Has David Tennant really got the measure of Phileas Fogg? Tennant, who plays Jules Verne’s globetrotting hero in the new BBC dramatisation of Around the World in 80 Days, describes Fogg as “a particularly stuffy Englishman” who “represents everything that’s alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire”.

To start with, I’d question the stuffiness. I concede that Verne’s 1872 novel begins with Fogg, a man who lives by rigid routines, dismissing his manservant because he “has brought him shaving-water at 84 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 86”. But Verne describes his behaviour as “eccentric”. Fogg’s extreme standards stem from his unusually precise, mathematical way of thinking – the very opposite of stuffiness, which is all about following convention.

Besides, Fogg soon abandons his comfortable routines once he embarks on his journey. What’s stuffy about dropping everything and circumnavigating the globe for a bet?

Neither is Fogg a tub-thumping reactionary. He is, famously, a member of the Reform Club – perhaps not a guarantee of un-stuffiness nowadays, but in the Victorian era a sign that you were committed to radical politics. One doesn’t have the sense from Tennant’s remarks that he realises Fogg belonged to a club that banned copies of the Daily Telegraph from its premises.

It is true that Fogg does not express scepticism about aspects of the British imperial project to the same extent as his French creator – it is left to Verne, as narrator, to refer to the British Crown’s “despotic dominion” over India, and to wonder what the “[Hindu] divinities think of India, anglicised as it is to-day, with steamers whistling and scudding along the Ganges”.

But Fogg is no racist. Indeed, he ends the novel engaged to Aouda, the Indian woman he rescues from being burned alive in a suttee ritual.

In the end, a chap who travels around sorting out other people’s problems is an eternally appealing figure in the adventure genre – as former Doctor Who David Tennant would no doubt concede.

Fogg belongs in the pantheon of the great fictional travellers who flourished during the second half of the 19th century – a golden age for adventure writing. Figures such as the heroes in G A Henty’s stories for boys, or Allan Quatermain in the novels of H Rider Haggard, were plucky and venturesome – they cast themselves into unknown and probably hostile territory to challenge themselves, not for gain.

The “civilising” of Africans is anathema to men like Quatermain, who envies them for knowing “nothing about steam, electricity, or gunpowder, and mercifully for themselves nothing about printing and the penny post”; he also rails against the enslavement and exploitation of Africans by white men.

Robert Louis Stevenson, defending the adventure novel from attacks by Henry James and others, observed in 1884 that the genre “appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man” – that is, the counterintuitive desire, in an increasingly civilised world, to experience a little danger and discomfort.

If the Tennant series focuses on Fogg as a hidebound imperialist lackey instead of trying to capture that spirit of romantic freedom, it will be a sorry thing.