Cycling images

Victorian Cycles
Hand-built 1890's-style bicycles
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Cycling Images

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The images below were scanned from our private collection of antique ephemera.
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"Who knows but that before the next century dawns it will be recognized that the inventor of the bicycle has done more to revolutionize the religious, moral and social ideas of mankind than all the philosophers of our time?"
—"Bicycling Notes of the Month." Outing May, 1886, p. 240

If you like cycling —especially Victorian cycling!— be sure to check out my fiction series about a cycling club in the 1880s and '90s, the Tales of Chetzemoka!

Godey's fashion plate, 1890

Ladies' sports fashions, 1890.
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"Recent performances on the wheel would seem to indicate that we have not yet apprehended the possibilities of 'cycling. Tours of prodigious distances have been made in incredibly short periods of time. Regions have been traversed hitherto regarded as inacessible. Two ladies recently rode over the Alps [on highwheel tricycles], from Basle to Porto Maurizio, crossing by the Gemina Passi... The distance between John o' Groats and Land's End has been made in eight days. 255 miles have been covered in one day." —G.E.B. "The Future." Outing and The Wheelman, December, 1883, p. 227.

"I am of opinion that no exercise for women has ever been discovered that is to them so really useful [as riding a high wheel tricycle]. Young and middle-aged ladies can learn to ride the tricycle with greatest facility, and they become excellently skillful. One young lady, who is very dear to me, can beeat me both in pace and in distance, and in a tour we have made to-day of several miles on a beautiful country road, we have enjoyed ourselves as much as when we ride out together on horseback, while we have had better exercise. I shall rejoice to see the time when this exercise shall be as popular amongst girls and women as tennis and the dance, for the more fully the physical life of our womankind is developed, the better for men as well as women." —Dr. B.W. Richardson, "On-Dits and Facts of the Month." The Ladies' Treasury: A Household Magazine, 1882, p. 715.

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"To say that it is hard to learn to ride the bicycle is an exageration, and arises mainly from the fact that the pride of some who are graceful riders makes them magnify their own accomplishments by alarming unnecessarily, those who are anxious to learn. A few lessons and a little dertermination and, before one is aware of it, the art is acquired."
—Hull, Geo. S., M.D. "Physicians and the Bicyle." Outing and the Wheelman. October 1883, p. 57.

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Advertisement for cycling corset.
"Cycling In A Corset"
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"Does the novelty [of cycling] wear off? Ask the first bicyclist you meet, and be prepared for his emphatic "No!""
—George S. Hull, "Physicians and the Bicyle." Outing and the Wheelman. October 1883, p. 57.

"With a good bicycle, well ridden, any man, old or young, may enjoy the finest and most exhilerating exercise the world has yet seen and be as safe as the occupant of a carriage, and safer than the horseman."—Henry W. Williams, "The Wheelman." February, 1883, p. 378.

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1880's high-wheel bicycle and tricycle advertisement

Cycling fashions from "The Delineator" 1897.

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Cycling fashions from "The Delineator" 1897.

Advertisement in Good Housekeeping, January, 1896

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"[C]ertainly no one can doubt that the modern bicycle is a thing of beauty. It belongs to the nineteenth-century. It has all the lines, it has all the bearings, it has all the motions, it has all the airiness, it has all the aspirations of the nineteenth-century in it. It belongs to the same category of modern things as the Brooklyn Bridge."—Rev. George Pentecost. "Speeches Made At The Banquet of the League of American Wheelmen, Monday, May 28, 1882, At Metropolitan Hotel, New York City." July, 1883. p. 308.