Cycling participated actively in the momentous social changes that took place at the turn of the twentieth century. By providing mobility to disadvantaged groups, the bicycle became a political symbol closely associated with the growing demands of the working class and women for equality. Yet such movements were by no means uncontested, and strenuous attempts were also made to contain the potentially subversive image of working-class or women's cycling within certain codes formulated by bourgeois, patriarchal society. This analysis of the class dimension of the bicycle focuses on three novels by H. G. Wells, an author who made extensive use of cycling as a symbol of social ascendancy or alternatively of a rejection of the British class structure. I expose how the bicycle stands for a democratisation of mobility and knowledge, and suggests an alternative to the tenets of capitalist society. The second part of this chapter engages with a debate that has received much attention in recent years: the bicycle's role in women's emancipation. Through an exploration of works of British fiction, I explore how the bicycle gave women concrete new freedoms, while exposing how society simultaneously attempted to constrain women cyclists within the reductive stereotypes of the New Woman and the lady cyclist. The final section crosses the Channel in order to examine what is perhaps the bicycle's most important contribution to debates on both class and gender. As Proust's use of the bicycle in his portrait of Albertine shows, cycling helped challenge social and gender categories by exposing their cultural and temporal contingency. Cycling was an activity that allowed individuals to begin to formulate alternative identities that eroded the distinctions established by their oppressors. The bicycle was thus a technology that pointed to an alternative, counter-hegemonic organisation of society.

Bicycles and Class

Democratising Travel

At the close of Chapter 1, I pointed to the connection between the bicycle's democratisation of mobility and a broadening of the country's intellectual life through higher rates of literacy and changing tendencies in publishing. At the end of the nineteenth century, ‘clerking culture’ was associated with, among other things, bicycles and lowbrow literature; objects that directly challenged the monopoly of knowledge by a social elite.