Cycling: The Craze of the Hour

Directly you are in motion you will feel quite helpless, and experience a sensation of being run away with, and it will seem as if the machine were trying to throw you off. The first bicycle was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that the craze really took off. This brought with it the fears, scaremongering, worries and uncertainties that inevitably accompany any new fashion. Women (often unchaperoned and oddly dressed) taking to ‘velocipedes’; over-exertion and heart disease; unknown effects on the health and development of the body - these are just some of the fears that haunted the establishment in the late nineteenth century… But with it, of course, came the joy and wonder of ‘the easy and agreeable motion’ of this thoroughly modern means of locomotion. Cycling: The Craze of the Houris part of ‘Found on the Shelves’, published with The London Library. The books in this series have been chosen to give a fascinating insight into the treasures that can be found while browsing in The London Library. Now celebrating its 175th anniversary, with over 17 miles of shelving and more than a million books, The London Library has become an unrivalled archive of the modes, manners and thoughts of each generation which has helped to form it.