In a school book belonging to an Emily Sophia Coddington is appended, in a more modern and confident hand, ‘Rides on my safety’ - a diary in which describes a woman taking up bicycling in 1893 , her learning to ride and her ever increasingly ambitious expeditions thereafter, which often incorporated the meeting of gentlemen cyclists. In this, then, there survives a case study of the phenomenon of the roads of the mid 1890s, the young, affluent and presumably attractive lady bicyclist.

Although there is a huge literature of female bicycling in the 1890s, most primary material is journalistic, much is mediated by time lapse and the demands of publication, some is entirely fictional. This diary provides a rare primary account, made more significant because its writer took up the activity ahead of the boom and was provincial rather than metropolitan. She provides us with a remarkably full account of what it was like to be an anonymous lady bicyclist on the road, not making a statement, not writing for the press, nor being the subject of it.

This paper sets out to consider the content of the diary as evidence of wider activity. To what extent can one individual’s activities be seen to represent the experiences of her social group as a whole?