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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Around the World in Eighty Days, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Modernity, Time, and Control
Imperialism
Chance, Adventure, and Human Connection
Honor, Reputation, and Duty
Summary
Analysis
Phileas Fogg lives alone in a mansion at No. 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens in London, England. He is a member of the exclusive Reform Club social organization and has a reputation of being worldly despite his mysterious, solitary nature. Mr. Fogg is wealthy and generous, yet no one knows how he earns his fortune. He has no family or close relationships and opts to spend every day reading newspapers and betting on games of whist at the Reform, “not to win, but for the sake of playing.”
Fogg’s reclusive nature suggests that he does not consider human connection to be an important value, though he clearly holds a high social status in Victorian England due to his wealth and upright reputation. His interest in gambling as a challenge, rather than a means of earning money, foreshadows his ongoing willingness to put his faith in random chance.
Themes
Fogg is eccentric and extremely particular about his daily schedule, meals, and habits—he carefully observes a clock in his house that displays the hours, minutes, seconds, days, months, and years. Mr. Fogg even fires his servant for bringing him shaving water that is two degrees cooler than he prefers. He hires a new servant named Jean Passepartout, a Frenchman who hopes that working in a domestic setting will be a relaxing change from his formerly adventurous life.
Around the World in Eighty Days takes place in 1872, just after the Industrial Revolution. Fogg’s strict lifestyle is a caricature of how the industrialized workplace bled over into people’s personal lives, as they became more routinized in their habits to conform with an increasingly mechanized and scheduled world.
Themes
Literary Devices
