The Wheels of Chance is an early comic novel by H. G. Wells about an August 1895 cycling holiday, somewhat in the style of Three Men in a Boat.
It began to weaken the rigid English class structure and it gave an especially powerful boost to the existing movement toward female emancipation.
The hero of The Wheels of Chance, Mr. Hoopdriver, is a frustrated "draper's assistant" in Putney, a badly paid, grinding position (and one which Wells briefly held); and yet he owns a bicycle and is setting out on a bicycling tour of "the Southern Coast" on his annual ten days' holiday.
He is not a skilled rider of his forty-three-pound bicycle, and his awkwardness reflects both Wells's own uncertainties in negotiating the English class system and his critical view of that society.
Nonetheless, Hoopdriver is treated sympathetically: "But if you see how a mere counter-jumper, a cad on castors, and a fool to boot, may come to feel the little insufficiencies of life, and if he has to any extent won your sympathies, my end is attained.
She is ultimately revealed to be Jessie Milton, a girl of seventeen who has run away from her stepmother in Surbiton, risking "ruin" at the hands of the bounder Bechamel, an unscrupulous older man who has promised to help the naive Jessie to establish herself an independent life but who is really intent on seducing her.
Ironically, her flight has in part been inspired by liberal ideals of unconventionality that have been hypocritically promoted by her stepmother's popular novels.
"[6] Wells's intention in The Wheels of Chance might be taken to be satirical, were his protagonists' circumstances not so closely related to his own history and that of his second wife, Catherine Robbins.