“Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World”, by Matthew Goodman

496 pages, Ballantine Books, ISBN-13: 978-0345527271

Who in the hell were Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, I hear you ask? I knew you were asking that, Dear Reader, ‘cause that’s what I asked myself when I picked up Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World by Matthew Goodman at 2^nd & Charles. So I’ll tell you: Nellie Bly was the pen-name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, an American (female) journalist who began her career with the Pittsburgh Dispatch before moving on to the New York World and who was a pioneer in her field by launching a new kind of investigative journalism, as when she went undercover to report on a mental institution from within; Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore was also an American (female) journalist and author who began her writing career as a teenager by sending poetry to the New Orleans Times Democrat where she soon went to work for the paper before moving to New York City and writing for The Sun and New York World, as well as become an editor at Cosmopolitan and contributing to the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. So now you know.

What Eighty Days is about is these two women’s race around the world in late 1888 and early 1889, à la Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days. It began when Bly approached John Cockerill, the editor of the New York World, about besting the fictional Fogg by accomplishing in fact what Fogg did in fiction. While at first Cockerill refused the request, about a year later he and his boss, Joseph Pulitzer, decided that such a deed accomplished by a plucky Yankee girl would be a grand piece of publicity for the paper, and so a year after she first suggested it, Nellie Bly boarded the Hamburg America steamer Augusta Victoria at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889 (with a mere two days' notice) and began her historic 25,000 mile journey…meanwhile, John Brisben Walker, who had just purchased the three-year-old and still-fledgling Cosmopolitan, decided to dispatch Bisland on her own journey around the world and, a mere six hours after being recruited, Bisland departed from New York, only she traveled west by train in contrast to Bly traveling East by boat. It would prove to be a story for the ages.

I won’t spoil the conclusion for you, but I will say that Eighty Days was part adventure story and part travelogue as Goodman described the long-lost world of the Pax Britannica, in which the mighty British Empire made the world safe for travel by these two American gals. The story is fascinating and is written in such an engaging manner and at such a fast clip as to remain entertaining throughout, without the dry spells I often seem to hit somewhere near the middle. At the same time, it is packed with insight and information about the two travelers and their world and culture; while some of these stories felt like filler, I enjoyed them all the same and thought they added to the over-all tale, even if they were tangential to the same. I came away from Eighty Days feeling very well informed, not only about Bly and Bisland’s daring travels, but about things such as the origin of modern time zones, the conditions of coal stokers on those great Victorian steamships and the struggle of female journalists to make it off society pages and into real reporting. My biggest complaint is that I fell that the book seemed biased towards Bly, but I thank Goodman for bringing to light this little-known story of Yankee feminine daring-do.