Oftentimes when I read a book of its time I try my best to look past the weirdness that’s built into its age and meet it where it is. Honestly, Around the World in 80 Days isn’t really worth doing that. I’m conflicted about this: this is a very influential work, obviously, but it’s also one where the culture has moved effectively past its influence and the impact is dulled. This means that there’s less payoff than there should be for the racism, sexism, and general weirdness of the story.
Phileas Fogg is a deeply coded-autistic character of unclear means who bets his entire fortune and basically bankrupts himself on merit of a bet with his random friends from the club, saying he could make it around the world in 80 days. The rest of the story details how this happens. It’s not uninteresting: the whole thing sort of functions as a logic puzzle, and indeed I believe this was used to teach longitude to me in school. That’s cool, but it falls into a lot of the same issues that most 19th century literature does. There is a lot of worship thrown at the feet of colonial Britain, suggesting they’ve done great things for China… as they detail the impacts of the illegal opium trade. Similarly there are treatments of the Sioux Indians, as well as the traditional buffalo herds, as nuisances. As I read that potion I could only think of the old propaganda poster saying something to the tune of “every buffalo killed is a red man dead.”
The past is a different country, they do things differently there. All the same, I didn’t super like this one very much. If there’s a story worth missing in my work back through classic lit, this is one.