Bicycle Beginnings

Stephen Channing’s earlier tome, The Victorian Cyclist focused on one of the sport's pioneers – an anonymous author from Margate who described in great detail the routes he took around East Kent in 1886 – and garnered universal praise for its wonderful writing and meticulous detail. Bicycle Beginnings now plays the spotlight over a wider domain, excerpting hundreds of 19th century newspaper reports and letters to convey the atmosphere in which the first cyclists found themselves. The mammoth work (over 190,000 words, covering the period 1779 to 1912) contains race reports, legal developments,…