Bly’s Spirit – Frank McNally on a pioneering journalist with an Irish sub-plot

It seems to have been dropped from the recent TV series remake of Around the World in Eighty Days, but the original novel by Jules Verne has a crucial sub-plot involving Ireland.

Passing Fastnet Lighthouse on his ship from New York, Phileas Fogg realises that the sea route to Liverpool will take too long. He lands at Queenstown (now Cobh) instead, from where an express train whisks him to Dublin and a transfer to the speedy mailboats. Thanks to the 12 hours gained on the sluggish transatlantic steamer, he eventually lands his bet in London.

In another departure from the original, the new TV version of Fogg was accompanied on his journey by an intrepid female news reporter. This must have been a nod to the extraordinary Nellie Bly (1864-1922), an actual journalist who, some years after the novel, really did circumnavigate the globe, and was world famous by the time she died, 100 years ago on January 27th.

Bly was American. But like Verne's novel, she too had an Irish subplot. Her paternal grandfather was an emigrant from Derry, Robert Cochran, whose US-born son Michael lived the American dream, starting as a blacksmith and ending up a judge.

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Cochran jnr was also a mill owner and the founder of a Pennsylvania township, Cochran's Mill, which he went a long way to populating, with 15 children from two marriages, to a Catherine Murphy and a Mary Jane Kennedy respectively.

One of the latter's offspring became Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, losing her father at an early age but gaining an "e" on her surname at some point.

A young woman in a hurry, reduced to poverty after the patriarch’s demise, she broke into journalism via a spirited reply to a chauvinistic male columnist’s article headlined “What girls are good for”.

Intrigued by the letter, the editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette hired her, in the process giving her a pseudonym – standard practice then – picked from a Stephen Foster song.

After early investigative work, the newly-christened Nellie Bly found herself condemned for a time to the women's pages, but escaped to become a correspondent in Mexico – long enough to annoy the government there – before again being confined to features and arts coverage. Impatient with her lot, she left Pittsburgh in 1887 to try and make it in New York.

Her big breakthrough there required something more dramatic than a letter. For an exposé of the dire conditions in mental health asylums, she first had to pose as a potential patient herself: wearing ragged clothes, neglecting personal hygiene, having psychotic episodes, and practising “a far-away look”. The act eventually got her committed.

It was a risky stratagem then, especially for a woman. There was no guarantee she’d be let out again. But her new employer, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World sprang her successfully to write a damning series of articles, which became a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, and led to big changes in the way asylums were run.

New York celebrity secured, she now talked her editor into backing a world trip in which she would emulate the fictional Fogg while turning Verne's fantasy into fact. She set out in November 1889, 16 years after the novel, and anticipating Ryanair by over a century, travelled with only hand luggage.

The huge interest in her voyage was further hyped by a "Nellie Bly Guessing Match" in which the newspaper encouraged readers to estimate her time of her return, for a prize of their own trip to Europe.

In the event, she outdid Fogg to make it around the world in 72 days, meeting the actual Jules Verne en route.

Now internationally famous, she next ventured into popular fiction, writing a string of novels.

Then she married Robert Seaman, a wealthy industrialist more than twice her age.

When his health failed, she quit journalism to run the company.

Unfortunately, her enlightened treatment of employees – providing health benefits and recreational facilities, including gyms and libraries – was not matched by traditional business acumen.

By the end, according to her biographer, she “lost everything”.

On a return to journalism, she covered the eastern front of the first World War and was arrested in Austria on suspicion of espionage.

After the war, working for another New York paper, she reported on subjects including the women’s suffrage movement.

Bly was still only 57 when she died, from pneumonia, on January 27th, 1922.

Among many honours, she is today commemorated by the New York Press Club’s annual award for best young reporter.