Mr Fogg’s Hat Tavern Review: The Fourth Fogg, and He Still Does Not Exist

Phileas Fogg is fictional, and there are now four bars in this survey named after his belongings

Mr Fogg’s Hat Tavern holds a 4.6 from seven hundred and fifty people, charges ten to forty pounds, and it is the fourth Fogg in this survey.

There is a Society of Exploration. There is a Gin Parlour. There is a Residence. And now there is a Hat Tavern.

All of them are named after the possessions and premises of a man who has never existed.

Phileas Fogg

He is the protagonist of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, and he is one of the strangest heroes in fiction.

He does almost nothing. He does not look at anything. He crosses the entire world and he is described, repeatedly, as having no interest whatsoever in what he is passing through.

He plays whist. He reads the paper. He calculates.

The whole novel is a machine about punctuality, and its hero is a man with no visible inner life at all, and Verne knew exactly what he was doing.

The bet

Which is the plot, and which is worth being precise about.

He does not travel for adventure, or for curiosity, or for love. He does it because he has made a wager at the Reform Club for twenty thousand pounds, which is half his fortune.

He is not an explorer. He is a man settling a bet, on a schedule, with a stopwatch.

And the famous ending – the one everybody has forgotten – is that he thinks he has lost, and he has not, because he travelled eastward and gained a day and did not notice.

The entire novel turns on the International Date Line, and Verne is quietly making a point about a man so obsessed with time that he lost a whole day of it without looking up.

Four bars

The Prat’s naming desk has now completed a full accounting across five postcodes and would like to record the following.

Wellington has five pubs and despised his own fame. Shakespeare has several and is missing a hand. Churchill has the most photographed pub in Britain and it was named forty-eight years before he was born.

And Phileas Fogg, who is made up, has four – which puts a fictional Victorian whist player ahead of most of the actual people in this survey.

He joins Theodore Bullfrog, who never existed either and who has a pub in Covent Garden, and Sherlock Holmes, who was never born and has a stuffed hound.

The bar

Genuinely good, well-made drinks, and a 4.6 across a real sample – and the Fogg group have never once broken character in five postcodes, which is a discipline worth acknowledging.

Verdict

Excellent bar. Go, drink well, and raise one to a man who went round the world and did not look out of the window.

Eighty days, and why it was possible

The novel is a hymn to infrastructure and almost nobody reads it that way.

Fogg’s journey is only feasible in 1872 because of three things that had all been completed within a few years of each other: the Suez Canal, opened 1869; the American transcontinental railway, completed 1869; and the linking of the Indian railways across the subcontinent.

Verne is not writing about a man. He is writing about the moment the world became small enough to be circled on a timetable.

And the entire plot depends on the trains running on time, which is the most Victorian premise in literature.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]