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Start giftingThe Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreOur hero, Mr. Hoopdriver, is a frustrated “draper’s assistant” in Putney. He is badly paid and over worked. Wells briefly worked in such a job. Mr. Hoopdriver owns a bicycle and he sets out on a bicycling tour of “the Southern Coast” on his annual ten days’ holiday and escapes the dreariness of ordinary life into an imaginary world of fantasy.
Wells wrote this at the height of the bicycling craze and before the automobile. The bicycle gave freedom to the working class, weakened the English class structure and gave a boost to female emancipation. In his story he explores these changes.
H.G. Wells was a professional writer and journalist who published more than a hundred books, including pioneering science fiction novels, histories, essays and programmes for world regeneration. He was a founding member of numerous movements including Liberty and PEN International - the world's oldest human rights organization - and his Rights of Man laid the groundwork for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Wells' controversial and progressive views on equality and the shape of a truly developed nation remain directly relevant to our world today. He was, in Bertrand Russell's words, 'an important liberator of thought and action'.
John Burlinson is an American audiobook narrator.
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