THE SHORT STAGES 



VI 



Suppose, instead of taking one of the fast mails to 

 Exeter, and journeying straight away, we book a seat 

 in one of the ' short stages ' which were the only 

 popular means of being conveyed between London 

 and the suburbs in the days before railways, 

 omnibuses, and tramways existed. We will take 

 the stage to Brentford, because that is on our 

 way. 



What year shall we imagine it to be ? Say 1837, 

 because that date marks the accession of Her Majesty 

 and the opening of the great Victorian Era, in which 

 everything except human nature (which is still pretty 

 much what it used to be) has been turned inside out, 

 altered, and ' improved.' 



If, in the year 1837, we wished to reach Brentford 

 and could not afford to hire a trap or carriage, 

 practically the only way, other than walking the 

 seven miles, would have been to take the stage ; and 

 as these stages, starting from the City or the Strand, 

 were comparatively few, it was always advisable to 

 go down to the starting-places and secure a seat, 

 rather than to chance finding one vacant at Hyde 

 Park Corner. 



' How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages 

 that draw up in a line in Piccadilly, after the mails 

 are gone,' says Hazlitt, writing of the romance of the 

 Mail Coach. Well, it may be that their five or ten 

 mile journeys afforded no hold for the imagination, 

 compared with the dashing ' Quicksilver ' and the 



D 



