How to Bike Like a Victorian-Era Cyclist
Ever looked at a cool vintage bike and fantasized about what riding was like when it was produced? For six years, a married couple in Port Townsend, Washington, has taken that impulse to its furthest logical conclusion with vintage highwheel bicycles from the late Victorian era. So committed are Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman to living their lives as if it were still in the 1880s that they limit themselves to era-appropriate technologies like iceboxes; wear exclusively antique clothing (corsets and all!); and commute nearly everywhere on modern replicas of early penny-farthings.
Interviewing the couple feels like a history lesson about cycling in the 1880s—and provides the surreal anachronism of chatting with the consummate Victorian-era couple via Skype. Here, they explain the origins of Victorian cycling clothing, what kinds of reactions they get around Port Townsend, their favorite rides in the Pacific Northwest, and why you should try a really old-school bike.
Related: An Antique Collector’s Lifelong Love Affair with Vintage Bikes
Bicycling: When and how did you start living Victorian lives?
Sarah: The thing that really started the path of us living this way is when Gabriel gave me my first corset for my 29th birthday six years ago. Up until that point, I’d always loved the aesthetic of the time, but I’d heard stereotypes about it being a horrible time to live, and I believed those things because that’s what everyone said. It never occurred to me to question them. I also believed all the horrible things people said about corsets. But when he gave me my first corset and I tried it on, I realized it was comfortable and I could breathe. I started asking myself, “If all the stereotypes about that are wrong, what else is wrong?” From there, things kept building and we kept investigating other aspects of history and found that one of the other Victorian things people get wrong are highwheel cycles.
Gabriel: They’re this icon of obsolescence, but what I’ve found from riding them is they’re incredibly fun, remarkably efficient, and some of the most comfortable touring bikes I’ve ever ridden.
And you work at a bike shop, right?
Gabriel: Yeah, I have almost 20 years of working in bike shops and even more than that of riding. I do have a number of modern bikes as well, but these old bikes are the ones I gravitate to and choose to ride these days. Partly because it's the most fun I’ve had on a bike in a long time, but also because when you ride a modern bike you get mixed reactions—some people like you, some people don’t mind you, and other people hate you. On a high-wheel bike, everyone likes you.
Sarah: We just did a cycling tour last month where we went across the Idaho panhandle—him on his highwheel bike and me on my highwheel tricycle, and that was a lot of fun. It was 75 miles on the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes, one of the rail trails.
What’s the climbing like on those bikes?
Sarah: Gabriel’s can climb just fine. Mine weighs about 75 pounds. There were [19th century] women who rode those over the Alps—over mountain climbs Google maps will now say you can’t ride a bike over at all. I have a feeling if we had our friend who’s a professional cyclist ride the trike, she could do that sort of thing, but I’m not there. I may never be there.
Gabriel: I do a lot of hills on my highwheel bike but it takes time to work up to it. I did the Viking Ride, an organized ride down here in May, on the 33-mile option, which packed in 2,900 feet of climbing. I only had to walk up one hill, which a lot of people had to walk, called Sawdust Hill—an 18-percent grade. But all the rest of the hills I could do. It’s just like riding a fixed gear—if you keep up your momentum going up a hill you can do pretty well, but you just can’t slow down. So I end up passing a lot of people on hills, which they’re always amazed by—partly because they’re being passed by a bike a lot of people see as slow, but also because it’s utterly silent so you can sneak up on people pretty easily.
I do enjoy riding with people who are on modern bikes as well because they get amazed by the contrast and by how something like a bike has stayed so much the same over time. They look at the spokes and other aspects of the bike and can see how the technology has progressed to a modern bike. It’s interesting that you can look at something that old and see the origins of the modern bicycle.
What’s so fun about riding an old bike? Is it just the challenge?
Gabriel: That’s part of it, but we also love the history and do a lot of education and outreach for people. Beyond that, physically, I’m a long-time cyclist with lower back issues—I can sit on this bike and be perfectly vertical and upright, which is wonderful for comfort, and you get a better view. One of the things I always used road riding for is meditation, and riding a highwheel bike is an excellent bike for that—it’s just a magical experience gliding along and feeling the rhythm of everything.
"A highwheel bike is an excellent bike for meditation—it’s just a magical experience gliding along and feeling the rhythm of everything.”
