*Warning: This blog contains spoilers for A Tale of Two Cities :)*

I woke up at the early hour of about 6 o’clock on Monday morning. I hurried around my room, trying to gather every last belonging and scrambling to pack (as I should have done the night before) to be sure to arrive at St. Pancras Station at 7:54am. To my relief, my Uber came just in time and delivered me safely to the check in area for the Eurostar, with just enough time to grab a quick coffee and a ham and cheese croissant. To pass the time on the train, I read the TV monitor affixed to the cabin’s ceiling, which was proudly telling me all about the Eurostar’s record-smashing top speed of 347km/hr, and I listened to my 35 song country playlist from beginning to end. We dipped below the English Channel, and just like that, we surfaced in France and rolled into Gare du Nord, my very first introduction to Paris. It took a total of 3 hours (with reliable Wi-Fi and air conditioning, of course) from my first sip of my iced vanilla latte at St. Pancras to my first breath of Parisian air. 

Unfortunately for Dickens’ characters, this 267 mile journey wasn’t so blissful. In the beginning of his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, one of the main characters, Mr. Lorry, is on his way to Paris to oversee the operations of the Parisian branch of Tellson’s Bank. He rides as one of three passengers on a mail coach, which already seems to me like a less-than-luxurious way of travel, but unfortunately, riding in a seat on that mail coach would have been the best case scenario. As these characters trudge down Dover road to Dover, where they will meet their boat to take them across the English Channel, they are met with particularly muddy circumstances. You see, they actually have to walk, step by step, through the mud because the horses cannot carry the weight of the people and the mail through the sinking, soaked-dirt road. 

Dickens writes “With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints.” Doesn’t sound particularly enjoyable, if you ask me. He continues, “There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it has roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none.” 

Hearing this testimony in my head while also hearing the quiet snores of my fellow passengers on the Eurostar threw my perspective of the novel into a total time-warp. Obviously, I knew that Mr. Lorry and his co-travelers were not living in a time of automated vehicles or large reclined seats with drop-down footrests, but I failed to recognize the effects of the slow (and difficult) travel time on business proceedings at the time, as well as its effects on the French Revolution as a whole.

If Mr. Lorry could have made it from London to Paris in a matter of 136 minutes, the set-up of our story, which begins with a fateful piece of mail being brought to Mr. Lorry by means of interception on Dover road, would not exist. Also, the ease of travel that we take for granted now would have changed the speed of communication and the very connection of two of the most influential Western European cities, changing the history altogether, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Instead of letting this argument get out of hand, let's say, for instance, that everything else stays the same, but later in the novel, Charles Darnay could have taken the Eurostar instead of his painstaking journey to England. Would Carton have needed to take his place in the execution? Would he have made the decision to take his family to England and denounce his French surname if he knew going to England wasn’t really that far away? Would different lives have been saved? Or lost?

Bookpacking has been an excellent environment to grapple with unanswerable questions like these. As we wander around places that held so much significance to both fictional and historical characters, we get to see the changes that have been made over the last 200+ years. On our journey from London to Paris, I found that speed is perhaps the most important thing that has changed since the days of A Tale of Two Cities (and indoor plumbing because…yuck), but the changes in communication and travel are of the utmost importance in the development and unfolding of a story as impactful as this one. 

Now, as I head off into the streets of Paris, I intend to find all the unique pieces of history that I can, while appreciating the speed at which I can do it.