The Wheels of Chance
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| The Wheels of Chance | |
 The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll |
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| Author | H. G. Wells |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | J. Ayton Symington |
| Cover artist | Jeff Quinn |
| Country |  United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Comedy |
| Publisher | J. M. Dent & Co |
| Publication date | 1897 |
| Media type | Print (Hardbound) |
| Pages | 232 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
The Wheels of Chance is a comic novel by H. G. Wells.
[edit] Plot introduction
This novel was written at the peak of what has been called the Golden Age of the bicycle—the years of 1890-1905 when practical, comfortable bicycles first became widely and cheaply available, and before the rise of the automobile (see History of the bicycle). The advent of the bicycle stirred sudden and profound changes in the social life of England. It was unprecedented that a person of modest means could travel substantial distances, quickly, cheaply and without being limited to railway schedules. The very idea of travelling for pleasure became a possibility for thousands of people for the first time. This new freedom affected many. It began to weaken the rigid English class structure and it gave an especially powerful boost to the existing movement toward female emancipation.
These are the social changes Wells explores in this story. His hero, Mr. Hoopdriver, is a draper's assistant, a badly-paid, grinding position on the bottom fringes of the middle class—and yet he owns a bicycle and is just setting out on a bicycling tour for his annual ten-days holiday. Wells pokes fun at Hoopdriver's pretenses. To Wells or his readers, a draper's assistant on a bicycle tour was incongruous, only a bit less risible than a chimpanzee in a top hat. Today we can't feel this humor.
Wells portrays Hoopdriver as a dreamer full of Mitty-esque fantasies, and makes many jokes about his shaky riding skills. Hoopdriver's awkwardness, the fact that the bicycle is only just under control and keeps getting away from him, can be seen as a metaphor for how Wells saw his entire society: uncertain and only barely keeping its balance on this new machine. But Wells likes Hoopdriver and truly appreciates the bicycle as well. He describes the start of Hoopdriver's adventure in a lyrical passage that any cyclist would enjoy:
Only those who toil six long days out of the seven, and all the year round, save for one brief glorious fortnight or ten days in the summer time, know the exquisite sensations of the First Holiday Morning. All the dreary, uninteresting routine drops from you suddenly, your chains fall about your feet...There were thrushes in the Richmond Road, and a lark on Putney Heath. The freshness of dew was in the air; dew or the relics of an overnight shower glittered on the leaves and grass...He wheeled his machine up Putney Hill, and his heart sang within him.
Not far along, Hoopdriver encounters a pretty young woman cycling alone and wearing rationals (bloomers). Modern readers, to whom a woman cycling alone (wearing a tank top and lycra shorts) is nothing unusual or even especially interesting, cannot appreciate the titillating shock this picture must have given Wells's readers. Here in one image was all the freedom, all the danger and all the sexual excitement inherent in the new freedom of the bicycle.
Hoopdriver doesn't dare speak to the Young Lady in Grey, as he calls her, but their paths keep crossing. It develops that she is, unknowingly, in great moral danger, on the verge of being "ruined" by an unscrupulous companion. Eventually, and almost accidentally, Hoopdriver saves her from this fate worse than death, and the two wander in innocent companionship across the south of England until the real world, in the shape of the young woman's family, catch up with them. Interestingly, Wells used real geography: with a good map you can follow their route over roads and through towns that still exist.
Wells is less sympathetic to his heroine, Jessie, than to Hoopdriver. She is full of completely impractical notions about living a real life, meaning an independent life free of conventional limits. She has gotten these ideas from reading "modern" novels about women written by her stepmother, and Wells is savage and sarcastic in his treatment of this pretentious authoress and her coterie. He seems to think that Jessie is hopelessly foolish in her romantic notions of female independence, but that the older woman who encourages these ideas without taking responsibility for the consequences is quite immoral.
In the end, both Jessie and Hoopdriver go back to their former lives, Jessie with some possibility of greater freedom and Hoopdriver with some possibility of advancing out of his dead-end job. Wells explicitly denies the reader a finished, happy ending. He only claims not to know what happens to them next, and invites our sympathy for both. If the book is a metaphor for the effect of the bicycle on society, its ending is simply an admission that Wells can't tell if the revolution brought by its wheels will be good or bad.
The text of Wheels of Chance is freely available at several sites on the internet.
