Jacques, filled with enthusiasm and Anglophilia, sets off for the steamer in late July 1859, but when he gets to Nantes to meet up with Jonathan, he is faced with bad news.

Twenty-four days after leaving Nantes, the two friends arrive in Liverpool, where they marvel at unfamiliar English customs and are astounded at the depths of poverty and squalor in the streets.

They visit many landmarks, including the Scott Monument, the Palace of Holyrood, Arthur's Seat (Jacques's first experience of a mountaintop view), and the beach at Portobello.

They dine with the family of Mr. B—, Jonathan's brother's wife's uncle; Jacques is taken with Mr. B—'s daughter, Miss Amelia, who promises to draw up an itinerary for their sightseeing to come.

Following Miss Amelia's instructions, they travel by steamer up the Firth of Forth, dine with a Catholic priest in Oakley, Fife, and proceed by rail to Glasgow, which they discover to be as dingy as Liverpool.

Their tour was rushed, but colorful and memorable; they are now ready to take a different and much more leisurely kind of trip as they "travel backwards through their memories"[4] to relive their experience of Britain.

)[6] Another source for Verne's Scottish themes came from the French writer Charles Nodier, who used his 1821 travels in Scotland as the impetus for two works he wrote that year: Promenades de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Écosse and Trilby ou le lutin d'Argail.

[7] Verne cites both Nodier and Scott in the first chapter of Backwards to Britain, as well as several other writers who influenced his conception of Britain: Charles Dickens in his novels The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; Louis Énault, author of Angleterre, Écosse, Irlande, voyage pittoresque (1859); and Francis Wey, author of Les Anglais chez eux : esquisses de mœurs et de voyage (1850–1).

[13] In Verne's novels, Scotland is depicted a land of utopian possibilities, as is suggested by his fictional underground city New Aberfoyle in The Black Indies or the dreams of an ideal Scottish island settlement imagined in The Children of Captain Grant.