Around the World in Eighty Days, Chapters Fifteen to Seventeen

In which the bag with the bank notes is relieved of a few thousand pounds more; Fix has not the appearance of knowing anything about the matters concerning which they talk to him; one thing and another is talked about during the trip from Singapore to Hong Kong; and in which the narrator is pleased that he gets to use his jowly voice, because he likes his jowly voice.



That's enough of India! on to Hong Kong! And welcome to our new major cast member, Mrs. Auoda (and yes, she's "Mrs." in the book, even though she was unwillingly wed and her husband is now dead, but WHATEVER, Nineteenth Century.)

6:15 - "'My shoes!' cried Passepartout."

12:09 - "On every occasion she showed him the liveliest gratitude."

21:15 - "Once or twice only he had a glimpse of Mr. Fogg."

24:03 - "It is charming, even in its meagerness."

Weirdly, no notes this time around. I guess it all seemed more or less straightforward. Maybe I'll take that time to make a correction: In the first installment, I gave some current values for the sums of money being discussed, to put them into context we can understand in 2014. Well, I think I calculated them the wrong way 'round. See, I used an inflation calculator to figure out what the value would be in modern British money, then used current exchange rates to figure out what that would be in US dollars. Upon reflection, it would probably be more accurate to convert the amounts to dollars using historical exchange rates, and then use inflation to bring it up to the modern day. Doing this, we see that the £55,000 stolen from the bank would actually be about $5.7 million today, and the £20,000 wager translates to about $2 million today. Slightly less than my initial estimation, but still pretty considerable sums of money.

Hmm. Actually, that math works out pretty well. Looks like any time you hear an amount in pounds in this book, multiply by 100 and you'll get a pretty close estimate of what it would be in modern dollars. That's easy.


If you would like to read along, I unfortunately can't find my translation by Stephen W. White online, but the George Towele translation can be found at Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, which is also where I got the illustrations, or the more accurate but rather fusty Henry Frith translation at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!