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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Around the World in Seventy-Two Days," Nellie Bly masterfully chronicles her audacious journey to circumnavigate the globe in a mere 72 days'—an astonishing feat at the time that defied societal norms for women. Bly employs a journalistic style rich in vivid descriptions and experiential detail, immersing readers in both the triumphs and challenges of her daring expedition. Contextually, her work emerges from the late 19th century's burgeoning interest in travel narratives and the burgeoning field of investigative journalism, a domain largely dominated by men until her groundbreaking endeavors. Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Cochran, was a pioneering journalist whose innovative spirit and commitment to social reform propelled her into the public eye. After her groundbreaking expose on the mistreatment of patients in mental institutions, Bly sought to push boundaries further by embarking on an adventure that mirrored Jules Verne's fictional voyage. Her desire to illustrate the resilience of women and challenge gender stereotypes reverberates throughout her writing, making her an iconic figure in the realm of journalism and women's rights. This book is highly recommended for readers seeking both adventure and a deeper understanding of early feminist literature. Bly's work not only entertains but also inspires by showcasing one woman's determination to explore the world on her own terms. It is a testament to courage, curiosity, and the relentless spirit of a trailblazer. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Around the World in Seventy-Two Days
Table of Contents
Introduction
A lone reporter races the clock across oceans and continents to prove that the world—and a woman—could move faster than anyone dared imagine.
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days is Nellie Bly’s vivid account of her 1889–1890 circumnavigation, assembled from the dispatches she filed to the New York World and published as a book in 1890. Written at the height of the steam age, it chronicles a meticulously timed journey undertaken to test the limits of modern transport and to match an audacious literary challenge. Bly’s purpose was practical and symbolic: to demonstrate that a solo traveler could compress the globe into a lived itinerary, and to affirm a woman’s competence, composure, and authority in spaces long treated as exclusively male.
The book is considered a classic because it marries speed with substance, transforming a newspaper stunt into enduring literature. Bly fuses pace, precision, and personality, setting an early benchmark for immersive reportage while extending the horizons of travel writing. Her compact scenes, keen profiles, and clear-eyed observations capture a world in motion without losing the human scale. The narrative’s urgency mirrors its subject: timetables, tides, and rail connections become a plot engine. That blend of propulsion and perspective influenced later journalists and memoirists, establishing a model for first-person nonfiction that is both timely and timeless.
Nellie Bly—born Elizabeth Cochrane—was already renowned for investigative reporting when she proposed this journey to the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper. The trip unfolded in late 1889 and early 1890; the book, issued the same year, distilled her serialized reports into a cohesive narrative. Its premise is straightforward: begin in New York, maintain an unbroken path around the globe, and return as swiftly as the era’s steamships and railways allow. Bly’s intention was not to catalogue curiosities but to test the practicalities of movement, communication, and self-reliance across borders, writing for readers who followed every mile with breathless attention.
Bly’s technique is a study in narrative economy. She writes as a professional on deadline, shaping each stop into a precise scene that advances both itinerary and insight. Maritime schedules, railway corridors, and telegraph lines are not mere background but active forces, pressing the story forward and revealing the choreography of a connected world. Her first-person perspective grants the reader access to negotiations, delays, and fleeting encounters, yet she avoids indulgence, keeping the line taut between event and reflection. The result is a clean, forward-driving chronicle that balances curiosity with control and observation with momentum.
As a historical document, the book captures the late nineteenth century’s infrastructure at work. Steamships stitch coasts together; railways cut across empires; telegraph cables compress distance into minutes. Bly maps the emerging logistics of global modernity—not as abstraction but as experience measured in departures, arrivals, and the weight of a timetable. Readers glimpse port cities and junctions that function as hinges of an interconnected age. The narrative offers a contemporaneous record of how people, goods, and information moved, illuminating both the promise and the pressure of a world newly calibrated to speed and schedule.
