The Wheels of Chance, by H. G. Wells

This is a book review I wrote for a staff news letter some months back. I thought I'd pull it out and give it a bit of an airing over here.

A couple of months ago I was listening to a documentary on Radio National in which they read several passages from The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells. As a teenager I had read several of Wells' science fiction novels, including The Island of Dr Moreau, which was written in the same year as The Wheels of Chance, but I had never bothered to look at his non-science fiction novels.

I was pleased to find a copy of this book was sitting on our shelves, so I checked it out… then promptly forgot to read it. I noticed it sitting on my desk the other day and decided I had better take it home – and I'm so very glad I did. Right from the opening chapter this book had me absolutely charmed. It's now one of my favourite books, and I'll be keeping an eye out for a copy of my own from now on.

The book was written in 1895 and is a contemporary novel – perhaps set a couple of years before the book was published. The story involves Mr Hoopdriver (his given name was never made clear) – a twenty-three year old draper's assistant who decides to spend his yearly two-week holiday cycling around the south of England. He has only recently bought a second hand bicycle, and he still isn't entirely sure how to ride the thing, but he has bought the clothes and accessories to be a cyclist and he is determined to enjoy himself.

Hoopdriver is something of a comical figure, and he takes more than one fall in the course of this short book, but he is also heroic in his way. On the first day of his journey he encounters another cyclist, the Young Lady in Grey, who flummoxes him by wearing "rationals" (bloomers), sending him crashing to the pavement. Throughout the book he crosses paths with this Young Lady in Grey and her ne'er-do-well companion, eventually coming to her rescue and spending a few days as her "brother" before his adventure comes to an end.

The book could be considered a social commentary, as well as a comedy, as it touches on a lot of aspects of English culture at the time. However, where other social commentaries might use a sharp, incisive humour to make their points, The Wheels of Chance treats its subjects with a loving touch, remaining gentle and charming throughout.

This is a book set in a time when safety bicycles (those with two wheels the same size, as opposed to "ordinary bicycles", which we think of as "penny farthings") were making travel possible for the common man and "untrammelled" woman. The freedom of movement they brought to women and the lower classes coincided with and contributed to the early feminist movement and the waning days of the traditional class system in England.

This book was published a year after Susan B. Anthony's famous statement celebrating the bicycle, calling the image of a young lady on a bicycle "the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood". This statement clearly influence Wells as he was writing this novel, as one of the characters is an authoress who has written a book called A Soul Untrammelled. Wells does seem to be laughing a little at the concept, but his humour is directed more at the young girl who has taken all her ideas of life from novels than the feminist literature itself.

Jesse, the Young Woman in Grey, has an idea of becoming a "Free Woman" and "Living Her Own Life", like the heroines in the popular novels. In the course of the book, she discovers that "freedom" usually costs something after all (money, for instance). Hoopdriver revels in the fact that a young man in a cycling suit could be a duke as well as a draper, and takes the opportunity to pretend to be someone else for a while. He eventually discovers that the man he actually is just might be good enough after all.

It's not a high romance, it's not a grand adventure, it's not a side-splitting comedy and it's not an incisive social commentary. And, yet, it is a romance, an adventure, a comedy and a social commentary. It is, as the subtitle says, an Idyll, and it is a very pleasant read.