Walk A Tale of Two Cities, London to Paris
The best of times, the worst of times, and the road between two cities in the years of the Revolution. Your everyday steps take you from London to Paris, and Dickens's words unlock where it happened.
- 311 miles
- 9 stops
- Charles Dickens, 1859
The Dover road to the Revolution
London to Paris by the mail road and the Dover packet, in the years when crossing the Channel meant crossing into a revolution. It opens with the best-known sentence in English and closes with a man walking to the guillotine in another man's place.
The novel's first journey is Jarvis Lorry's, on the Dover mail on a Friday night in November 1775, struggling up Shooter's Hill in the mud and the dark. From Dover the packet crosses to Calais and the road runs on to Paris, to the wine shop of the Defarges in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the shadow of the Bastille.
Dickens published the book in 1859, and it ends on the Place de la Révolution with one of the most famous last lines in English. The route follows the novel from London to Paris, about 311 miles by road and sea, with a short walk through the Paris places that matter most. It is one of the most-read novels ever written, and a good length for a first walk.
- Distance
- 311 miles (500 km)
- Stops
- 9, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Charles Dickens; Project Gutenberg ebook #98
Where it starts
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.
A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, Chapter II · The Mail
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 8 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Two Cities take you?
The mail coach took days. Yours can take as long as you like. Choose when you'd like to reach Paris and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
9 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for Paris.
311 miles of A Tale of Two Cities, on the walks you already take.
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