Phileas Fogg

Phileas Fogg is the protagonist in the 1872 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Inspirations for the character were the American entrepreneur George Francis Train and American writer and adventurer William Perry Fogg. Fogg is a man of independent means and is a gentleman who is “exact”, as in he has a perfect routine and life right down to the number of steps he walks to the temperature of his shaving water. Having fired a servant for providing him with shaving water at a slightly incorrect temperature, he hires Jean Passepartout as a valet. Fogg makes a wager of £20,000 (£2.3 million in 2023) with members of London’s Reform Club that he can circumnavigate the world in 80 days or fewer. He sets out with his French servant Jean Passepartout to win the wager, unaware that he is being followed by a detective named Fix, who suspects Fogg of having robbed the Bank of England. Fix spends the first half of the book trying to delay Fogg’s journey to keep him in British territory. However, after Fogg reaches America, Fix helps Fogg complete his bet to get him back to the United Kingdom, where he will be under British jurisdiction and Fix can arrest him (while still suspicious that Fogg will run off and go into hiding somewhere on the journey). While in India, Fogg saves a widowed princess, Aouda, from sati during her husband’s funeral and she accompanies Fogg for the rest of his journey after initial plans to take her to an uncle failed as the uncle had moved. Together, the trio have numerous exciting adventures which come to an abrupt end when he is arrested by Fix immediately upon their arrival back in Britain. Although Fogg is quickly exonerated of the crime, the delay caused by his false arrest appears to have cost him the wager. However, he learns from Passepartout that he has gained one calendar day during his travels, allowing him to reach the Reform Club just in time to meet his deadline and collect his winnings. He marries Aouda and divides the remainder of his travel money between Fix and Passepartout. In Albert Robida’s Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul (1879), Fogg appears in the narrative having gone on an attempt to travel the world again, this time in 77 days. He is portrayed as a serial saviour of ladies, having over three hundred rescued women accompanying him on his travels, which have lasted well over three years by the time he is introduced. In Philip José Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), he is said to be Eridanean, an Earth-born member of the more benevolent of two extraterrestrial factions attempting to control the Earth; Fogg is a member of Farmer’s Wold Newton family. Fogg’s adventures continue in Phileas Fogg and the War of Shadows and Phileas Fogg and the Heart of Orsra, both by Josh Reynolds, and in “Being an Account of the Delay at Green River, Wyoming, of Phileas Fogg, World Traveler, or, The Masked Man Meets an English Gentleman” by Win Scott Eckert.