Sarah: The ladies’ highwheel tricycle is the first fixed-gear bicycle I’ve ever ridden. But because it’s a tricycle, I can’t fall over—I would have to try to fall over. So that’s a very definite advantage in learning to ride a fixed gear—all those qualities fixie riders love without worrying about falling over. It’s also a really good way to show people how advanced technology really was back then. A lot of people think the past must have been really primitive compared to now, but our bikes are involved machines.
Gabriel: I have some highwheel cycles that are still using the original bearings from the 1880s. I challenge Phil Wood to make bearings that last that long!
Do you spend a lot of time stopping and delivering history lessons about your bikes to people?
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s part of the fun.
What is it like to ride in Victorian clothes?
Sarah: When I started wearing a corset while riding my modern bike, I was surprised by how easy it was to get the hang of it. But just like modern people have riding clothes that are different from street clothes, they had special cycling clothes back in the Victorian era. Both men and women, when they were getting into sports, approached clothing like: “Okay, we’re upper-class people”—(those were the people who could afford to spend time cycling)—“but now we’re going to sweat.” Up until that point, sweating was a very lower-class thing. It was how the farmworkers and the mechanics earned their living. But after starting to ride they thought: “Okay, we feel better, sports are fun—but what are we going to wear when we’re sweating? We want to do these sports, but we don’t want to look lower class when we do them.” The contexts in which upper-class people were allowed to sweat were the military, and during childhood—because you can’t stop a child from being rambunctious. So for men and women, they took some elements of military style clothing.
Gabriel: They knew enough about performance fabrics to suggest everything be made of wool—no cotton, because you could catch a cold and die.
Sarah: And some companies are coming back to that use of wool now! But as far as the children’s aspect of sports clothing, they took the length of the skirt for women, which was about a mid-calf length. As a grown women, if I weren’t on a tricycle or bicycle, my skirt would be a very “young” skirt for me to wear. The other thing that makes it a cycling skirt besides that it’s short is that it has a thick band of leather sewn into the hem, which helps is stay weighted down so it doesn’t fly up. For men, it was knickers—short pants.
Related: Penny in Yo’ Pants Helps Female Cyclists Avoid Flashing
Gabriel: For Victorian men, one of the things that was popular is that they liked to do everything in groups—they were very social and liked clubs and teams. The men’s cycling clubs were very much fraternal organizations, so you picture one of those crossed with a cycling team. All matching uniforms, and they would do maneuvers in sync and put their arms around each other and fill the whole road, riding with no hands.
Do you ever get tempted to break some of the Victorian rules and whip out a chamois?
Sarah: The reason we wear these clothes is we’re comfortable. For me, this is more comfortable than riding with a chamois.
Gabriel: Victorian men’s clothing had the early equivalent of a chamois—a double seat in the britches with leather on the inside and wool on the outside. That was the origin of the modern chamois.
How do you find all your old-fashioned gear?
Sarah: It’s a perpetual challenge.
Gabriel: Sarah makes all her own clothes. She works with fashion plates and what few originals we can find—of course, sports gear is very hard to find. I have a seamstress who makes copies for me. My cycling outfit you see on the website is a copy of the Boston Wheelmen cycling club uniform from the 1880s, and the seamstress worked from museum photos and diagrams. Finding the materials is also challenging. As far as bags, my touring bag is a copy of an old-style Brooks bag from the 1880s that a woman who does leatherwork made for me in Austria. Bringing these things back into the world is part of the reason we love doing what we’re doing.
You must be really well known around Port Townsend. Do you ever get negative reactions?
Sarah: When I was out on my more modern-style safety bike, I had someone pull her car over and basically barricade the bike lane with her car to stop me and almost grabbed me, screaming that I shouldn’t be riding in a skirt.
Gabriel: I don’t get as many of those reactions. I do get people thinking I don’t belong on the road on the highwheel bike if they think I’m being slow, but Sarah gets the worst reactions. It seems that women who dress differently get more negative attention than men, which is something we really dislike.
"I never expected my underwear to be such a polarizing issue.”
Sarah: I never expected my underwear to be such a polarizing issue. I have heard similar things from other women who ride bikes, but I’ve heard that we do get more grief when we actually dress like a woman while cycling. By not changing what I want to wear, I hope it sends a message. People should have the right to wear whatever they want.
