1 - Text and Transport

Summary

An intuitive interaction between writing and mobility has long existed; as far back as Homer's Odyssey, the rhythms of movement over land and sea have been linked to the inspiration required to begin writing and to the structure, style and literary qualities needed to produce text. Cyclists and authors at the turn of the twentieth century used a new means of transport to explore fresh terrestrial and narrative possibilities. From acting as a device for bringing characters into contact to using the rhythms of cycling to structure a story, authors explored a rich literary terrain on two wheels. The cyclist made an appearance in late Victorian literature as a symbol of progressiveness, liberation and modernity, and quickly became interwoven with genres including adventure stories and comic writing. The bicycle also helped shape original literary forms in this period, which witnessed, for instance, the appearance of the New Woman novel, detective stories and new forms of travel writing. Moreover, cycling had a material relationship to print; the spread of this means of transport impacted on the production and consumption of literature, contributing to the significant changes occurring in the format of books and the manner in which they were read at the turn of the century. The visceral experience of this contemporary form of mobility had a palpable impact on the minds of writers and readers alike.

Romantic Walkers and Cycle Travel Literature

Cycling […] has brought nature and man together in a way that not even the arts of poetry and painting have hitherto succeeded in doing.

F. W. Bockett

Turn-of-the-century cyclists inherited and extended aesthetic, literary and social conceptions of movement and mobility that had begun to be formulated in the Romantic period, when walking was tightly bound up with the process of literary creation. Several Romantic poets were keen walkers, writing during a period described by some – even at the time – as an ‘age of Pedestrianism’. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt and de Quincey each acknowledged the influence of walking on their writing, and Victorian critics readily recognised the importance of Pedestrianism to the Romantic movement. Leslie Stephen, for instance, claimed in his essay ‘In Praise of Walking’ (1901) that ‘the literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was […] due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking’.