No matter, for Verne was a novelist, not an inventor and his application of science and technology was all about creating the necessary illusion to make the reader believe in the adventure. By the time anyone knew any better he and his readership were consigned to history.
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Table of Contents
CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
In which Phileas Fogg and Passepartout accept each other—the one as Master, the other as Servant
In the year 1872, the house No. 7 Saville Row, Burlington Gardens—the house in which Sheridan died, in 1814—was inhabited by Phileas Fogg, Esq., one of the most singular and most noticed members of the Reform Club of London, although he seemed to take care to do nothing which might attract attention.
This Phileas Fogg, then, an enigmatic personage, of whom nothing was known but that he was a very polite man, and one of the most perfect gentlemen of good English society, succeeded one of the great orators that honour England.
An Englishman Phileas Fogg was surely, but perhaps not a Londoner. He was never seen on ‘Change, at the Bank, or in any of the counting-rooms of the “City.” The docks of London had never received a vessel fitted out by Phileas Fogg. This gentleman did not figure in any public body. His name had never sounded in any Inns of Court, nor in the Temple, nor Lincoln’s Inn, nor Gray’s Inn. He never pleaded in the Court of Chancery, nor the Queen’s Bench, nor the Exchequer, nor the Ecclesiastical Courts. He was neither a manufacturer, nor a trader, nor a merchant, nor a gentleman farmer. He was not a member of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, or the London Institution, or the Artisan’s Association, or the Russell Institution, or the Literary Institution of the West, or the Law Institute, or that Institute of the Arts and Sciences, placed under the direct patronage of Her Gracious Majesty. In fact, he belonged to none of the numerous societies that swarm in the capital of England, from the Harmonic to the Entomological Society, founded principally for the purpose of destroying hurtful insects.
Phileas Fogg was a member of the Reform Club, and that was all.
Should anyone be astonished that such a mysterious gentleman should be among the members of this honourable institution, we will