Charlotte Slade had reached fifty years of age before she visited London.  That visit only happened by chance as Mrs Fuller suddenly insisted on returning from Brighton at the first possible opportunity, the journey running through London.  She found Reading very busy, people marrying and dying and getting born all the time.  Her horizon, like most other people in the villages, encompassed primarily the villages.  The outside world remained exactly that, outside.  The letters carry very few references to anything happening outside either Aston Tirrold or Aston Upthorpe.

We hear news of Queen Victoria’s first child and a brief mention of the Chartists.  Interestingly, the man mentioned, John Frost, would shortly find his way out to Australia as a convict.  He may have lain in Port Arthur at the time Henry Slade visited Hobart to buy sheep.  There is mention of an American ship that may have sunk.  Little else from the outside world percolates through.  Even in the world of politics, we hear only two mentions: Henry Slade is courted for his vote, and Mr Langford finds himself disenfranchised when he forgets to register after moving from Aston Tirrold to Aston Upthorpe.

Charlotte uses the media to keep her informed about the outside world, although she mostly looks for news from Australia and, later, India.  We hear about The Colonial Gazette, The Perth Gazette, Reading papers that she shares with Mrs Fuller, The Times, and the Illustrated London News.  The Reading paper taps into a wider world, for it sometimes carries extracts from the Westminster Review.

Even though Charlotte may have wanted to turn her eyes inward to the villages, controlling her exposure to the world outside by reading the media of her choice, that ability had begun to change perhaps without Charlotte fully realising.  Nevertheless, she does herself draw the picture as she and her son Frederick tell us about the progress made by the Great Western Railway.  It seems that nothing like this had happened for a long time, if ever.  The railway exerted a powerful hold on the villagers.  As the lines reached Moulsford, the villagers abandoned Sunday service and went down to stare, a more exciting form of Sunday entertainment, perhaps. It fascinated the men and took the women on exciting shopping trips to Reading.  Frederick Slade, who, it seems would eventually make his career on the railway, went to the trouble of measuring the exact distance between the villages and Moulsford Station.  The letters keep us abreast of the railway’s progress to Didcot and then Bristol.  Later we hear about the connection with Oxford, Fred, of course, finding a place on the inaugural trip, when much remained to finish on the line.  The Marris children recount how the navvies working on the railway came to board in the villages, causing disturbances there, although the Parish Records do not show any sudden rise in illegitimate births for this period.  The railway was a system.  Its noise penetrated the previously silent night at specific times.  The Slade men found that they could set their watches by the train, perhaps not realising how it had taken charge of their lives and plugged them into the rest of the world.