The Romance of the Wheel: Cycling, Fiction and Late Nineteenth-century Ireland

Abstract

The subject of the Irish sporting press in the nineteenth century is one of the many under-researched subjects in the field of Irish sports history. This paper offers an examination of a distinctive strand in the output of Ireland's leading Victorian cycling newspaper, that of fictional short stories and sketches. An exploration of the Irish Cyclist's use of such material demonstrates how these writings were used by the editor, Richard James Mecredy, to give the weekly journal a tone that would appeal more to a potential unionist readership than a nationalist one. This ran counter to the supposedly non-political and non-sectarian ethos of the nineteenth-century Irish cycling world. A close examination of many of the fictional short stories and sketches which are set in the Irish countryside reveals the authors’, and presumably the readers’, fear of the Catholic peasant or nationalist ‘other’.

Notes

1. Tony Mason, ‘Sporting news, 1860–1914’, in Michael Harris and Alan Lee, eds, The press in English society from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (London, Cranbury, NJ, and Mississauga, 1986), p. 168.

2. Tony Mason, ‘Sport’, in J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, eds, Victorian periodicals and Victorian society (Aldershot, 1994), p. 297.

3. Mike Huggins, ‘Cartoons and comic periodicals, 1841–1901: A satirical sociology of Victorian sporting life’, in Mike Huggins and J.A. Mangan, eds, Disreputable pleasures: Less virtuous Victorians at play (London and New York, 2004), pp. 124–50; Jeffrey Hill, ‘Rite of spring: Cup finals and community in the north of England’, in Jeffrey Hill and Jack Williams, eds, Sport and identity in the north of England (Keele, 1996), pp. 311–29; Marilyn Constanzo, ‘“One can't shake off the women”: Images of sport and gender in Punch, 1901–10’, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 19 (2002), pp. 31–56.

4. Marcus de Búrca, Michael Cusack and the GAA (Dublin, 1989), pp. 149–65; Peter Finn, ‘Sport in the north of Ireland from the 1890s’, in Eamon Phoenix, ed., A century of northern life: The Irish News and 100 years of Ulster history, 1890s–1990s (Belfast, 1995), pp. 201–7; Paul Rouse, ‘Sport and Ireland in 1881’, in Alan Bairner, ed., Sport and the Irish: Histories, identities, issues (Dublin, 2005), pp. 7–21.

5. Bob Montgomery, R.J. Mecredy: The father of Irish motoring (Garristown, 2003), p. 8.

6. Irish Cyclist, 10 July 1889.

7. For a discussion of French's career see Brendan O'Dowda, The world of Percy French (Belfast, 1981).

8. Irish Cyclist, 25 Dec. 1889.

9. Irish Cyclist, 25 Dec. 1889.

10. One can discern a similar echo in the trajectory of Punch's portrayal of cycling's development in the late Victorian period: whereas an early cartoon in Punch's almanack for 1869, entitled ‘A run with a rantoone’, scoffs at the very idea of following a fox hunt on a bicycle, a cartoon in the periodical's issue of 12 October 1895, entitled ‘The new patent spring-heeled “bike” for the hunting field’, reflects cyclists’ belief that the bicycle will replace the horse in the future, and features a contraption similar to the one described in French's tale.

11. For some examples in Punch, see the issues dated 5 March 1864, 6 Jan. 1866, 10 Feb. 1872, 4 July 1874, 2 Sept. 1876, 20 Feb. 1886, 21 Dec. 1895.

12. For this topic see Brian Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 9–10, 27–31. For a similar reaction in England see Charles L. Graves, Mr Punch's history of modern England, 4 vols (London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne, 1921), vol. II, p. 139.

13. I have not been able to ascertain Morice's Christian name. The fact that both he and Casey were Irish is stated in Irish Cyclist, 18 Nov. 1885.

14. Wheel World, July 1885.

15. Wheel World, July 1885.

16. Wheel World, Aug. 1885.

17. Wheel World, Sept. 1885.

18. Wheel World, Oct. 1885.

19. Wheel World, Sept. 1885. For Irish cyclists’ reckless disregard for brakes and, indeed, their admiration for those who eschewed their use, especially on Ordinary bicycles, see Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland, pp. 41–3, 169–70.

20. Editor's comment in Irish Cyclist, 27 Dec. 1893.

21. Irish Cyclist, 18 Oct. 1893.

22. Jeffrey Hill, Sport and the literary imagination: Essays in history, literature, and sport (Bern, 2006), p. 27.

23. Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland, pp. 151–60.

24. Irish Wheelman, 25 Sept. 1894.

25. Montgomery, R.J. Mecredy, pp. 5–6.

26. Clare McCotter, ‘Islanders, tourists and psychosis. Doing time in Beatrice Grimshaw's travel brochures’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 4 (2006), p. 2.

27. O'Dowda, The world of Percy French, pp. 1–6.

28. Irish Cyclist, 13 Feb. 1895.

29. Irish Cyclist, 29 March 1893.

30. Irish Cyclist, 10 Feb. 1892.

31. Irish Cyclist, 23 Jan. 1895.

32. Irish Cyclist, 17 Feb. 1892, 24 Feb. 1892.

33. For a discussion of the importance of the geographical setting in Gothic fiction see Robert Mighall, A geography of Victorian Gothic fiction: Mapping history's nightmares (Oxford, 1999), pp. xi–xvii, 19–21, 26, 43–4, 46–8, 62–5, 87–8, 153–6.

34. Irish Cyclist, 21 April 1897.

35. Irish Cyclist, 3 Feb. 1897. The author of this tale used the pen-name of ‘Era’.

36. Irish Cyclist, 16 June 1897.

37. Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland, pp. 75–83.

38. Brian Griffin, ‘Prevention and detection of crime in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in N.M. Dawson, ed., Reflections on law and history (Dublin, 2006), p. 117.

39. Irish Cyclist, 17 Jan. 1894, 24 Jan. 1894, 31 Jan. 1894. This short story was written by an anonymous contributor who used the pseudonym of ‘Philander’.

40. Irish Cyclist, 17 Feb. 1892, 24 Feb. 1892.

41. Irish Cyclist, 11 Jan. 1893, 18 Jan. 1893.

42. On this topic see Brian Griffin, ‘The Irish police: Love, sex and marriage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy, eds, Gender in nineteenth century Ireland: Public and private spheres (Dublin, 1997), pp. 168–78.

43. Irish Cyclist, 3 April 1895.

44. Irish Cyclist, 17 April 1895.

45. Irish Cyclist, 8 Jan. 1896. This story was written by ‘A de. M’: the internal evidence suggests that ‘A de. M’ was a policeman.

46. Irish Cyclist, 25 Aug. 1897.

47. Irish Cyclist, 15 April 1891.

48. Irish Cyclist, 1 Jan. 1902.

49. Irish Cyclist, 1 Jan. 1902.

50. Some years earlier, when pointing out that ‘This is the short story age’, Mecredy described some of the main features of the genre in the cycling press: ‘The hero is depicted on a bicycle, instead of a horse, and flourishing a wrench instead of a pistol, not always, however, for in some of the modern wheel romances, the latter weapon plays a sensationally prominent part; but in most cases it is deemed sufficient, in the middle of the tale, to describe the wheel hero pursuing on his bicycle some escaping criminal, or flying from the assassin’: Irish Cyclist, 27 Dec. 1893.

51. For a discussion of Irish cycling clubs see Griffin, Cycling in Victorian Ireland, pp. 33–9, 55–7, 66–9, 88–9, 142–52.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Griffin

Brian Griffin, Bath Spa University