Its cultural significance is equally pronounced. Traveling unaccompanied as a working reporter, Bly disrupted prevailing expectations about where women could go and what they could do. She presents competence and decisiveness as ordinary professional tools, making gender neither a spectacle nor an apology. The book thus enters feminist history not as a treatise but as evidence—a public demonstration that authority in the field belongs to whoever does the work. In doing so, Bly widened the imaginative and practical possibilities for women journalists and travelers, leaving a path that many would follow across the next century.
The publication history underscores its media impact. Serialized dispatches allowed readers to track progress in near-real time, a participatory excitement that the book preserves in cohesive form. The project arose within fierce newspaper competition, yet Bly’s voice keeps the focus on craft rather than promotion. She explains processes, navigates bureaucracy, and weighs risks with notable clarity, modeling what we now expect from enterprise reporting. The book shows how journalism can convert an engineered event into durable literature by privileging observation over hype, procedure over spectacle, and the disciplined accumulation of fact over romantic embellishment.
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days influenced both travel literature and reportage. Its brisk, fact-forward style anticipates later narrative nonfiction that pairs scene work with a reporter’s rigor. It helped solidify a tradition of first-person travel accounts grounded in verification rather than ornament, and it emboldened newspapers to support ambitious fieldwork by individual correspondents. The book also broadened the canon of travel writing by centering a woman’s professional perspective, encouraging successors who would treat movement as inquiry rather than tourism. Its legacy can be traced in subsequent globetrotting memoirs, investigative journeys, and deadline-driven narratives across media.
Reading the book today invites both admiration and scrutiny. It supplies a valuable contemporaneous view of ports, routes, and procedures, while reflecting the assumptions and frames of its era. Bly’s clear prose offers access to the period’s infrastructures and interactions, yet modern readers can contextualize her vantage point within broader histories of power and representation. The text rewards that layered approach: as a primary source, as a crafted narrative, and as a cultural artifact that reveals how the nineteenth century imagined itself. Its candor and compression make it particularly useful for understanding the lived logistics of global modernity.
For new readers, the book offers pace and presence: a controlled rush of deadlines, practical calculations, and closely observed encounters. Expect attentive detail about transit, communication, and the small decisions that keep an itinerary intact. Expect, too, a writer who values clarity, purpose, and the texture of ordinary challenges. Bly’s focus on process—tickets, timetables, and the choreography of transfers—creates a narrative architecture that is both concrete and suspenseful without relying on melodrama. In its pages, the world becomes legible through movement, and movement becomes meaningful through the discipline of recording it accurately and well.
Ultimately, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days endures because it crystallizes themes that remain urgent: ambition measured against time, curiosity disciplined by evidence, independence asserted through skill, and a planet felt as a network rather than a map. It is a testament to what reporting can do—turn velocity into knowledge and experience into record. Contemporary audiences find in it the exhilaration of purposeful travel and a reminder that technology reshapes not only distance but imagination. As literature, journalism, and cultural milestone, Bly’s book continues to speak with clarity about courage, craft, and the restless possibilities of a connected world.
Synopsis
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days is Nellie Bly’s journalistic account of her 1889–1890 attempt to circle the globe faster than the eighty days imagined by Jules Verne. Written in a clear, reportorial style, the book follows her from the moment she proposes the idea to the New York World through the logistics of preparing to travel alone with minimal baggage. Bly sets a practical goal: keep to mail-boat timetables, avoid unnecessary delays, and send dispatches en route. The narrative frames the journey as a test of modern transportation and communication, not as a travelogue of marvels, and records arrangements, timetables, and observations in sequence.
On November 14, 1889, Bly departs New York by steamship, beginning a closely timed itinerary. Crossing the Atlantic on the Augusta Victoria, she notes shipboard routines and the importance of punctual connections. On arrival in England, she moves quickly by rail toward London and on to the Continent to keep pace with scheduled mail steamers. A notable early episode is her visit to Jules Verne at Amiens, where the author of her model story greets her and examines her route. Encouraged but focused on time, she returns to the rails, mindful that missed trains or tides could expand a brief pause into days.
