Friday, February 8, 2019

“War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells” and the Bicycle,” Jeremy Withers

H. G. Wells may be best known for his books “The Time Machine” and “War of the Worlds,” but he also was a long-time advocate of the bicycle and early in his writing career wrote a novel about a bicycle tour in England in 1895 called “Wheels of Chance,” that was made into a silent film in 1922.  He references the bicycle often enough in his writing, fiction and non-fiction, that an Iowa State English professor, Jeremy Wittles, made a study of it in the book “War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle.”

If I had known about it when it was published in 2014 I would have dropped everything to get my hands on it, as I had a period when I devoured Wells in search of the origin of his oft-quoted declaration “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle I no longer despair for the future of the human race,” which appends every email I send. I wanted to know if it came early in his years or later on before his death in 1946.  I never came upon the quote in my reading nor did my search of the internet solve the mystery.  I knew this book could finally have the answer. 

I patiently read it from start to finish without jumping around to seek out the quote, just waiting for it to present itself.   I had to wait until the final chapter.   Just past the halfway point of the book, Wells’ other quote dear to the heart of every cyclist, “Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia,” from his 1905 novel “A Modern Utopia,” appears.  

Since Wittles presents Wells writing chronologically, I presumed his “future of the human race” quote came at the end of his career.  Wittles could not say, as he too was unable to track down its origin.  Though he acknowledges it certainly captures Wells’ voice and sentiments, no one has been able to pin it to him.  His fellow Wells scholar, Simon J. James, came to a similar conclusion in a piece he wrote for the Spring 2014 “H. G. Wells Society Newsletter”  entitled “When I See a Quotation on the Internet: Wells, the Bicycle and the Human Race.” 

Surely if someone else had devised the quote, they’d be happy to take credit for it, so it must remain buried in some obscure essay he wrote or speech he gave that has yet to be uncovered.  I have yet to read James’ essay, nor his own book on Wells, to see the extent of his research or what stones he might have left unturned, but it was good to learn that there is a Wells newsletter, where the answer may some day turn up.

Wittles’ scholarly book dwells mostly on Wells’ writing with scant attention to his bicycling, though it does include photos of Wells on a tandem with his wife and with other bikes.  He does point out though that Wells’ mention of the bike in his writing dries up in 1914 when he does the unthinkable and buys a car, an apparatus he had previously reviled.  He needed the car to facilitate his visits to his mistress who lived fifteen miles away.

In his 1909 novel “Tono-Bungay,” one of his darkest and most cynical works, he lambasts the automobile as an object of conspicuous consumption and facilitator of materialistic greed, human arrogance and social stratification.  Unlike the bicycle, it does not signify anything positive or beneficial to humanity.  Wittles finds mentions of Wells taking bicycle trips in Europe up until 1912, but henceforth only by car.  And even more appalling is that he personifies  his car with a name, Gladys, something he never did with any of his bicycles.  He hypothesizes that the name may be an homage to Francis Willard, who named her bicycle Gladys.

Even though he takes Wells to task for abandoning, or at least neglecting, the bicycle in his later years, he still accords him respect for his early utopian celebration of the bicycle as an astonishing piece of technology that could cure a throng of social and political problems as well as a range of physical and psychological ailments.  Wells has provided  a body of work that one can continue to read asserting the myriad of benefits of bicycling.  Even “War of the World’s” has over a dozen references to the bicycle.  As an ardent socialist he regarded the bicycle as a “powerful tool to resist the corrupting and alienating influence of modern industrial capitalism.”

Wittles doesn’t cite his own credentials as a cyclist, but he clearly is a full-fledged adherent.  He has edited a book on the bicycle in literature and cinema and he interjects strong endorsements of the bicycle in this book from others that stand alongside Wells’ strong pronouncements.  He quotes the geneticist Steve Jones as declaring the bicycle “the most important event in recent human evolution.”

He quotes Wells’ fellow Brit Conan Doyle from an 1896 issue of  “Scientific America” as saying “when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, all one needs to do is just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road.” 

And he also quotes Susan B. Anthony’s comment “I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel” that is a sister to Wells’ “Every time I see an adult...” quote.  Either could have been derived from the other.

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