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Hobbies; or, Attitude Is Everything, Dedicated with Permission to All Dandy Horsemen. Hand-colored etching, published in London, 1819.
London, 1819. A crowd has gathered in Paddington to witness a sporting event, of a sort. It is a race that will follow a semicircular course, bending through the genteel streets and squares on the eastern side of the Edgeware Road, moving west out to the Grand Junction Water-Works, before turning south and then east to finish at Tyburn Turnpike, at the northeast corner of Hyde Park.
As battles staged in London streets go, it is a high-toned affair. The contest pits a lord against an earl, and a collection of the well-born and well-dressed have gathered to look on, wearing fine muslin and crisp breeches worthy of an afternoon at Ascot. This is a stakes race, after all, with a prize of one hundred guineas promised to the victor. Yet no horses will be run today. Instead, this contest will showcase that latest sensation, that celebrated and maligned novelty that goes by various names—the velocipede, the hobbyhorse, the pedestrian curricle, the swiftwalker, the accelerator, the perambulator, the draisine—but is most colorfully known by monikers that testify to its popularity in the beau monde to which the lord and earl belong: the dandy horse, the dandy hobby, the dandy charger.
Someone has fired a pistol. The racers are off, swinging their legs and pushing off on paving stones to drive their vehicles forward. The sight of these two-wheelers in motion is by turns impressive and absurd. On straightaways and on level ground, the machines do well, traveling with an easy gliding motion that might even be called elegant. But when the road slopes upward, the racers grunt and strain, and on the downhill stretches and sharp turns, toil often turns to panic, a flurry of furious tugging at hand brakes and clumsy manipulating of steering bars to keep the contraptions vertical and above the London dust.
For the first half mile or so, the lord and the earl run virtually neck and neck. Then, as they near the waterworks, the racers’ eyes bulge at an unwelcome sight. A cow has dashed onto the path. The earl swerves clear but the lord maneuvers too slowly, plowing straight into the beast and crashing hard amid a tumult of cursing and bovine lowing. The fallen rider is helped to his feet by a chimney sweep. He brushes himself off and starts up again, trailing by some distance now but riding hard. A short while later, as the riders approach the corner of Connaught Mews, just north of Hyde Park, it is the earl who veers off course—slipping, tipping, nearly hurtling to the pavement. This lapse allows the lord to close the gap, and moments later, when the pair arrive at Tyburn, they are in a dead heat. As they cross the line it is impossible for anyone in the cheering throng to discern which dandy has charged to the finish first.
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This was likely one of the first bicycle races held in England, one of the first anywhere, for that matter—assuming that it actually took place. The story is recorded in a pamphlet, An Accurate, Whimsical, and Satirical, Description of the New Pedestrian Carriage, or Walking Accelerator!!, written by a certain John Fairburn. It is a contemporary source, published in 1819, the year the race is reported to have been run. But there are reasons to believe that the account is more whimsical and satirical than accurate, another vivid piece of bicycle apocrypha. The racers are identified only as “Lord Y____” and “the Earl of B____.” That wager of one hundred guineas, nearly $10,000 in today’s money, seems steep, even for profligate peers. The slapstick elements of the account—the sudden appearance of cows and chimney sweeps, darting onstage from the wings—suggest an effort to juice the plot. Then there is the kicker to the story, in which Fairburn reports that the race transfixed le tout London and that news of the results was sent by carrier pigeon to George, the Prince Regent, at his seaside retreat, the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.
But if the story is not, strictly speaking, factual, there is truth in it. As Fairburn’s lively narrative suggests, history’s first cycling craze played out as a Regency farce, with dramatis personae drawn from England’s upper crust. The Laufmaschine made its way first to France, where Karl von Drais secured a patent in early 1818. News that Parisian swells had taken to riding a machine called the draisienne or vélocipède filtered across the channel; later in 1818, the two-wheeler materialized in Bath, where a German acquaintance of Drais’s had a model built by a local artisan. Soon after, a London coachmaker, Denis Johnson, was granted a patent for “a Pedestrian Curricle or Velocipede.” Johnson’s machine incorporated modifications to Drais’s blueprint and added some tweaks of his own devising. Johnson refined the steering apparatus and substituted metal for wood in certain areas to create a sturdier machine. He also designed an adjustable seat, which could be raised or lowered to accommodate riders of differing heights. Other manufacturers soon popped up, selling their own variations or—more often, perhaps—pirated copies of Johnson’s velocipede in violation of his patent.
