Around the World in Eighty Days: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

At 11:30 AM, Fogg goes about his typical routine of walking to the Reform Club, where he eats breakfast and reads newspapers until the dinner hour. After his evening meal, he plays whist with his usual partners: Andrew Stuart, John Sullivan, Samuel Fallentin, Thomas Flanagan, and Gauthier Ralph. Like Fogg, these men are wealthy and highly respectable members of the Reform Club.

While they play whist, the men discuss a recent robbery of £55,000 from the Bank of England by a “well-to-do” gentleman. Detectives were sent to ports throughout England and a hefty reward was offered in attempts to recover the money. Stuart thinks that “the world is big enough” for the thief to escape, but Fogg and Ralph believe that the world has grown smaller, since men can now travel around it ten times more quickly than they could a century ago.

Fogg and Sullivan figure that it only takes eighty days to go around the world by train and steamboat: London to Suez, Suez to Bombay, Bombay to Calcutta, Calcutta to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Yokohama, Yokohama to San Francisco, San Francisco to New York, and New York to London. Stuart is skeptical of this, and bets Fogg £4,000 that he cannot make the trip in such a short amount of time.

Fogg accepts the challenge, wagering £20,000 of his own, and the other men agree to the bet. He declares that he will catch the train to Dover, England at 8:45 PM that evening, October 2nd, and will be due back at the Reform Club at 8:45 PM on December 21st, exactly eighty days later.