THE WHEELS OF CHANCE

'''The Wheels of Chance''' is a comic novel by H. G. Wells.

Contents

Plot introduction

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—gasp!—''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.