Scorchers v cycle haters: how Victorian cyclists were also vilified in the press

You might think the discussion of cycling in an era before cars were on the roads would be less judgmental - history shows us that is not the case

"The past is a foreign country: they cycle differently there". Such an assumption is often close to the surface in any complaint about the activities of cyclists in present-day Britain. Take, for instance, Angela Epstein's recent article in the Telegraph, which told us to:

Forget bucolic images of the village schoolboy poetically wheeling down country lanes. Or all those Call the Midwife-style dramas where baskets are a vital part of the kit and protest is launched with little more than a chirp of the bicycle bell. Today's cycling fraternity are aggressive, unreconstructed and utterly immutable when it comes to criticism of their form of transport.