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Cars of destiny: Writing the golden age

of motoring
James Emmett Ryan
Published online: 17 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: James Emmett Ryan (2013): Cars of destiny: Writing the golden age of
motoring, Studies in Travel Writing, 17:2, 116-132

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 Studies in Travel Writing, 2013
Vol. 17, No. 2, 116–132, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2013.789626

Cars of destiny: Writing the golden age of motoring

James Emmett Ryan*

In the years just before and after 1908, when the first mass-produced automobiles were sold, a
substantial practical, sporting and touristic literature was produced on the subject of motoring.
Much of this literature, which is surveyed and analysed here, focused on long-distance motor
racing and personal accounts of motor adventuring in Europe, Asia and America. These reports
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were often written by a generation of wealthy drivers, who were among the earliest users of
automobiles. However, not every work of early motoring literature was produced by the
wealthy. Travel journalists, popular novelists and sporting enthusiasts keen to share their
experiences of motoring saw the emergent automobile experience not merely as a practical
means of travel but as radically modern technology capable of providing pleasure,
knowledge and heightened consciousness when used for high-speed racing, long-distance
adventuring and serendipitous travel.
Keywords: automobile; motor sports; travel writing; Futurism; popular culture

Mass-produced during the years 1908–1927, the Model T Ford brought affordable passenger cars
within reach of ordinary middle-class drivers and showed the way for other automotive manufac-
turers to join in creating a world transportation revolution during the twentieth century. In a
closely related but less-studied development, a generation of literate motor adventurers and
professional automobile writers attempted, in the years just before and after mass ownership of
automobiles became a reality in the developed world, to come to grips with the motor car as a
machine that might enhance both sport and leisure travel. In so doing, these racers and travellers
addressed and articulated in significant ways the evolving relationship between human culture
and the modern automobile. Examination of these diverse writings from Europe and the
United States illuminates the ways that the early generation of automobile writers, not surpris-
ingly, situated the new mode of transportation athwart the overlapping discourses of adventure,
competition and leisure travel.
Many of these early automobile writers, however, went much further in making strong claims
for the motor car as a technology holding transformative, even transcendent potential for modern
humanity. Whether undertaken by racer or tourist, automobile racing and travel were perceived by
numerous writers of the early twentieth century as a means to indulge in practical and beneficial
movement through space, but also as a means for liberating, enriching and empowering the self.
In order to examine these remarkable new ideas about technology and human potential, the dis-
cussion that follows explores the energetic transatlantic conversation about the early motor car as
conducted by some of its most adventurous and literate drivers, among them racers, journalists,
novelists and travel enthusiasts. The year 1907 stands as a watershed date in this analysis for two
primary reasons. First, in that year one of the most famous and symbolically weighty of the early
transcontinental races was conducted and brought worldwide attention to the automobile. Second,

*Email: ryanjae@auburn.edu

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Studies in Travel Writing 117

by 1908 the motor car first became available to the middle classes with the arrival of Ford’s Model
T, thus initiating a process by which the automobile would become ubiquitous – and later ecolo-
gically troublesome – throughout the developed world.
The literary activities of early automotive writers were frequently prompted by or served as
part of the publicity surrounding motor tours and competitions of various kinds that became
popular as early automobiles became more roadworthy and powerful. During the decade just
before motor cars became an affordable, reliable and widely adopted technology for the
middle classes in industrialised nations, motor racing developed quickly into a glamorous sport
with a global audience keen to follow the adventures of its wealthy participants. And as the over-
lapping pursuits of motor touring and racing began to capture the imagination of would-be motor-
ists around the world, the press was filled with discussion, much of it highly articulate, serious and
even philosophical, of how automobilism would be experienced in the search for practical con-
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venience and commerce but also for modern leisure, adventure and sport.
Many of the earliest writers who considered the significance of automobile travel were con-
siderably more intellectual and poetic in their appraisals of the new technology’s potentialities
than automobile writers of subsequent generations. For example, the Chicago-based critic and
modern art enthusiast, Arthur Jerome Eddy, wrote a lyrical account in a travelogue of motoring
called Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile (1902).1 Nominally an account of his round-trip
journey by motor car from Chicago to Boston and New York, Eddy demonstrates in his narrative
a wealth of knowledge about such matters as American history, socialism, wine, painting, Walt
Whitman’s poetry and modern literature. Moreover, Eddy’s eclectic cast of mind – his easy
surfing from one fund of knowledge to the next – corresponds perfectly with the serendipity of
travel made possible and even necessitated by the early motor car:

