A few years ago, I read a very interesting book by Anne de Courcy titled The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj. This book outlines a peculiar part of British colonial history that is not well-known to many Americans today. It gives a detailed account of the annual arrival in British India of hundreds of eligible young women seeking husbands.
The combination of somewhat rigid class system in England and the man-power needed to rule a vast empire meant that there was a shortage of eligible British men actually living in Great Britain during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. A great number of them had gone to live and find their fortunes in Britain’s various colonial holdings, with India being chief among these. Consequently, many middle and upper-class British women who wished to be married found themselves without any suitable matches in their home country. Only the most beautiful and eligible young women could hope to find a husband in England. The rest had to choose between not marrying, or going abroad to look for a husband.
The most common destination was India, and the annual arrival of large numbers of British women seeking husbands eventually became known as the Fishing Fleet. I won’t go into much further detail about this practice, since Anne de Courcy provides an excellent history of it, drawing heavily from first-hand accounts.
The reason that I bring this up is because I was reminded of the Fishing Fleet when I was translating Around the World in Eighty Days, although somewhat in reverse. Rather than relating the story of an unmarried British woman traveling to India and finding a husband among the various British military or civil officers there, we have an account of a British bachelor finding a wife there in the form of an Indian princess.
Of course, this flips the narrative on its head. In the broader context of the British empire, Phileas Fogg should have had no trouble finding a wife back in England. His looks were compared to Byron’s, he was a gentleman, and incredibly wealthy. However, given the quirks of his personality, it’s easy to see why he was not married. It’s hard to imagine what sort of woman he would even have been interested in. Verne alludes to this in at least one passage:
However, there was in the vicinity–to borrow an astronomical term–a disturbing star which should have produced certain perturbations on the heart of this gentleman. But it didn’t! Mrs. Aouda’s charm had no effect, to Passepartout’s great surprise, and the perturbations, if they existed at all, would have been even more difficult to calculate than the ones that had effected Uranus and brought about the discovery of Neptune.
Yes! Passepartout was more astonished each day to see the depth of gratitude toward his master in the eyes of this young woman. Phileas Fogg may have had a heart when it came to acting heroically, but definitely not when it came to love.
Throughout most of the book, it would be reasonable to wonder if Phileas Fogg had any interest in women at all, though this point is cleared up for us in the end. At the very least, it took a unique and special woman to produce any response at all, and not the sort of woman that he could hope to meet back in England.
This brings up an interesting point. I’ve always wondered at the motivation for the trip around the world. Was it really just about a wager? Or did Phileas Fogg have something else driving him to take on such an insane bet? Sexual repression is a convenient theory to fall back to, but there may be at least some elements of that implied here. Was Phileas Fogg subconsciously taking the same sort of trip as the women of the Fishing Fleet? Whether this is even feasible depends on whether Verne was aware of this practice.
Ultimately, I don’t know if he was or was not, but he did go into great detail about the exorbitantly high salaries of British military and civil officers in India. This was one of the key elements that drew women seeking husbands to India. Verne also gives very accurate descriptions of the rail lines and various locations throughout the Raj. Given how well-researched the book is on a whole, it’s at least possible that Verne was aware of the Fishing Fleet. If that was the case, it’s easy to see how he could be having some fun by using a “gender-bender,” and this interpretation brings out some humor in the romance between Phileas Fogg and Mrs. Aouda.