Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) demonstrates how international travel became more accessible and how the speed of travel impacts on the curiosity of the Occidental traveller. Despite Phileas Fogg’s lack of engagement with his journey, a connection is established between the traveller and his immediate industrialised travel space. Fogg’s lack of curiosity and lack of engagement in matters outside the journey are placed against the narrator’s negotiations of the spatial relations between the landscape, its peoples, and industrialised mobility. There is a noticeable change in relationship between travellers and immediate industrialised travel spaces that perpetuates the image of the gentleman-hero as the century progresses. Fogg’s consistent conduct and use of space in both Verne’s text and Léon Benett’s illustrations reinforce hierarchical capitalist and patriarchal structures, as well as gendering a space that comes to reflect imperialist administrative power. Verne’s characterisation of Passepartout destabilises the imperial space. This is accentuated when Fogg is forced to use ‘exotic’ modes of transport. Ironically, this serves to delineate his Englishness, creating an indisputable criterion of difference in which the British adventurer is set apart from the Other.