Keats on Two Wheels

The nothing of the day is a machine called the Velocipede—It is a wheel-carriage to ride cock horse upon, sitting astride & pushing it along with the toes, a rudder wheel in hand. They will go seven miles an hour. A handsome gelding will come to eight guineas, however they will soon be cheaper, unless the army takes to them.

—John Keats, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 18 February 1819

Keats’s nothings range from “less than a nothing” to nothings that weigh slightly more than dreams.¹ Keats reports feeling physically reduced to nothing himself when “sitting by a good looking coachman”;² and his entire body of poetry unbuilds itself whenever his confidence deserts him.³ My concern is with a particular nothing that, for all its seeming flimsiness, presses on childhood memories, threatens Keats’s sense of poetic self, and conjures disturbing ghosts of political futurity. Keats makes just one allusion to the velocipede—the pedal-less precursor of the modern bicycle, patented by German inventor Karl Drais, and the most talked-about newfangled fashion of 1819—dismissing it as the “nothing of the day.”⁴ But like so much in Keats, this dematerializing comment is complexly layered, self-complicating. Keats on the subject of two wheels (one of three modalities of my title’s preposition) not only helps to illuminate the reception of kick-propelled, personal mechanized transport in Britain. It also invites us to attend to the radical entanglement of particular Romantic things and nothings: volumes of Cockney poetry, velocipedes, post-Peterloo policing.

In a valuably recalibrating essay on the 1819 vogue for velocipedes, Brian Rejack explores the wider public backlash against the new machines in the contexts of Regency sporting culture, Cockney masculinities, and suburban aesthetics. He traces how the “dandy charger”—a gibe at early adopters—was not only negatively enlisted in culture wars against dandies, but also against the “similarly threatening cultural figure of the Cockney, who like the dandy destabilizes categories of social class, masculinity, and cultural hegemony.”⁵ Rejack is also right that with the term “cock horse” Keats signals his own painful awareness—as a poet whom the conservative-leaning press had publicly identified with faddish verse—of the “correspondence between the machine and its Cockney proponents.”⁶ Put another way, Rejack shows us that the “handsome gelding” of both Cockney transportation and versification is for Keats a gelding that itself castrates.

An important dimension, then, to Keats’s wariness of Drais’s machine can be understood in precisely the terms Rejack sets out. However, Keats’s snarkish comments mask a set of urgent personal registrations that lie outside of Rejack’s careful analysis. Keats’s attempt to unmake the modish nothing of the day is framed to his émigré brother and sister-in-law as itself nothing, a side comment of no consequence. But his inclusion of technical specifications, price point and notes on riding technique suggests the machine had occupied his thoughts, if not captured his imagination.⁷ There’s more than meets the eye to Keats on velocipedes, more than a simple reflex against his sense of the flashy absurd.

When we psychologically decompress his tutty remarks, three distinct areas of anxiety emerge. The first, I suggest, arises from the ostler’s son’s appreciation of the likely impact of cheap, mass-produced mechanical horses on the equine industry.⁸ The second bears on his own industry— poetry—and is activated by his apprehension of the similarities between pushing oneself “along with the toes” and writing poetry about standing tip-toe (upon little hills). The third locus of Keats’s unease is presciently centered on the prospective militarization of the new technology (if “the army takes to them”). Prescient, because in the weeks following the lethal cavalry charge against protesters in Manchester on 16 August 1819, velocipedes were an unlikely and hitherto unremarked recruit into post-Peterloo debates on the use of mounted military irregulars in policing large public gatherings.

A final remark before I elaborate on my opening provocations. At the Third Bicentennial John Keats conference in Hampstead...