From the Channel coast, Bly travels by express trains through France and Italy to Brindisi, a key junction for the Peninsular and Oriental line. The book emphasizes the discipline of light travel: she carries a single small bag, one dress, basic toiletries, and a money belt, reducing delays at customs and stations. She records ticketing, passport formalities, and the coordination between rail and steamship. At Brindisi she boards a mail-boat bound for Egypt, noting how imperial routes knit together European capitals and Eastern ports. Her timing is governed by fixed sailings, and the narrative repeatedly highlights the cost of even minor schedule slips.
Through the Mediterranean to Port Said and the Suez Canal, Bly provides concise descriptions of coaling stops, canal traffic, and the controlled tempo of a convoy. She reports on the telegraph offices that let her newspaper track progress, illustrating how communication shadows transportation. Passing Ismailia and Suez, she remarks on desert vistas, labor along the banks, and the formalities of canal transit. The account remains time-conscious: every halt is measured against the itinerary, and she calculates margins for the next change of ship. The chaptered pacing mirrors legs of the route, each ending with a successful connection and renewed momentum.
Entering the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, Bly endures heat and variable seas en route to Aden and then Ceylon (Colombo). Ports appear as functional nodes: tenders, health inspections, customs, and the briefest shore excursions fitted into the mail-boat clock. She notes colonial administration, local transport like rickshaws, and commercial districts, but keeps description succinct to preserve the narrative’s focus on schedules. At Colombo, waiting and weather threaten delays, and she assesses contingency plans within the fixed web of departures. The book documents fellow passengers, officers, and the social rhythms aboard ship, all framed by her recurring calculations of miles, days, and tides.
From Ceylon the route threads through the Straits Settlements, stopping at Penang and Singapore, where Bly purchases a small monkey that becomes a light diversion. The itinerary continues to Hong Kong, a major transfer point for East Asian mail steamers. There she learns that another American journalist, Elizabeth Bisland, has been sent in the opposite direction to challenge her time, adding a real rival to the book’s clock. Bly outlines the logistics of ticket exchanges, baggage checks, and harbor transfers necessary to maintain pace. She records brief impressions of markets and street life, then secures passage onward toward Japan without losing a connection.
In Japan, principally at Yokohama, Bly observes orderly streets, theaters, and shops with concise, factual notes, then focuses on securing the fastest trans-Pacific steamer to San Francisco. She boards an American liner and details life at sea: weather shifts, engine troubles avoided, and daily noons when the ship’s position is fixed and her remaining margin calculated. The crossing of the International Date Line alters the calendar but not the underlying count of hours, and she marks the change with care. Reports continue by cable when possible, maintaining the World’s public tally. Ocean conditions hold steady enough to safeguard her planned arrival.
Landfall on the California coast initiates the most compressed stage. The World arranges a special train from Oakland eastward, coordinating locomotives, crews, and right-of-way to eliminate layovers. Bly’s narrative becomes a sequence of rapid stops: fuel, water, engine changes, and crowds gathering at stations to cheer the progress they have read about. Winter mountains and prairie stretches are crossed on a strict timetable, with telegraphers announcing the train’s approach town by town. She notes interviews on platforms, gifts and flowers, and the constant recalculation of whether the schedule will hold across the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, and the plains to the Mississippi.
The final dash through the Northeast brings Bly to Jersey City on January 25, 1890, completing the circuit in seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes. The book closes by noting confirmations of time, public receptions, and the outcome of the rival race, which she wins by several days. Across its chapters, the work’s central message is practical: modern transport and telegraphy compress distances, and a determined traveler, even alone and lightly equipped, can traverse the globe within fixed timetables. Presented as a straightforward record rather than a romantic tale, Bly’s account links journalism, publicity, and precise planning to a measurable result.
