‘Take out your machine’: Narratives of Early Motorcycle Travel

Abstract

Journeys and accounts of them are shaped by the mode of transport adopted. How we travel affects how quickly we arrive at a destination and by what route, but it also influences how we relate to the environment and to one another. Even the ways in which we structure our stories of movement may be affected by our means of motion. This is especially true in what Wyndham Lewis called ‘the Petrol Age’, which introduced greater speed and mechanization.¹ Narratives produced in response to its innovations often draw attention to literary contrivances that might otherwise have gone unremarked upon. My focus in this chapter is on the first few decades of the motorcycle, a form of transport more mechanical than the bicycle but more open to the elements than the train or motor car. My essay will survey some of the early developments in motorcycle history, up to the late 1920s, and will examine a range of travel accounts by male and female motorcyclists who rode for a variety of reasons.