Around the World in Eighty Days

"You have made a mistake of one day! We arrived twenty-four hours ahead of time; but there are only ten minutes left!" Phileas Fogg had accomplished the journey round the world in eighty days!

A wager creates a clean route-and-deadline engine; travel mishaps convert into the eastward date-line trick that pays off the bet, so plot scores 89.

Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention.

Fogg's reserve, Passepartout's animation, Fix's misreading, and Aouda's stake create useful contrasts; Fogg's enigmatic clockwork persona anchors the quartet, so cast scores 87.

In order to shorten the journey, the guide passed to the left of the line where the railway was still in process of being built. Phileas Fogg and Sir Francis Cromarty, plunged to the neck in the peculiar howdahs provided for them, were horribly jostled by the swift trotting of the elephant.

Missed connections, purchases, rescues, and transports continually force the next leg; the elephant charter typifies how each obstacle resets the deadline clock, so pace scores 95.

He talked very little, and seemed all the more mysterious for his taciturn manner. His daily habits were quite open to observation; but whatever he did was so exactly the same thing that he had always done before.

Brisk explanatory narration favors clarity and comic precision over ornament; the prose renders Fogg's phlegmatic routine with deadpan economy, so prose scores 87.

From London to Suez _viâ_ Mont Cenis and Brindisi, by rail and steamboats ................. 7 days. From Suez to Bombay, by steamer .................... 13 days. From Bombay to Calcutta, by rail ................... 3 days.

Steamship, rail, telegraph, money, and colonial travel infrastructure form the story's operative map; the printed timetable makes global modernity legible as plot machinery, so world scores 92.

"In eighty days," interrupted Phileas Fogg. "That is true, gentlemen," added John Sullivan. "Only eighty days, now that the section between Rothal and Allahabad, on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, has been opened."

Fogg's clockwork household makes a globe-circling deadline immediately consequential; the wager crystallizes in this exchange before he stakes twenty thousand pounds, so hook scores 93.

Phileas Fogg had, without suspecting it, gained one day on his journey, and this merely because he had travelled constantly _eastward;_ he would, on the contrary, have lost a day had he gone in the opposite direction.

Turns global modernity and the date line into a popular adventure mechanism—the calendar trick is seeded by geography and pays off both wager and romance, so innov scores 95.

"No doubt," returned Mr. Fogg, "by not crossing India. But if I had not crossed India, I should not have saved Aouda; she would not have been my wife, and—" Mr. Fogg quietly shut the door.

The lost day is fairly seeded by eastward travel and pays off both wager and romance; Fogg's quiet door-shut reframes victory as happiness not money, so ending scores 94.