Historical Context
Nellie Bly’s Around the World in Seventy-Two Days is set in the late Victorian and Gilded Age moment of 1889–1890, when transoceanic steamers, intercontinental railways, and the electric telegraph condensed distances and reorganized time. New York City, the book’s point of departure and return, was a booming press capital, its harbor tied to German, British, and American shipping lines. The urban newsroom of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World provided the staging ground for a public experiment in speed, publicity, and modernity. Bly’s itinerary threaded through imperial port cities and commercial corridors whose infrastructures—docks, coaling stations, customs sheds, and telegraph offices—were products of industrial capitalism and empire.
The narrative traverses the Atlantic, continental Europe, the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, the Pacific, and North America’s transcontinental rail. These were not neutral spaces but engineered routes policed by colonial authorities, synchronized by the 1884 adoption of Greenwich as the prime meridian, and scheduled by steamship conferences and mail contracts. Bly moved through Southampton, Calais, Brindisi, Port Said, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton, Yokohama, San Francisco, and across the American interior. Her journey revealed a world stitched together by coal, cables, and capital, yet stratified by class, race, and gender, whose hierarchies she navigated and implicitly interrogated as a solo woman traveler.
The Second Industrial Revolution (circa 1870–1914) transformed long-distance travel through steel rails, standardized gauges, air brakes, and triple-expansion marine engines propelling iron and steel ships faster and farther. Scheduled liners linked New York to Southampton in under a week, while European trunk lines connected to Mediterranean mail ports feeding the eastern routes. Bly’s initial crossing on the Hamburg America Line’s Augusta Victoria illustrates the rise of luxury steamship travel alongside mass migration in steerage. Her precise timetables depended on interlocking private and state infrastructures whose reliability made a seventy-two-day circumnavigation conceivable, turning Jules Verne’s fiction into a logistical challenge measured by minutes, coal bunkers, and connections.
The Suez Canal, built 1859–1869 under Ferdinand de Lesseps and opened on 17 November 1869, halved the sea distance between Europe and Asia by eliminating the Cape route. After Britain’s 1882 occupation of Egypt, British control of the canal secured imperial communications with India and the Far East. Ports like Port Said and Ismailia became coaling and quarantine stations; toll revenues and tonnage soared in the 1880s. Bly’s passage through Suez—regulated by health inspections, pilots, and convoy schedules—epitomized how a single engineering work reoriented global trade and travel. Her reliance on canal punctuality underscores the extent to which modern speed rested on colonial governance and maritime bureaucracy.
Submarine telegraph cables completed a planetary news network by the 1880s: after the successful 1866 Atlantic cable, British imperial lines spread via Gibraltar, Suez, Aden, Bombay, and Singapore to Hong Kong and Australia. Agencies like Reuters and Havas built real-time markets in information. The 1884 International Meridian Conference standardized Greenwich Mean Time and global time zones, enabling coordinated timetables and daily press bulletins. Bly’s editors cabled updates to readers, turning her movement into serialized news. The book mirrors this infrastructure: dispatches, handoffs at cable stations, and the race against the clock dramatize a world where timekeeping, wire services, and steam schedules made distance quantifiable, saleable, and publicly performative.
At the height of British imperial power, colonial nodes structured Bly’s route. Ceylon (Colombo), a Crown Colony since 1802, served as a major coaling and mail stop on the Europe–Asia line. The Straits Settlements—Penang and Singapore—established in 1826 and reorganized in 1867 under the Colonial Office, anchored trade between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Hong Kong, ceded in 1842 by the Treaty of Nanking and expanded in 1860, functioned as a free port and legal enclave under British rule. The book registers these ports’ commercial orderliness and ethnically stratified quarters, revealing how imperial administration facilitated commerce and comfort for first-class travelers like Bly.
Japan’s Meiji Restoration (1868) launched rapid state-led modernization: railways (Shimbashi–Yokohama, 1872), telegraphs, conscript army, and Western-style legal codes culminated in the Meiji Constitution of 1889. Treaty ports like Yokohama, opened in 1859, became gateways for silk trade and foreign settlements under extraterritoriality (largely ending in 1899). By the time Bly arrived, Yokohama showcased brick warehouses, gas lamps, and steam trams alongside traditional markets. Her observations of punctuality, mixed architectural styles, and efficient harbor services reflect the era’s hybrid modernity. The book’s smooth transit through Yokohama illustrates how Meiji infrastructure aimed to signal Japan’s parity with Western powers in commerce and technology.
