The Romance of the Wheel: Cycling, Fiction and Late Nineteenth-century Ireland

The subject of the Irish sporting press in the nineteenth century is one of the many under-researched subjects in the field of Irish sports history. This paper offers an examination of a distinctive strand in the output of Ireland's leading Victorian cycling newspaper, that of fictional short stories and sketches. An exploration of the Irish Cyclist's use of such material demonstrates how these writings were used by the editor, Richard James Mecredy, to give the weekly journal a tone that would appeal more to a potential unionist readership than a nationalist one. This ran counter to the supposedly non-political and non-sectarian ethos of the nineteenth-century Irish cycling world. A close examination of many of the fictional short stories and sketches which are set in the Irish countryside reveals the authors', and presumably the readers', fear of the Catholic peasant or nationalist 'other'.