Showing results for "H" in City Life

Mr. Hoopdriver is a frustrated draper’s assistant in Putney, London. He is badly paid, over-worked, and he needs a holiday. He also owns a bicycle—though he is an awkward rider. When his annual ten days’ holiday comes around, Mr. Hoopdriver sets out on a bicycling tour of the “Southern Coast.” Wells wrote this at the height of the bicycling craze and before the automobile. The bicycle gave freedom to the working class, weakened the English class structure and gave a boost to female emancipation. In his story he explores these changes.

New York, August 1896. A "hot wave" has settled on the city with no end in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead horses felled by the heat. In this presidential election year, the gulf between rich and poor has political passions flaring, while anti-immigrant sentiment has turned virulent. At police headquarters, the gruff, politically ambitious commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has been struggling to reform his notoriously corrupt department.