Late Qing China operated under the unequal treaty system forged after the Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860), which opened treaty ports, fixed low tariffs, and granted extraterritoriality to Western residents. Guangzhou (Canton) remained a commercial hub, while adjacent Hong Kong, under British sovereignty, handled much China trade. Steamship lines and river boats integrated Pearl River Delta markets with global routes. Bly’s excursion to Canton from Hong Kong exposed her to bustling river traffic, guilds, and colonial-era intermediaries. The contrast between British-administered Hong Kong and Qing-governed Canton that she records mirrors the legal and administrative patchwork foreigners navigated in southern China during the late nineteenth century.
The 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, crowned by the Eiffel Tower, symbolized industrial engineering and national spectacle in the French Third Republic. While Bly did not linger in Paris, France was central to her European leg; notably, she detoured to Amiens to meet Jules Verne, whose 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days framed her project. Verne (1828–1905) and his wife received her in November 1889, endorsing her attempt to beat his fictional time. This cultural encounter underscores how mass readership, technological optimism, and celebrity authorship intersected with journalism to transform a private journey into a public test of modern possibility.
The rise of mass-circulation newspapers in the United States, epitomized by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, created a competitive ecosystem of attention. Innovations in cheap newsprint, advertising, and sensational reporting fostered “stunt journalism,” in which reporters enacted stories. On 14 November 1889 Bly sailed eastward; that same day The Cosmopolitan launched Elizabeth Bisland westward, producing a transcontinental media rivalry. Cablegrams, posters, and special editions turned timetables into headlines. Bly’s victory on 25 January 1890, at seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes, demonstrated how the press could mobilize global infrastructures, convert them into narrative spectacle, and expand women’s roles in public professional life.
American railroads supplied the final sprint. The first Transcontinental Railroad was completed in May 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, linking Eastern trunk lines to the Pacific. By the 1880s, systems like the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe offered fast through-service, standardized by Westinghouse air brakes (patented 1869) and Janney couplers (1873). When Bly reached San Francisco in January 1890, newspapers arranged expedited transfers, priority rights, and special sections—dubbed the “Nellie Bly Special”—to speed her eastward. This orchestration, crossing mountains and plains in winter, exemplifies how corporate coordination, telegraphic dispatching, and continuous track enabled record-setting coast-to-coast passenger movement.
The Universal Postal Union (established 1874, Bern) standardized international mail rates, routes, and exchange, integrating with steamship mail contracts like those of P&O and German lines. Regular mail steamers running Brindisi–Suez–Aden–Colombo and onward aligned with rail timetables across Europe. Passenger services piggybacked on these subsidized mail routes, ensuring predictable calls and coaling. Bly’s ability to file dispatches and receive news en route depended on this postal-telegraph ecology. The book’s episodic structure reflects the cadence of mail days and cable stations, and her interactions with ship pursers and postal agents illuminate how a bureaucratic architecture of stamps, bags, and schedules underwrote global journalism.
Nineteenth-century maritime public health regimes shaped travel. Recurrent cholera pandemics (notably the fifth, 1881–1896) prompted port quarantines, health declarations, and inspections at chokepoints such as Suez, Aden, and Hong Kong. International Sanitary Conferences (from 1851) sought to balance disease control with commercial flow, standardizing bills of health and fumigation practices. Bly’s tight connections depended on clearing these procedures, sometimes waiting for convoys or medical officers. Her uneventful passages highlight how routine sanitary controls—flag signals, lazarettos, and port health authorities—had become embedded in the rhythms of global shipping, minimizing disruption while revealing the vulnerability of speed to epidemic risk.