By the turn of 1819, several hundred of the new vehicles were in use across England. Their presence was felt on city streets and country lanes, from Winchester to Canterbury to Hull to rural Hampshire, where a woman was killed when her horse, startled by a passing velocipede, threw her from her cart. In Manchester, Sheffield, and Leeds, crowds gathered for demonstrations of velocipede riding. Denis Johnson, hoping to drum up sales, went on tour, traveling to Birmingham, Liverpool, and other cities to exhibit his machine in hotels and music halls. There were velocipede races. Many were informal competitions, like the race depicted in Fairburn’s pamphlet. On one occasion, hundreds assembled on a road outside Glasgow where, word had it, a velocipedist would be showcasing his machine. “Thus they were hoaxed,” a newspaper reported, “for no dandy horse appeared.”
The fad was centered in London. “In the New Road [velocipedes] might be seen in great numbers running every fine evening especially near Finsbury Square, and the top of Portland Road, where they were let out for hire by the hour,” recalled one Londoner. “Rooms for practice were opened in several parts of town.” A newspaper likened the obsession with velocipedes to the interest generated by the visit to England of a Persian emissary seeking assistance in his nation’s conflict with the Russian Empire: “To-day, nothing is spoken of but the Persian Ambassador, or the Velocipede.” On the variety stage, skits and songs sent up the velocipedes as a trendy folly. “The nothing of the day is a machine called the velocipede,” wrote John Keats, the poet, in March 1819, in a letter from London to his brother and sister-in-law. Keats professed bafflement at the popularity of the strange “wheel carriage to ride cock-horse upon.”
The meanings ascribed to the new invention in the French and English capitals conformed neatly to national stereotypes. The Parisian vélocipède signified sex: it was said that couples rented his-and-hers two-wheelers in parks and bois and rode to secluded spots to tryst. In London, the vehicles were emblems of social class. The price of a velocipede was dear. (Eight guineas, Keats noted in his letter.) The velocipede craze was not restricted to the elite; the proliferation of instructional schools and the by-the-hour rental market bespeaks more widespread popularity, and there are contemporary accounts of country clergymen using velocipedes to make their rounds visiting parishioners. But they held special allure for the subset of rich Englishmen who were infatuated with novelties and dedicated to amusement.
This social type—young, carefree, flamboyantly dressed, with ample funds and free time to commit to the pursuit of what most would call frivolous pleasures—had been an object of fascination in England since the 1770s. But the figure of the dandy gained new prominence in the second decade of the nineteenth century, when King George III, beset by mental illness, was judged unfit to rule, and his eldest son, Prince George, was installed as his proxy. The prince had long been notorious for his dissolute habits: his ravenous appetite for food and sex and art, his wild parties, lavish spending, huge debts, and general disdain for duty and propriety. Some held out hope that the responsibility with which the prince was now entrusted would bring a change in demeanor. But with greater power came more opportunities for George to indulge his vices, and he took them.
During his reign as regent, from 1811 to 1820, George turned over the business of governing to his ministers, chiefly the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, absolving himself of responsibility for nearly all affairs of state, including the ongoing war with Napoleon’s France. While Britain endured the costly final years of that conflict, and faced an onslaught of domestic crises, the prince devoted himself to high living. The excess of the period was exemplified by the Royal Pavilion, the opium-dream Orientalist palace designed for the prince by architect John Nash, and by the parade of aristocrats and hangers-on who flocked there to eat, drink, and debauch beneath its psychedelic domes and minarets. This circle included George’s various mistresses and many prominent men of fashion, among them the ne plus ultra of dandies, the prince’s old Eton chum Beau Brummell.
