The author Jules Verne describes the quintessential Englishman in the person of Phileas Fogg – precise, self-assured, and capable. Set in 1872, the adventure novel Around the World in Eighty Days describes Fogg’s attempt to defy his critics by circumnavigating the globe with his French servant Jean Passepartout in a matter of eighty days, beginning and concluding his travels in London.
Being an adventure novel, it is not steeped in political or philosophical content. But as over one hundred and fifty years have passed since the book’s publication, a modern retrospective cannot help but address a number of things which stand out to the reader.
The nineteenth century
It is difficult to look at a modern atlas and fully digest the sheer scale of the globe. The distance along the equator is nearly twenty-five thousand miles, though the advent of the aeroplane has made such distances feel small. At the time of the novel’s publication, the Blue Riband, an unofficial accolade bestowed upon the ship which crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the least possible time, was in the hands of the sailors of the City of Brussels. This screw steamer made the journey in a matter of seven days, twenty hours, and thirty-three minutes. And while such a voyage is crossed in mere hours by modern aircraft, the mighty steamship then served as a symbol of mankind’s ascendancy to a position of incomprehensible power and might.
To cross such a vast expanse of water in so few days was a great feat – a mark of the advances in science and engineering seen in the nineteenth century. In the book, Fogg’s schedule accords with the nine-day journey of the fictional China steamboat eastward across the Atlantic. And while the narrative presents such innovations as unreliable, hence why Fogg’s journey was met with so much skepticism, Fogg is unwavering in his resolve. When a train line is incomplete, he takes an elephant to convey them across the gap. When he narrowly misses the departure of the China from New York, he commandeers the Henrietta instead and pays through the nose to set sail for Dublin.
In contrast, less than ninety years later, Soviet Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made orbit the earth in one hundred and eight minutes, less than two hours. That, alongside satellites and airliners, must only further blur our understanding of the size of earth, over half a billion square kilometers in its surface area. Just as the world figuratively shrinks, so too does our ability to understand the people who lived in antiquity, for whom the skies were limitless, for whom mountaintops were left untrodden, and for whom the oceans stretched further than the imagination.
We can no longer fully appreciate what a fantastical feat that Fogg manages to pull off, because there may never again be a time when a person cannot be anywhere in the world in a matter of a few days. It would be foolish for us to think that this does not distort our understanding of the world around us. It is only because of the vast sum of human ingenuity that we can travel around the world in fewer than eighty days, let alone in a day. A single man cannot, for all his talents, understand everything his compatriots have accomplished to make such feats remotely possible. We are limited and fragile beings. Mankind lives at the mercy of the world around him, and no matter how long he avoids it, his mortality will knock on his door eventually.
The death of an empire
Verne, a Frenchman, was born into the Kingdom of France, and reposed in the French Third Republic. He himself, was not a Briton. His portrayal of the British Empire was born neither of chauvinism nor of allegiance. It was a statement of fact. There is a reason that in those days it was known as “the empire on which the sun never sets”. It had every right to be known as such. Fogg makes his journey from London to Suez, then to Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York, and then back to London. While journeying across India, and also while in Hong Kong, Phileas Fogg is safely in the dominion of the English (and by extension under the authority of the English laws).
Fogg is trailed by a detective who has mistaken him for a notorious fugitive, For what is a substantial part of the journey, Fogg is at risk of being arrested, only avoiding such a catastrophe by spending so little time in the ports of English control, always at sea one step ahead of a pending arrest warrant.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, HM Queen Victoria reigned over approximately one fifth of the earth’s landmass, and a quarter of its population. In the years to come, it would expand only further, the largest empire in history, surpassing even the Mongol Empire of the High Middle Ages. Of course, after the Great War, it bankrupted itself and more quickly than it had grown, shrunk in a matter of decades. Poor strategic decisions in the war against Nazi Germany only served to accelerate its decline. Indeed, its overseas territories now cover an area lesser in size than the island nation of Fiji. Its sorry status as a vassal state of the United States was cruelly enshrined when the latter used intense political and economic pressure to force the United Kingdom to withdraw from the territory they conquered.
Far from being the power that once brought industry, laid railways, and exerted control over commerce, the Britain described in Verne’s book has long since ceased to exist, along with the sorts of people you would find therein. In its place sits the British rump state. No longer does it possess foreign cosmopolitan ports teeming with foreign merchants and sailors, rather its own cities now house those from abroad.
Yes, Verne was a Frenchman, and in those days, there was no love lost between the English and the French. But Verne despite this depicts that now lost empire in very fair―perhaps even complimentary―terms, for all its faults and limitations (of those there were many, to be certain). Ultimately, the sun has long ago set on John Bull’s empire, and one must now content himself with the new global empires which govern our affairs in the modern age.
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