Women’s rights movements formed vital context. In the United States, the suffrage movement grew from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention through two organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (1869), which merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Debates over women’s paid labor, travel without chaperones, and access to public life were intense in the 1880s. Bly’s solo travel with a single bag deliberately challenged assumptions about female fragility and propriety. The book’s calm documentation of visas, tickets, and negotiations demonstrates that competence, not gender, governed success in the modern travel and news economy.
Immigration and racial politics marked the era. In the United States, the Page Act (1875) and Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) restricted Asian migration, shaping port bureaucracies in San Francisco and public attitudes across the West. In Britain’s Asian colonies, racialized legal codes, residential segregation, and labor systems structured urban space and service hierarchies encountered by travelers. Bly’s swift processing as a white, first-class passenger contrasts with the scrutiny and constraints facing Asian migrants and colonial subjects. The book thus indirectly records how borders, passports (loosely enforced then), and race intersected with mobility, highlighting the unequal accessibility of the very routes that enabled her celebrated speed.
As social critique, the book exposes the gendered gatekeeping of professions and travel. Editors doubted a woman could travel alone; shipping agents suggested chaperones and trunks; Bly insisted on autonomy and minimal baggage. Her success rebukes paternalist assumptions and the ideology of separate spheres. Simultaneously, her first-class vantage lays bare class divides aboard steamers and in hotels, where comfort, safety, and punctuality were purchased. Tipping customs, servants’ invisibility, and staged “native” entertainments in colonial ports reveal how bourgeois mobility rested on underpaid labor. The narrative’s cool, procedural tone underscores that competence and planning, not masculine bravado, defined modern mastery of global systems.
Politically, the journey registers imperial order and critiques its moral economy. Bly relies on British-administered ports and police, yet her observations of racial hierarchies, multilingual intermediaries, and legal enclaves suggest a world governed by unequal treaties and coercive structures. The obsessive measurement of time—telegrams, schedules, special trains—exposes a culture that commodifies space and speed, turning the globe into a competitive spectacle for media profit. By turning Verne’s wager into lived reportage, the book questions who benefits from this system and who is excluded. Its enduring argument is that women can claim modernity’s tools while recognizing and implicating the injustices that sustain them.
Author Biography
Nellie Bly, the pen name of Elizabeth Cochran (later Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman), was an American journalist whose audacious reporting reshaped public expectations of the press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She pioneered undercover, first-person investigations that exposed social injustices and demonstrated the power of immersive storytelling. Her best-known works, including Ten Days in a Mad-House and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, made her an international celebrity and a touchstone for discussions of journalism’s responsibilities. Operating at the nexus of reform-minded reporting and mass-circulation “New Journalism,” she remains emblematic of a moment when newspapers fused narrative flair with public-interest scrutiny.
Bly grew up in western Pennsylvania and attended the Indiana State Normal School (now part of a public university system) for a brief period before financial constraints curtailed her studies. Her entry into journalism began when she wrote a spirited response to a newspaper column that belittled women’s abilities, leading to a job at the Pittsburgh Dispatch. There she adopted “Nellie Bly,” a name inspired by a popular Stephen Foster song. Although not formally aligned with a single literary school, she was shaped by the era’s reform press and the narrative techniques of New Journalism, influences she later channeled into investigations with clear social aims.
At the Pittsburgh Dispatch in the mid-1880s, Bly reported on working women’s wages, factory conditions, and inequities in divorce law—topics that drew attention and resistance. When she was steered toward lighter features, she sought larger horizons by traveling to Mexico as a correspondent. Her dispatches, critical of political repression under Porfirio Díaz, prompted her return to the United States and were collected as Six Months in Mexico. The experience fortified her commitment to observational, on-the-ground reporting and confirmed her belief that journalism could illuminate distant places while confronting power close to home, especially on issues affecting vulnerable communities.
Seeking a platform for more ambitious work, Bly moved to New York and joined Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. There she undertook her landmark asylum investigation: feigning mental illness, she secured admission to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island and documented neglect and abuse from inside. Published first as a series and then as Ten Days in a Mad-House, the exposé sparked official inquiries and contributed to increased oversight and funding for patient care. It also established Bly as a leading practitioner of undercover reporting, demonstrating that first-person, immersive techniques could produce both public outrage and concrete reforms.