The exploits of the prince and his set transfixed and scandalized the public. Everyone and everything connected with the milieu was imbued with glamour and subject to populist resentment. Thus the velocipede, which gained fame and, in short order, infamy. Newspaper readers learned that velocipedes were fixtures on the grounds of the prince’s estates and adornments of his parties. In August 1819, the London-based Morning Post described the regent’s birthday celebration at Windsor Castle, an extravagant affair featuring “a variety of juvenile amusements,” including “eating of buns while hopping,” “wrestling for a jacket,” and “dandy horse racing.” Newspapers reported that the Prince Regent’s guests were in the habit of commuting to the Royal Pavilion on two wheels. (“It is now become quite common for persons to come down to Brighton from London on Velocipedes.”) George himself took an interest in the machines: he was said to have purchased four of them, which were conveyed from London to the Royal Pavilion by army officers with “all the wagon-train pomp of a peaceful military parade.” It is unclear if the prince himself was a velocipede rider, but the idea provoked much amused commentary, due to his considerable girth.
You did not need to be among the elect on the royal guest list to catch a glimpse of the velocipede. “In Hyde Park, all fashionable men cross its saddle,” went the lyrics of “The Perambulator; or, Pedestrian Dandy Hobby Horse,” a song published in 1819. Hyde Park was London’s velocipede mecca, and dandies predominated. (“If we are literally to shoot the folly as it flies,” wrote one observer of the velocipede scene, “Hyde-park, on a Sunday would be strewed with dead, and not a Dandy left to tell the tale.”) The understanding that velocipedes were, first and foremost, the playthings of “idle and titled” men-about-town was amplified in the quips of commentators and the sardonic rhymes of poets:
Pray have you not seen
That most clever machine,
That’s to drive out of England each prime bit of blood;
And the dandy who rides,
Has the pleasure besides,
Of carrying his steed, and of walking in mud.
There were fiercer denunciations. In May 1819, a newspaper editorialist lamented the “disgrace and odium of Dandyism” that had tainted the velocipede, distracting attention from its innovative design and its usefulness as a means of “muscular exertion.” For a writer in the political weekly The Gorgon, the velocipede was a symptom, and a symbol, of the depravity of England’s elites: “What are these lay-lords, as they are called, with which the country is burdened? Idle young fellows…who spend their time in galloping about the Park, and riding the Dandy horse—while the labourer is perishing with hunger, the merchant cannot sell his goods, nor the farmer cultivate his land, because of the taxes they pay to support the spendthrifts.”
The virulence of this criticism reflects the wider politics of the day. Britain in the early nineteenth century was convulsed by change and social unrest. The rise of industrialized production, the enactment of free trade policies, the deprivation and loss engendered by the war with France—these transformations and traumas roiled the British public and poured fuel on smoldering class tensions. Throughout the Regency period, as much as a third of England’s population faced starvation. Food riots and other rebellions erupted and were met by military crackdowns. More British troops were called up to combat machine breakers during the Luddite uprisings of 1811–13 than had been deployed by Wellington against Napoleon’s forces in the Iberian Peninsula a few years prior. In August 1819, the British calvary stormed into a crowd of sixty thousand protesters who had assembled in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field to demand parliamentary reform. Eighteen people died and hundreds were injured in the so-called Peterloo Massacre, “the bloodiest political event of the nineteenth century on English soil.”
This was the backdrop to England’s velocipede craze. Whatever inherent appeal the machine may have held—as a technological wonder, as a symbol of progress, as an amusing curio—was overwhelmed by its association with the callous ruling class. The knowledge that the velocipede had reached English shores via France added to the umbrage. In Regency England, Francophilia was rampant among “all those with the slightest pretension to fashion or taste.” Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, English elites maintained their French allegiances and affectations—peppering their speech with French phrases, stocking their cabinets with Sèvres porcelain, filling their glasses with Bordeaux, and “hanker[ing] after Paris as their spiritual home.” The vast majority of the English held virulent anti-French views, and the sense of betrayal—the conviction that the indulgences of the upper classes were not only decadent but treasonous—lingered when the war was over. In June 1819, almost exactly four years to the day after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a comedian appeared onstage at London’s Covent Garden Theatre. Riding a velocipede and clad in the costume of the dandy, he recited flowery verses praising his Parisian “cheval de bois.” The joke would have been lost on no one.
