Jules Verne
Around the World in Eighty Days
Engraved after Gustave Doré
- 30 plates
- Gustave Doré
The book
An Englishman of implacable routine bets half his fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days, and sets off within the hour with a new valet and no luggage. He is pursued the whole way by a detective who believes he is a bank robber.
Why Gustave Doré
Verne's novels were illustrated from the start. Hetzel published them as the 'Voyages Extraordinaires' with hundreds of wood engravings by Édouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville and Léon Benett — and those engravings are so bound to the books that most readers cannot picture the Nautilus without them.
Doré was in that same Paris, in those same decades, working the same medium with the same engravers' studios, and he was better at it than any of them. He never took a Verne commission. So this is not a translation into a foreign idiom — it is the original idiom, with the period's strongest hand doing the drawing.
What to look for
Places rather than events. The book is a catalogue of nineteenth-century transport and the cities strung along it, and Doré — who had already drawn London from the inside — is the hand for a world seen at speed from a carriage window.
