A Wonderful Fact To Reflect Upon

From Book the First, Chapter 3 ("The Night Shadows") of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), narrated as Jarvis Lorry travels by mail coach toward Dover. Dickens uses the darkness of the night journey as a meditation on the ultimate privacy of every human mind — a theme that shadows the entire novel, whose plot turns on hidden identities, secret letters, and lives concealed from those closest to them. The passage establishes that even the most intimate connections leave each person irreducibly alone with their own interior world.