London to London — the four people who circumnavigate the globe in eighty days.
Around the World in Eighty Days has an unusually small named cast for a globe-spanning adventure: the four principals and a handful of significant supporting figures at specific stops. The smallness is deliberate — Verne is not writing a novel of society but a novel of mechanism, and the mechanism requires a few precisely calibrated figures rather than a crowd.
The protagonist. Forty years old, independently wealthy, a member of the Reform Club, known for nothing except precision. His past is entirely opaque; where his money comes from is never explained; what he does between his fixed appointments each day is unknown. He proposes the circumnavigation at the card table and departs the same evening. He is the novel's puzzle, and the answer arrives on the last page.
Jean Passepartout, hired the morning of the wager. Former acrobat, fire-eater, and gymnast. He believes he has found, in Fogg's household, the perfect quiet life — and finds himself crossing three oceans. He is curious, warm, improvises brilliantly under pressure, and creates most of the disasters. His reunion with Fogg in Yokohama is the novel's warmest scene. He discovers the calendar error in the last chapter.
Spots Fogg at Suez and is immediately convinced he is the Bank of England robber. Pursues him across three continents, telegraphing London for the arrest warrant that never arrives in time. Eventually helps Fogg cross America because it is the fastest way home to British jurisdiction. Arrests him in Liverpool. Three hours later the real robber is arrested elsewhere. He apologizes. Fogg accepts.
A young Parsee woman Fogg rescues from a funeral pyre in India. Educated, composed, English-speaking — she joins the circumnavigation because her Hong Kong relatives prove unreachable. She is the novel's most fully realized human being: grateful, curious about the world, and in love with Fogg in a way Verne takes seriously. The last scene is hers as much as Fogg's.
A seasoned colonial official who shares Fogg's railway compartment from Bombay and assists in the rescue of Aouda. He considers Fogg eccentric to the point of uselessness, is overridden by events, and departs the story at Calcutta. His brief presence defines what conventional competent judgment looks like in the novel — reliable, limited, and superseded.
The captain of the trading vessel Henrietta, whom Fogg hires in New York for the Atlantic crossing. When the ship runs out of fuel, Fogg buys the hull from Speedy, burns the wooden parts to power the engine, and arrives in Queenstown. Speedy, locked in his cabin for most of the crossing, has the complex emotion of a man whose ship has been legally purchased from under him and technically delivered.