The Wager

Having eaten breakfast in the style to which he is accustomed, all ‘washed down with several cups of tea, for which the Reform is famous’, Fogg turns to the day’s papers. However, he is distracted from digesting both his food and the news by a conversation between friends. Emerging from behind his copy of the Daily Telegraph, Fogg joins his chums in their card-playing discussion of a recent robbery at the Bank of England. The British police are in pursuit of the well-dressed gentleman thief. Some of Fogg’s associates speculate that because ‘the world has grown smaller, since a man can now go round it ten times more quickly than a hundred years ago‘, the constabulary will have the edge on this shrewd fellow. Fogg agrees, speculating that since the opening of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway one might go around the entire world in just ‘eighty days’.