Ashley Justinic
Everyone has a story worth telling.
Everyone has a story worth telling.
If your boss asked you to drop everything and race around the world for the next eighty days, would you? For nineteenth-century journalists Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, the answer was yes. Eighty Days is the true story of their 1889 trips around the globe in a well-publicized race to beat the fictional character from Jules Vernes’ Around the World in Eighty Days.
This is Matthew Goodman’s third book. Interestingly, his first book was a Jewish cookbook. Like Eighty Days, his second book The Sun and the Moon is non-fiction focused on New York City in the 1890s. On one JHistory Review, it was commended as “a most readable, interesting, delightful, well-written, and informative story” (Atkinson, C. 2013). Although that book did not become a best-seller, it doubtlessly helped the creative writing instructor get into the headspace to capture the essence of New York’s past.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that Goodman has focused on New York City. He is based out of Brooklyn, after all, and in his acknowledgements for Eighty Days, he credits the “the New York Public Library, the Butler Library of Columbia University, and the Library of Congress” as just a few of the immense resources available to him locally (l. 6730). He has even taken his children to visit the graves of Bly and Bisland, both of which are located at Woodlawn Cemetery in his own neighborhood.
Modern readers will be agog at the haphazard nature of the race around the world. A woman of society might typically require several months to secure all the accoutrements desirable for travel. Yet A. D. Wilson, business manager of The Cosmopolitan, sent Elizabeth Bisland on her tour the very same morning he had conceived the idea after reading of Nellie Bly’s departure in The World: “He asked whether she might leave New York that evening for San Francisco, and then proceed onward from there around the world” (Goodman, 2013, l.1288).
In another instance, Bisland is left waiting at a train station. Unable to make any of the travel arrangements herself, she is at the mercy of her manager back in New York. She wanders around “resentful at Walker for having sent her on this ridiculous wild-goose chase, and at herself for having consented” (Goodman, 2913, l. 1882). The stress they must have felt at a solo trip around the world without any companion or preparation is astonishing.
Ultimately, both got around the globe in under eighty days, Bly finishing in seventy-two and Bisland in seventy-seven. But the high was bound to end. In a profile of Nellie Bly, Donald Ritchie writes, “The trip made Nellie Bly larger than life...but it also made it impossible for her to find anything to report on that could rival her round-the-world stunt” (1997, p. 140). She retired from reporting at age 30 and married a 70-year old millionaire. Bisland, however, was suited for a quieter life, and went back to literary criticism after a year abroad in England.
Eighty Days is engaging, but at times it might remind one of required reading from high school. Publishers Weekly calls this “deftly mixing social history into an absorbing travel epic” (2012) in a completely positive review, yet for me it was missing characterization. Perhaps this is because the race was so eventful or because the author is opposed to making any assumption about the characters’ thoughts and feelings. Nonetheless, at times it feels as if the point of the book is to learn about nineteenth-century America, and the story is just an entertaining vehicle to deliver the lesson.
Also, some of the drama is diminished by following both of the competitors. Who do we want to “win”? The Nellie Bly story has been told many times already due to the appeal of her adventurous form of reporting. The book would be a more valuable contribution if it had focused only on Elizabeth Bisland and approached the race from a new perspective. Kirkus Reviews even noted “Goodman’s depiction of the swashbuckling Bly... is somewhat less sympathetic than his portrait of the now-forgotten Bisland” (2013). Why not just write about Bisland?
Although the race was chiefly promoted to boost newspaper sales, it is still inspiring to learn about two women who were so adamantly defying social expectations to do the work they wished to do. Bly and Bisland’s strengths of character come through in terms of the sheer persistence and bravery in undertaking such a trip. Certainly, their story is worth knowing, and this book will appeal to a wide audience.
Atkinson, C. 2010, April. Atkinson on Goodman, 'The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York'. Retrieved on October 19, 2018 from https://networks.h-net.org/node/14542/reviews/14993/ atkinson-goodman-sun-and-moon-remarkable-true-account-hoaxers-showmen
Goodman, Matthew (2013). Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World. New York: Ballantine Books.
Kirkus Review (2013, January 21). Review of Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World. Retrieved October 17, 2018, from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/matthew-goodman/eighty-days/
Publishers Weekly (2012 October 22). Review of Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World. Retrieved October 20, 2018, from https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-345-52726-4
Ritchie, D. A. (1997). American Journalists: Getting the Story. New York, Oxford Press.