Bly’s most celebrated feat of the 1880s and 1890s was her circumnavigation of the globe, conceived as a real-world answer to Jules Verne’s popular novel. Departing from the United States and traveling by steamship and rail, she completed the journey in seventy-two days, an achievement that captivated readers and validated the era’s faith in speed and connectivity. She visited Verne en route, consolidated her travel columns into Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, and returned to parades and widespread acclaim. The episode exemplified “stunt” reporting, yet it also advanced women’s visibility in public life and showcased her disciplined reporting under pressure.
In the mid-1890s, Bly stepped back from daily journalism after marrying a prominent manufacturer and became active in industry. She managed the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and secured patents related to steel containers, experiences that deepened her understanding of labor and production. When business responsibilities waned, she returned to writing, contributing columns in the 1910s that supported women’s suffrage and social reform. During the early years of World War I, she filed reports from Europe, bringing readers eyewitness perspectives on upheaval abroad. Throughout, her work combined brisk narrative, firsthand observation, and a conviction that journalism should serve public accountability.
Bly’s later years were spent largely in New York, where she continued to write until her death in the early 1920s. Her legacy endures in multiple arenas: as an early architect of undercover investigations; as a popularizer of first-person reportage; and as a model of how mass-circulation journalism can pursue both engagement and reform. Ten Days in a Mad-House remains central to discussions about mental health, institutional oversight, and the ethics of deception in reporting. Around the World in Seventy-Two Days is still read as a milestone in travel writing and media spectacle. Collectively, her work anchors foundational debates about journalism’s methods and mission.
Around the World in Seventy-Two Days
CHAPTER I. A PROPOSAL TO GIRDLE THE EARTH.
WHAT gave me the idea?
It is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what gives birth to an idea. Ideas are the chief stock in trade of newspaper writers and generally they are the scarcest stock in market, but they do come occasionally,
This idea came to me one Sunday. I had spent a greater part of the day and half the night vainly trying to fasten on some idea for a newspaper article. It was my custom to think up ideas on Sunday and lay them before my editor for his approval or disapproval on Monday. But ideas did not come that day and three o'clock in the morning found me weary and with an aching head tossing about in my bed. At last tired and provoked at my slowness in finding a subject, something for the week's work, I thought fretfully:
"I wish I was at the other end of the earth!"
"And why not?" the thought came: "I need a vacation; why not take a trip around the world?"
It is easy to see how one thought followed another. The idea of a trip around the world pleased me and I added: "If I could do it as quickly as Phileas Fogg[1] did, I should go."
Then I wondered if it were possible to do the trip eighty days and afterwards I went easily off to sleep with the determination to know before I saw my bed again if Phileas Fogg's record could be broken.
I went to a steamship company's office that day and made a selection of time tables. Anxiously I sat down and went over them and if I had found the elixir of life I should not have felt better than I did when I conceived a hope that a tour of the world might be made in even less than eighty days.
I approached my editor rather timidly on the subject. I was afraid that he would think the idea too wild and visionary.
"Have you any ideas?" he asked, as I sat down by his desk.
"One," I answered quietly.
He sat toying with his pens, waiting for me to continue, so I blurted out:
"I want to go around the world!"
"Well?" he said, inquiringly looking up with a faint smile in his kind eyes.
"I want to go around in eighty days or less. I think I can beat Phileas Fogg's record. May I try it?"
To my dismay he told me that in the office they had thought of this same idea before and the intention was to send a man. However he offered me the consolation that he would favor my going, and then we went to talk with the business manager about it.
"It is impossible for you to do it," was the terrible verdict. "In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. Besides you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this."
"Very well," I said angrily, "Start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him."
"I believe you would," he said slowly. I would not say that this had any influence on their decision, but I do know that before we parted I was made happy by the promise that if any one was commissioned to make the trip, I should be that one.
