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Butcher persuasively demonstrates that there’s more in the book than a mixture of farce, manhunt, suspense and romance, though it is doubtless these that have made “Around the World in Eighty Days” the most popular novel by one of the most popular novelists of all time.

The other “Golden Picture Classic” I received, Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days,” has always struck me as surprisingly appropriate to the yuletide season, capturing something of its gaiety and high spirits, as well as the desperation of the last-minute shopper’s race against time as Dec. 25 approaches.

With particular relevance, though, “Around the World in Eighty Days” depicts a Christmas miracle worthy of the Hallmark Channel — the conversion of a friendless, stiffly precise Victorian gentleman into a human being capable of love and joy.

As a boy, I found “Around the World in Eighty Days” a thrilling story.

“Only by the 19th century was it a safer kind of journey, and this was when it became a popular pastime, as in Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days,‘” Chaplin said.