The most vivid satire was the work of caricaturists, who churned out etchings and engravings lampooning the velocipede fad. (In 1819, a London journalist noted that the velocipede “contributes to the amusement of passengers in the streets in the form of caricatures in the print shops.”) Rendered in the bold colors and cartoonish style of the period, the prints reflected the understanding that velocipedes were a public safety hazard, a threat to life or, at least, limb. They showed madcap scenes, images of an out-of-control machine barreling at top speed toward an inevitable crash.
But it was the riders who were the prime subjects of ridicule. Caricaturists depicted dandies in their finery, stuffed into top hats and half-swallowed by cravats, struggling to maintain a grip on careering velocipedes. Many cartoons conflated velocipede riding with sexual perversion. A frequent target of the caricatures was the Prince Regent, who was portrayed in preposterous erotic situations, straddling both a two-wheeler and a mistress. One print, thought to be the work of the famous illustrator George Cruikshank, shows the prince splayed facedown across a velocipede beneath its rider, the prince’s mistress, Lady Hertford. The prince has a bit in his mouth, and Lady Hertford tugs at the reins with her left hand; her right hand, raised high over her head, grips a horse whip. In the background we glimpse a second velocipedist, the prince’s brother Frederick, the Duke of York, who appears to be savoring the sadomasochistic scene.
Historical patterns are assembling here. We can see similarities between the anti-velocipede uproar of the Regency period and the scorn directed at today’s cycling dandies, “hipsters,” with their fixed-gear bikes and fashion-forward looks. There are other echoes of today’s bicycle controversies. Populist contempt for velocipedes may have been based largely on their reputation as toys of the rich. But what doomed the first bicycle, in England and elsewhere, was NIMBYism: the belief that velocipedes were unrightful intruders, welcome neither on the roadways, where horses and carriages traveled, nor in the parks or on the sidewalks, which were the domain of pedestrians. “The crowded state of the metropolis does not admit this novel mode of exercise,” pronounced a London newspaper in March 1819. Velocipedes were dangerous, critics said, ungovernable things that posed a menace to men and beasts, to say nothing of the fools who chose to ride them.
The problem was fundamental, built into a machine whose steering mechanism was poorly engineered and whose brakes were inadequate. Riders caught their wheels on ruts and went flying; they struck other velocipedes and swerved into the paths of pedestrians and horse-drawn cabs. Newspapers recounted stories of collisions and smashups: velocipedists who skidded into fence posts, who were thrown to the floor in practice rooms, who slammed into walls and gates and docks. There were reports of broken bones, cracked teeth, and crashes in marketplaces that upended vendors and scattered wares. An epidemic of “ruptures,” or hernias, was said to have afflicted those who “indulged themselves in the Sunday use of this vehicle.” Looking back on the phenomenon years later, a Londoner recalled the hysteria velocipede accidents provoked among certain citizens:
When quietly disposed people saw a velocipede come rattling towards them down a steep hill, rush by like a thunderbolt, going every moment faster and faster, and finally behold the rider terminate his furious career by plunging with frantic desperation, headlong into a deep ditch up to his eyes in mud, respectable people were at a loss to account for his violent conduct, and in their own minds ascribed it to mental alienation—a sort of temporary insanity brought on by velocipedes; while others could not help thinking of a certain herd of swine, that under satanic influence ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished among the waters.
The backlash against velocipedes had a violent edge. In Hyde Park, gangs of youths swarmed riders and chased them away. Sometimes the vehicles were seized by mobs and vandalized. Once, when a few velocipedists joined hundreds of horsemen on a stag hunt in Epping Forest, northeast of London, “the hobbies ultimately became objects of attack and were demolished.” The actions of these vigilantes were soon given an official imprimatur. In 1819, a ban on velocipede riding was decreed in London. Injunctions were enacted elsewhere in England, and in other far-flung locations that Karl von Drais’s invention had reached. Bans were imposed in Milan, New York, and Philadelphia. In New Haven, Connecticut, a newspaper editorial advised citizens to “seize, break, destroy, or convert to their own use as good prize, all such [velocipedes] found running on the side-walks.” The vehicles materialized in distant corners of the British Empire, and a familiar series of events unfolded. “It would seem that the Dandies of Calcutta, mounted on their Velocipedes, have become rather troublesome to the worthy citizens of that metropolis,” quipped the London Sun in May 1820, reporting that the city’s governor-general had instituted a velocipede prohibition.
