The Wheels of Chance

The Wheels of Chance

The Wheels of Chance – A Holiday Adventure
Author	H. G. Wells
Illustrator	J. Ayton Symington
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Comedy
Publisher	J. M. Dent & Co
Publication date	1896
Media type	Print (Hardbound)
Pages	313 pp
Preceded by	The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
Followed by	The Plattner Story and Others (1897)

The Wheels of Chance is an early comic novel by H. G. Wells about an August 1895 cycling holiday, somewhat in the style of Three Men in a Boat. In 1922 it was adapted into a silent film The Wheels of Chance directed by Harold M. Shaw.

The Wheels of Chance was written at the height of the cycling craze (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. Even the working class could travel substantial distances, quickly and cheaply, and 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. Wells explored these social changes in his story.

The hero of The Wheels of Chance, Mr. Hoopdriver, is a frustrated "draper's assistant" in Putney, a badly paid, grinding position (and one which Wells briefly held); and yet he owns a bicycle and is setting out on a bicycling tour of "the Southern Coast" on his annual ten days' holiday.

Hoopdriver survives his frustration by escaping in his imagination into a world of fantasy. He is not a skilled rider of his forty-three-pound bicycle, and his awkwardness reflects both Wells's own uncertainties in negotiating the English class system and his critical view of that society. Nonetheless, Hoopdriver is treated sympathetically: "But if you see how a mere counter-jumper, a cad on castors, and a fool to boot, may come to feel the little insufficiencies of life, and if he has to any extent won your sympathies, my end is attained."

Hoopdriver's summer adventure begins lyrically:

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.