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by J. Ayton Symington (Author), H. G. Wells (Author)
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 hero of The Wheels of Chance, Mr. Hoopdriver, is a frustrated "draper's assistant"[2] 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.Hoopdriver encounters a pretty young woman cycling alone and wearing rationals (bloomers). He dares not speak to the Young Lady in Grey, as he calls her, but their paths keep crossing. She is ultimately revealed to be Jessie Milton, a girl of seventeen who has run away from her stepmother in Surbiton, risking "ruin" at the hands of the bounder Bechamel, an unscrupulous older man who has promised to help the naive Jessie to establish herself an independent life but who is really intent on seducing her. Ironically, her flight has in part been inspired by liberal ideals of unconventionality that have been hypocritically promoted by her stepmother's popular novels.......... Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946)-known as H. G. Wells-was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context.He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist.Novels like Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, which describe lower-middle-class life, led to the suggestion, when they were published, that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. A diabetic, in 1934 Wells co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (known today as Diabetes UK). James Ayton Symington (1859-1939)British illustrator
