Abstract
When it comes to the experience of modernity, historians are more likely to point to other transport modes than the bicycle to describe how transport contributed to growing interconnectedness and speed at a global scale. As a more humble, slower and quieter form of transport, it is easy to forget that the bicycle once also was seen as new, exciting and modern. This is a picture that needs historical correction. In The Alternative Modernity of the Bicycle in British and French Literature, 1880–1920, Una Brogan's goal is to recapture the impression the bicycle made when it first appeared. Brogan argues that, whereas new telecommunication systems, as well as the car and the railway have quite extensively been studied as key technologies of modernity, the bicycle has received less attention (although interestis on the rise, e.g. in Corry Cropper and Seth Whidden's recent Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France, Bucknell University Press, 2022). Whereas during the twentieth century, the bicycle came to be seen as outdated or old-fashioned, Brogan's book tries to revive the sensitivity to its newness, freshness, and ultimately, its “alternative modernity” which still holds promise today.
The book draws on a rich array of written sources to analyse contemporaries’ experience of riding bicycles as a new technology. Throughout the book, Brogan keeps coming back to a number of British and French authors writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The authors discussed range from famous (H.G. Wells is a key figure in the book) to lesser-known ones, who are not always introduced in as much detail as the reader less well-versed in British literature around 1900 would like. In addition, while Brogan discusses her selection of authors in the introduction, the selection criteria still remain somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, it is a strength of the book that it covers a wide variety of written sources and does not limit itself to canonical literature.
The book consists of four sizeable chapters. The first one, Text and Transport, discusses various aspects of the relationship between cycling and publishing. Two novels, H.G. Well's The Wheels of Chance (1896) and Maurice Leblanc's Voici des ailes (1898), are key sources in this and other chapters. Brogan discusses how the bicycle was connected to nature in a way that ties back to an older (“peripatetic”) Romantic tradition of walking. Additionally, there are sections on the bicycle in detective novels, on how bicycles and bicycle accidents “had the capacity to provoke mirth and provide fresh possibilities for amusement” (p. 44), and the relationship between the publishing business and cycling, for example, the way cyclists read during breaks (or even while cycling!). In this way, this chapter provides a varied overview of the intimate connection between the written word and the experience of cycling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Chapter Two, Liberation on Two Wheels: Class, Gender and the Bicycle in Literature, has a sharper focus. It discusses how the emancipatory role of the bicycle comes to the fore in various aspects. Building on existing work on cycling and gender it discusses the class emancipation potential of the bicycle in H.G. Wells’ work, the gender emancipation potential in British literature in general, and most innovatively, the way cycling is connected to queer feminism in the work of Proust.
In Chapter Three (“The Body and the Machine: The Sensory Discoveries of the Cyclist”) cycling is placed more firmly in conversation with the body. For instance, Brogan sees the relatively low technical knowledge and skill needed for performing repairs as a democratic element in cycling: “This encouraged a relationship with technology that was meaningful and empowering rather than alienating and disabling” (p. 151). Later, Brogan argues that “many early cyclists claimed that their sensory impressions were sharpened rather than impoverished by their experience awheel, in contrast to other transport technologies” (p. 165). As such, Brogan also suggests that a more positive, non-alienating relationship between humans and technology has become increasingly hard to access, but might be revived by a return to cycling culture today.
The final chapter, entitled Moving Forward: Space, Time and the Bicycle, takes a critical look at claims that the bicycle was the forerunner of the car in creating “an accelerated, subjective, commodified modernity” (p. 205). Brogan takes some issue with views that do not properly take into account the differences between the experience and mode of cycling versus driving. How cyclists spatially interact with their environment is in her view “radically different from the destructive and dehumanizing paradigm of transport that would come to characterize the twentieth century” (p. 207). At the same time, it is undeniable that cyclists experienced nature and landscape in a new way: perched on the saddle, traversing multiple landscapes in short succession, they were experiencing the world in a faster and new way. Brogan argues that the bicycle, therefore, holds an ambivalent position by being “both a modernising influence and a counter-cultural technology” (p. 12). In the end, it is this complexity which makes the bicycle unique as a facet of modernity, but also explains its promise and potential today, some 150 years after its initial introduction.
As the conclusion of the book makes clear, Brogan's personal experience of cycling (as a bicycle messenger in Paris) informs this work. Many of the positive elements of cycling visible in the literature of the late nineteenth century should in her view inform our view of mobility today, as is explicitly acknowledged in the introduction. While this argument is not central to the book and remains rather implicit, the aforementioned fact that the relatively easy access to repair allows for a meaningful and non-alienating relationship to technology, the fact that cycling leads to a more positive relationship to the body, and the more positive experience of nature cycling allows, are all aspects we can find in the literature of the 1880s to 1920s that still hold promise today.
In conclusion, this is a fascinating and theoretically rich book that rightly draws full attention to the bicycle as a literary device in its own right, rather than a forerunner of the car, as many accounts of automobility would have it if they mention cycling at all. After reading this important work on cycling's place in turn-of-the-century French and British literature, one can only hope for similar analyses in other language areas that were more at the margins of modernity. Perhaps too, an analysis of cycling's declining cultural capital during the twentieth century is called for, as part of an explanation for the ascendancy of automobility. But for now, readers interested in cycling as a cultural phenomenon will find The Alternative Modernity of the Bicycle's a thought-provoking contribution to writing cycling back into history.
