, the dairy of the Club furnished his table from their succulent stores; the waiters of the Club, grave personages in dress-coats and shoes with swanskin soles, served him in a special porcelain and on fine Saxon linen; the Club decanters of a lost mould contained his sherry, his port, and his claret, flavoured with orange flower water and cinnamon; and finally the ice of the Club, brought at great expense from the American lakes, kept his drinks in a satisfactory condition of freshness.
If to live in such conditions is to be eccentric, it must be granted that eccentricity has something good in it!
The mansion on Saville Row, without being sumptuous, recommended itself by its extreme comfort. Besides with the unvarying habits of the occupants, the number of servants was reduced to one. But Phileas Fogg demanded from his only servant an extraordinary and regular punctuality. This very day, the second of October, Phileas Fogg had dismissed James Forster—this youth having incurred his displeasure by bringing him shaving-water at eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit, instead of eighty-six—and he was waiting for his successor, who was to make his appearance between eleven and half-past eleven.
Phileas Fogg, squarely seated in his armchair, his feet close together like those of a soldier on parade, his hands resting on his knees, his body straight, his head erect, was watching the hand of the clock move—a complicated mechanism which indicated the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the days, the days of the month, and the year. At the stroke of half-past eleven Mr Fogg would, according to his daily habit, leave his house and repair to the Reform Club.
At this moment, there was a knock at the door of the small parlour in which was Phileas Fogg.
James Forster, the dismissed servant, appeared.
“The new servant,” said he.
A young man, aged thirty years, came forward and bowed.
“You are a Frenchman, and your name is John?” Phileas Fogg asked him.
“Jean, if it does not displease Monsieur,” replied the newcomer. “Jean Passepartout, a surname which has clung to me and which my natural aptitude for withdrawing from a business has justified. I believe, sir, that I am an honest fellow; but to be frank, I have had several trades. I have been a travelling singer; a circus rider, vaulting like Leotard, and dancing on the rope like Blondin; then I became professor of gymnastics, in order to render my talents more useful; and in the last place, I was a sergeant fireman at Paris. I have among my papers notes of remarkable fires. But five years have passed since I left France, and wishing to have a taste of family life, I have been a valet in England. Now, finding myself out of a situation, and having learned that Monsieur Phileas Fogg was the most exact and the most settled gentleman in the United Kingdom, I have presented myself to monsieur with the hope of living tranquilly with him, and of forgetting even the name of Passepartout.”
“Passepartout suits me,” replied the gentleman. “You are recommended to me. I have good reports concerning you. You know my conditions?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what time have you?”
“Twenty-two minutes after eleven,” replied Passepartout, drawing from the depths of his pocket an enormous silver watch.
“You are slow,” said Mr Fogg.
“Pardon me, monsieur, but it is impossible.”
“You are four minutes too slow. It does not matter. It suffices to state the difference. Then, from this moment—twenty-nine minutes after eleven o’clock a.m., this Wednesday, October 2, 1872, you are in my service.”
That said, Phileas Fogg rose, took his hat in his left hand, placed it upon his head with an automatic movement, and disappeared without another word.
Passepartout heard the street door close once; it was his new master going out; then a second time; it was his predecessor, James Forster, departing in his turn. Passepartout remained alone in the house in Saville Row.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_651416bb-e5c8-595b-9427-c26181d22978)
In which Passepartout is Convinced that he has Found his ideal
