Themes

Speed and accuracy were ideals of the nineteenth century, an age where technology promised everything (the urban squalor, industrial pollution, and exploitation, cause by industrialization do not appear in Verne's early works). Man is in control of his machines, just as Phileas Fogg uses them to overcome all obstacles. It is the mastery of technology which is really what the whole journey is about. "After all, what did Fogg gain from his wager and efforts?" asks the author at the conclusion of his novel. "What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so, nothing but a charming woman who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!" But the reader knows that romance has not been the goal of the eccentric Englishman and that his pleasure lies in the accomplishment of what science had promised him, and which...