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Abstract
This essay assesses Edward Thomas's In Pursuit of Spring (1914) as a bicycle travelogue, which anticipates the modern sociological gaze. It argues that bicycle mobility is critical to how that gaze is experienced and mediated, and contrasts this mode with urban flânerie and other forms of pedestrian travel. In extending his critical gaze in a sweep across Southern England, Thomas alludes to earlier journeys by Cobbett, Jefferies and Hazlitt, yet he presents a very contemporary perspective of modernity and its effects as it ripples out of London, across the expanding suburbs and through the transforming rural margins of the Home Counties. In the unique human-powered mobility the bicycle provides, Thomas also gains relief from mental illness and finds a space–time in which to pose existential questions about himself and modernity. In this regard, he follows his friend Robert Frost and anticipates the bicycle fictions of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien.
Published Version
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