Is the environmental aspect of your lifestyle a motivating factor?
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s something we’ve thought a great deal about as we realize how much more we’re conserving by living this way.
Sarah: It’s made us a lot more aware of the resources we’re using. It’s easy to just flick on a switch for a light but when we have to actually fill a lamp and watch the oil go down, there’s a visceral connection to the resources we’re using.
How do you fund your Victorian lifestyle?
Gabriel: We prioritize very strictly—we don’t have a lot of money. You know what bike mechanics make. And writers make even less! So it’s a challenge, but it’s about setting priorities and trying not to let our circumstances keep us from living how we want to. It’s hard but it’s something we enjoy doing.
What aspects of Victorian life do you leave out, in addition to using a computer?
Gabriel: I drive a car because we live 50 miles from my job, and it’s just too far to ride every day. Lots of things like that aren’t completely avoidable because the entire infrastructure from the past is gone. That’s one of the reasons we use a computer. Sarah needs to submit manuscripts because they won’t accept handwritten manuscripts anymore. But the other ways the Victorians had of communicating, like telegraph services or whatever, are all gone.
What about modern medical care?
Sarah: Neither of us has had medical insurance for years—that’s part of being broke all the time.
Gabriel: I’ve had bad experiences with doctors so it’s something I try to avoid at all costs. We deal with it the same way the Victorians did—by trying to stay well through healthy choices and being responsible.
Sarah: And cycling’s part of that. Cycling is a healthy part of a lifestyle, no matter who you are or what you’re doing.
Do you maintain gender roles from the Victorian period?
Sarah: In every couple there are two different people with different skillsets. He works on the bikes because he’s been a bike mechanic for 20 years; I keep the house clean because I’m the one who works from home and sees the dirt in the corner needing to be cleaned up while I’m trying to write. It’s just a natural extensions of our skillsets.
Gabriel: We do a lot of reading about the Victorian era in magazines, books, etc., and what we have discovered about the past is that a lot of ideas about the past being misogynistic are wrong. There was a lot more diversity and understanding of the fact that some people are more interested in doing certain things than others—there was an acceptance of that.
Sarah, what’s the step-through bike you ride most of the time? Is it a modern replica of an old bike?
Sarah: It’s a Gazelle. It’s a modern bike. The company has been making more or less the same frame geometry since the 1890s. I would love to have a more period bike.
Gabriel: That’s one of my next projects for her—to build a fixed-gear, wooden-rim, pneumatic-tire Safety bike like in the 1890s. But the Gazelle is her current daily rider.
Sarah: It’s much heavier than the bikes they rode in the 1890s—it weighs 50 pounds by itself. The average bikes then were in the 20-pound range, though they had racing bikes like Major Taylor’s bike that were about nine pounds.
Are you planning to live like this forever?
Sarah: Yes. It’s our life. It involves a lot of things we love. I’ve been sewing since I was a kid, and he’s been into cycling since forever.
Gabriel: I don’t know that either of us would have done this on our own, but together, with our shared interest, we’ve ended up encouraging each other more and more, and it’s been so wonderful for us—we’ve enjoyed doing it together so much there’s no real reason to stop.
"History is a great palette of option… Old doesn’t necessarily mean bad, and a lot of those things are still viable technologies."
Sarah: It gives us something to talk about! And it’s a way to create deeper insight into the things that interest us already.
Do you recommend other cyclists try out an old-fashioned bike?
Sarah: Yes. It’s just another way to get a new perspective on something you already love, and who doesn’t want to do that?
Gabriel: Plus, the bike industry is always trying to create the next big thing that everyone has to try, like the fat bike a couple years ago. The highwheel is just another type of bike to try. If you look at all the interesting bikes they had from the 1880s or ‘90s, there are a lot of crazy bike styles out there, like the replicas Paul Brody displayed at NAHBS a couple years ago. History is a great palette of option. We should look to the past and realize there’s a lot there we can try out and choose from. Old doesn’t necessarily mean bad, and a lot of those things are still viable technologies that can be lots of fun.
For more about Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman and Victorian-era cycling, check out Sarah’s website—thisvictorianlife.com—where you can find her books about the topic.
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