80 Days Glossary

The Reform Club, an exclusive gentleman's club that Phileas Fogg frequented, was founded in 1836 and designed by architect Sir Charles Barry. It is located on Pall Mall in central London. Barry based his design on the Farnese Palace in Rome. The name of the club is derived from the Liberal Party’s 1832 legislative masterpiece, The Reform Bill, which gave more than just the aristocracy the right to vote. This splendid clubhouse is still in existence today and has admitted ladies since 1981.

Barings Bank, where Fogg deposited the 20,000 pounds, was founded in 1762 by Sir Francis Baring. It was one of the oldest and most respected banking institutions in the world until 1995 when one of the bank's employees, Nick Leeson, lost £827 million through unsupervised speculative trading.

Fogg starts his journey from Charing Cross railway station. The station was built in 1864 and was one of the grandest Victorian stations in London. The name originates from the cross put there by King Edward I as a memorial to his wife, Eleanor of Castile, at the former hamlet of Charing. Today, Charing Cross is one of the busiest stations in the country and connects London with the south of England.

Counting rooms, or counting houses, were establishments responsible for finances, monetary transactions and record keeping. Today, they are referred to as accounting departments or business offices.

A story in The Daily Telegraph estimates that a man could literally travel around the world in 80 days and spurs Fogg to enter into a wager. The Daily Telegraph, a fairly new communication invention, was founded in London in 1855. By 1877, it had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world. Today, the Telegraph remains the highest-selling British broadsheet with a daily circulation of 882,413.

Fogg refers to himself as Phileas Fogg, Esquire. The term Esquire is British in origin and denotes social status. Ultimately deriving from the medieval squires who assisted knights, the term came to be used automatically by men of gentle birth. Thus, use of the word represented nothing more than the claim to be a gentleman. More specifically, though, a distinction was made between men of the upper and lower gentry, who were "esquires" and "gentlemen," respectively. Today, particularly in the United States, it is used to indicate licensed attorneys.

Fogg thinks the local bank thief could be a barrister. A barrister is a British lawyer who usually pleads in the higher courts and still exists in England today.

Research for this article was obtained at www.wikipedia.org.