With an automobile all is different [from older modes of travel]. The vagaries of the machine upset
every itinerary. You do not know where you will stop because you cannot know when you may
stop. If one has in mind a certain place, the machine may never reach it, or, arriving, the road and
the day may be so fine you are irresistibly impelled to keep on. The very thought that letters are to
be at a certain place at a certain date is a bore, it limits your progress, fetters your will, and curbs
your inclinations. One hears of places of interest off the chosen route; the temptation to see them
is strong exactly in proportion to the assurances given that you will go elsewhere.2

Other automotive writers described the early motoring experience in even more transcenden-
tal terms. In 1908, the English essayist, Dixon Scott, writing about his profound reaction to the
thrill of nocturnal motoring, turned to consider the ways that the relation between city and coun-
tryside took on new levels of meaning: ‘To race [in a car] through the silver silence towards the
upcast glow of the city is to perceive, as one has never done before, the true relation of that distant
congeries to the empty spaces all about’. Comments like these indicate that early automobiles
were in many respects coming to represent not just ease of travel, but also an embrace of
techno-adventurism that culminated in new forms of sensory and intellectual pleasure.3
Available first to the wealthy few, the motoring experience as described by writers of the early
motoring period held the promise of easy travel conjoined with intellectual nourishment. As Irish-
American writer Frank Harris reflected in his salacious memoir My Life and Loves (1923–27),
‘The motor-car enriched life like the discovery of two or three new poets’. Harris was far from
the only serious literary man to reach such conclusions. Rudyard Kipling, an early member of
the Royal Automobile Club, remarked in 1902 on the creative and aesthetic dimension of motor-
ing, whereby the ‘snapping levers and quivering accelerators’ of the vehicle functioned like organ
keys, producing ‘marvellous variations . . . so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and some-
times a barn dance, varied on open greens by weaving fairy rings’. So it was that the most ima-
ginative of early motoring writers came to see the new automotive technology as something much
 118 J. E. Ryan

more exciting than mere transportation; for them, it was understood as a ‘magical and romantic
machine’ with the capacity to stimulate improvisational experiences of touring and, eventually,
the fierce competitive spirit of long-distance racing.4
The early motoring scene prompted a variety of widely circulated publications – including
novels, memoirs, newspaper accounts and even popular songs – in which a rich confluence of
these debates and reflections about the new automotive culture can be examined. To take a pro-
minent example, the 9000-mile Peking to Paris overland race of 1907, in which five automobiles
participated – three French, one Dutch and one Italian – became one of the most written-about
events of its kind, and newspaper reports of the event reached American readers just as the
first production run of mass-produced Model T Fords were about to roll off the assembly line
in Detroit. A purse for the event had been arranged by Le Matin, the influential French daily,
which ran front-page articles for months leading up to the race. As the event began, these news-
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paper dispatches listed weather conditions, profiled the race competitors, and logged a daily
account of the standings during the two months of racing, which featured long and difficult
off-road passages through Siberia and China.5
Readers around the world eventually encountered the race’s details through the attitudes and
observations expressed by Luigi Barzini (1874–1947), a young Italian novelist and journalist who
joined the victorious Italian team. Barzini’s book-length account of the voyage, La Metà del
Mondo Vista da un Automobile – da Pechino a Parigi in 60 Giorni (1908) [translated into
English as Peking to Paris (1908)], introduced to the popular imagination some of the dramatic
new possibilities for global mobility and cross-cultural experience that automobiles were begin-
ning to suggest. Peking to Paris would become a bestseller and was eventually translated into 11
languages, a level of commercial success that indicates the extent to which the motor car had
become an object of fascination in the popular press, even before ordinary citizens had access
to this new technology of travel. At the time of the race, Barzini, a pro-Fascist whose political
sympathies in later years led to his appointment to the Italian senate by Mussolini, was a corre-
spondent for Il Corriere della Serra, a Milanese daily that would soon be the most widely read
newspaper in Italy. With the advantage of this broad media exposure, Barzini used the opportunity
of accompanying the Italian team as a way to publicise the event for a wide European audience
but also for the purpose of forming and promulgating his own views about the larger conse-
quences and implications of automobile travel.
As the race began, Barzini was perfectly situated to chronicle the long overland motoring
adventure, thanks to having been invited to join the Italian team that eventually prevailed in
the arduous race. Barzini spent the entire race aboard an Itala rally car piloted by Prince Luigi
Marcantonio Francesco Rudolfo Scipione Borghese, the noted Italian mountaineer, explorer
and diplomat. It should be noted that Borghese’s triumph in the race, although officially attributed
by Barzini to Prince Borghese’s boldness and driving skill, was doubtless due in no small part to
the services of chauffeur and expert mechanic, Ettore Guizardi, who accompanied Borghese and
appears to have done most of the actual driving and all of the critical repairs. Barzini’s regular
dispatches from race checkpoints (made convenient because the race course followed a transcon-
tinental telegraph line) first appeared in Corriere della Sera before being distributed to the major
European dailies and to other newspapers around the world. As the Peking to Paris race got under
way in 1907, it was clear from the regularity of Barzini’s dispatches, as well as from the rise of
automotive writing as a genre, that motoring as sport and pleasurable travel had already found a
secure home in the European popular press. During the previous decade, the rise of motor-sport
journalism had been aided by one of England’s most important automobile racers, one who also
wrote compellingly about the sport.6
Even before the publication of Barzini’s bestselling chronicle of the Peking to Paris race, the
culture of automobility had already received considerable literary and journalistic attention. The
 Studies in Travel Writing 119

