Week One of Bookpacking London is complete and I can’t believe the amount of stuff we did last week! Although I didn’t have many concrete expectations entering the experience, week one was still pretty different than I had imagined.

First, what is bookpacking? Throughout the last few months, I was asked this countless times by family and friends. I would always give this standard answer: we’re exploring the cities through the lens of the novel. We will be walking the streets the author and characters walked. I imagined standing in a spot, absorbing the sites, and being able to feel a connection with Dickens’s London.

It didn’t quite go like that. Days 1 & 2 were blisteringly hot: record temperatures for the UK. And while we did come to London to see the history, we weren’t there to see history in the making. The heat proved a distraction from the Bookpacking as it fried the metal image I had of gloomy, overcast London right out of my head. 

There’s obviously no way to truly replicate the settings of the novel A Tale of Two Cities, but it became much more difficult to approximate than I had hoped. Not only were there throngs of people everywhere, locals and tourists alike, but also a multitude of cars, buses, signs, lights, and advertisements that all made it hard to see back into the London of our novel. Although the lovely buildings and architecture were well-preserved in the last 200 years at least, they were hard for me to connect to as anything more than buildings.

So it’s the end of Week one and I admit, I have found it hard to connect to the historical sites as we have been walking around. I really like ATTC but I’m lacking a sense of interaction with it and the past during our afternoon literary walks. 

However, two experiences did stand out to me in the way they brought the past into the present. The first was in Jarndyce, the antiquarian bookshop where we saw Dickens’s handwriting for the first time. Although we were just looking at a messy letter, the entire class had a moment of, “whoa, that’s cool” when we saw his signature. Being able to see a piece of Dickens The Human as he lived, not just the streets he walked, helped me appreciate and tap into his writing as art and not just a product of the historical period. 

Second, the Severs’ House. The Severs’ house is basically an attempt to capture the life of an 18th/19th century family through the scents, visuals, sounds, and objects of their house. It was so dark and every single thing inside looked like it had rolled right out of a fictional novel, but I guess that’s the point! While Dickens may not have lived in that atmosphere, his characters did, and it made it much easier to consider- how did someone writing or living at this time imagine the world around them? On the top floor, there was a pocket bible open to “Evening Prayer” on a lady’s dressing table. A pair of earrings are placed on top. I can just imagine her saying her prayers as she got ready for bed. Such a deeply intimate glimpse inside the home, and inside the mind of a person of the past! What sort of lessons was she pondering? What values did she hold?

These two experiences were the most engaging, wow-it’s-like-we’re-there moments for me. 

Contrary to when we were seeing the buildings and streets significant to the novel, it felt really personal to glimpse at the real lives behind the fiction. It made me realize that despite how the landscape has changed since the 1800s, people have changed relatively little. So I think I will shift my approach towards bookpacking in the coming weeks- rather than looking at Paris and hoping the buildings reveal more insights about the novels to me, I want to see what I can learn through a more human-centric lens.

What personal insights can I draw from the bookpacking experience when I consider the authors’ and characters’ experiences, hopes, disappointments, and especially fears when seeing the sites?