For a time, zealous riders flouted these laws. But the blow was struck. The two-wheeler had been deemed illicit, and that judgment would hold. The London press, which just months earlier had portrayed velocipedes as the height of fashion, now called them passé. “Great expectations were at one time formed of those things called Velocipedes,” a newspaper declared in the summer of 1820, “but they have been found so crazy and laboriously manageable that they are altogether abandoned.” The fashion-conscious moved on to new sensations, and there were fresh inventions to excite the imagination of technophiles: “All the catalogue of dandy chargers hitherto invented are not to be compared with the new mode of traveling by steam-boats.”
Other changes were afoot. With the death of George III in 1820, the prince ascended to the throne. King George IV was unreconstructed, still lazy and dissipated. (“A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist than this king, with vices and weaknesses of the lowest and most contemptible order,” wrote the privy councillor and diarist Charles Greville.) But King George was a depleted force who spent his final decade in steep decline: blind in one eye, morbidly obese, racked with gout and dropsy, doped up on laudanum. The Regency receded into history, and to the extent that the velocipede was recalled at all, it was as a footnote from that era of excess and frivolity. In 1822, a literary critic, writing dismissively of Lord Byron, judged the poet “as ephemeral as a Brummel or a Velocipede.”
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But there were voices in the wilderness—those who remembered the velocipede fondly, and who glimpsed its future. The historical record has preserved a couple of these visionaries. The anonymous author of an 1829 letter to the London-based science journal The Mechanics’ Magazine hailed the velocipede’s “celerity, lightness, elegance, compactness, durability, and ease of propulsion,” proclaiming it “one of the most promising inventions of this inventive age…far less worthy than most, of that oblivion into which it appears to have sunk.” With impressive prescience, the letter writer suggested that the machine might be improved with the addition of “treadles and cranks.”
Some eight years later, a more forceful case was mounted. In May 1837, just a month before the teenage Princess Victoria began her reign as queen, a man named Thomas Stephens Davies delivered a speech to a distinguished body in London. Davies was a mathematician and a member of the Royal Academy, a “gentleman of science” whose disquisitions typically had titles like “On the Equations of Loci Traced upon the Surface of the Sphere, as Expressed by Spherical Co-ordinates.”
His address on this occasion, “On the Velocipede,” fell outside his usual purview, and it stands as a remarkable piece of bicycle literature: both a requiem and a prophecy, and one of the most farseeing defenses of the two-wheeler ever recorded. The lecture was given in Woolwich, in southeast London, at the Royal Military Academy, an august institution for which Davies had recently authored a multivolume mathematics textbook. The audience that day was full of stolid, serious types, scholars and career soldiers. Davies knew they would be puzzled by his praise song to a machine, which, at that late date, was obscure to most (“[Today] a velocipede is as rare as a black swan, and the young people now rising up scarcely know what it is”) and regarded by those who did remember it as obsolete. “It has been suggested to me,” he said, “that I ought to apologize to you for bringing before you a subject that may appear to some persons too trifling to merit the attention of the members of this institution.”
But Davies insisted that the velocipede was worthy of reconsideration. It was, he said, a “remarkable invention,” which had been “persecuted” and “put down” before its time. He conceded that the velocipedes had design deficiencies, and that riders had difficulty controlling the machines when they reached high speeds. But Davies argued that neither design flaws nor dandies were behind the velocipede’s demise. The cause was narrow-mindedness and philistinism, the outcry of the “braying” hordes who oppose anything new and unfamiliar on principle: “When umbrellas were first brought out, they brayed at them, and when the steam engine got coming they raised with one content a bray so loud that it was heard across the Atlantic and re-echoed back from North America.”
In the case of the velocipede, Davies said, the braying had proved decisive. But was it fatal? Davies thought perhaps not. Squinting into the distance, he caught sight of a day when Karl von Drais would be vindicated—when the velocipede, or a descendant of it, would once again flash into view. “I am persuaded that many of you will think with me, that a new machine ought not to be laid aside and forgotten, until its principle or theory has been fairly enquired into,” Davies said. “An original idea should not be lost sight of, for, if the inventor himself does not see the full extent and application of it, those who come after him may.”