![]() The picture of a Japanese village below was used in his book. The real Mr Fogg, however, took much more interest, as a few selections below demonstrate, in which he describes the ship, the terrors of a cyclone, and his first arrival in Japan. And like Phileas, William used the Suez Canal – which had opened not long beforehand, in 1869 – but again in the other direction, heading to Egypt.Īlthough Jules Verne provides some narratorial details of the places his protagonist visited, sometimes seen through manservant Passepartout’s eyes, Phileas Fogg himself was a self-contained character with little interest in the places he passed through:Īlways the same impassible member of the Reform Club, whom no incident could surprise, as unvarying as the ship’s chronometers, and seldom having the curiosity even to go upon the deck, he passed through the memorable scenes of the Red Sea with cold indifference… William Perry Fogg visited many of the places that his fictional counterpart did, although generally in the opposite direction: Phileas went by train from San Francisco through Salt Lake City, but William the other way before that, Phileas went from India to China and Japan, but William again the opposite. My motive was not merely the pursuit of pleasure, but the desire to gratify a long-cherished passion to see once in my lifetime the strange and curious nations of the Orient, books of travel among whom have always had for me a strange fascination. Over the next two years he wrote a series of letters, mostly published in the Cleveland Leader newspaper (and then as a book in May 1872), with others using the pseudonym Nebula in the Cleveland Daily Herald. His trip to Japan in 1870 is believed to have been one of the first by an American. Initially he visited every state in the US (at that point there were 37 of them), Canada and the West Indies, before becoming more ambitious. In 1868, however, wanderlust took over and he set off on the first of his travels. The real Mr Fogg was born in New Hampshire in the United States and then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he became a pillar of the community, selling china, supporting descendants of New England pioneers and helping to run the city. But this week in Histories I give you a snapshot of the adventures of William Perry Fogg (1826–1909). The pioneering travel agency firm Thomas Cook & Son organised a round-the-world tour in 1872. One of them was the American businessman and presidential hopeful George Francis Train, who made a real 80-day world trip in 1870. I say ‘in the original’, but Jules Verne can hardly claim to have invented the core idea of the journey – you can read about the various apparent influences in more detail here, but several people in his era had tried using the then relatively new technologies of railways and steamships to circumnavigate the globe against the clock. You can follow my misadventures on Twitter here or through the hashtag #londonfogg. When this newsletter goes out, I will (hopefully!) have just finished my own little homage to the voyage, ‘Around the World in Eight Hours’, in which I walk more than 20 miles across central London against the clock, visiting places which in some way represent or relate to every country visited by Phileas Fogg in the original and unearthing some interesting corners of history in the process. ![]() This year will see the 150th anniversary of the first publication, in serial form, of Jules Verne’s classic adventure narrative, Around the World in Eighty Days, and there has already been a new TV adaptation. In a few minutes I was on deck, and no one, unless he has been for twenty-five days without seeing land or even a sail, can appreciate our delight as we gazed on the scene… ![]()
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