1872 Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a novel with a calendar at its narrative heart. The novel’s hero is Phileas Fogg, the incarnation of Anglo-Saxon sang-froid (his surname, however, indicates a lingering Gallic anglophobia – we may admire the rosbifs, but who would want to live there?).
Phileas lays a bet with his fellow Reform Club members that he can – using the latest transport systems (as advertised in the Daily Telegraph) – circumnavigate the globe ‘in eighty days or less; in nineteen hundred and twenty hours, or a hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred minutes’. He will leave England on 2 October, and return on – or before – ‘Saturday the 21st of December 1872’, at a quarter to nine. This narrative idea was supposedly inspired by Thomas Cook, catering for the first generation of world ‘tourists’.
There follows Verne’s extravagant travelogue of Fogg’s worldwide peregrinations, assisted by his omnicompetent ‘man’, Passepartout (ancestor of Jeeves). Alas, despite heroic efforts, they miss the return deadline of Saturday, 21 December by minutes. Disconsolate, they do not go to the club but slink home.
The following day (Sunday, as the two men think) – again with minutes only to spare – Passepartout rushes into his master’s mansion in Savile Row. It is, he breathlessly announces, a day earlier than they thought. They have forgotten, in all the excitement of their travels, crossing the date line. The two men scamper the 576 yards to the Reform Club, arriving breathless but just under the wire, as the club clock pendulum beats the 60th second.
Verne tells his tale with such verve that the reader generously overlooks the unlikelihood of Fogg not looking at his Daily Telegraph, or not noticing the difference between lively Saturday and gloomy Sunday in foggy London Town.