Englishman, Charles Jarrott, one of that country’s earliest racing champions, had become a well-
known figure in European races by the time of his participation in the 1901 Berlin–Paris race.
Having previously established himself as a successful bicycle racer, Jarrott’s account of his
motor racing exploits (at the wheel of both motorised cycles and automobiles), published as
Ten Years of Motors and Motor Racing (1906), provides one of the most thorough chronicles
for the early years of European racing while making a case for automobile sports as an enterprise
useful for both sporting and industrial purposes. He also shows the degree to which motor racing
had at the turn of the century become a common spectacle on the European landscape, with the
French capital as an important hub. Jarrott devotes chapters to key race events such as the ‘Circuit
du Nord’ (Paris–Arras), ‘Paris–Berlin’, ‘Paris–Madrid’, ‘Paris–Vienna’ and a series of ‘Bennett’
races established in 1899 by American newspaper tycoon and millionaire James Gordon Bennett,
Jr, the owner of the New York Herald. The Peking–Paris event thus fitted logically and geographi-
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cally with the model of motor racing that had been established in the previous decade, in which
Gordon Bennett races were arranged through Bennett’s funding of the Automobile Club of
France. As with the Peking to Paris event, competition in the Gordon Bennett car races was
staged between national teams, each with a maximum of three cars. The rules stated that every
part of each car had to be made in the team’s country, and so participation was thereby limited
to countries that were industrially advanced enough to make all the parts for a motor car.
Jarrott’s view of motoring as a human activity is notable, though, for his insistence that new
perceptions constitute the largest share of the automobile’s allure. ‘When one motors for the love
of it’, attested Jarrott,

the joy is in the open road, the wide country, the new scenes, and the change of conditions with which
one meets the day’s drive, no matter where that drive is taken. The charm is in the travel – not in the
speed; the pleasure is in the change of environment, and the conditions under which the change is made.7

Thus it is that Jarrott advanced the argument that the very appeal of adventure motor racing had
mainly to do with its demonstration of pleasurable movement rather than the surmounting of
technical and logistical obstacles. He therefore described the many hazards and inconveniences
experienced by participants in the early motor races ‘not in the belief that in them lay the great
charm of motoring,’8 but merely because they serve to characterise the conditions under which
the events were conducted. The pleasurably aesthetic dimensions of motor touring (the non-
competitive cousin of the motor race), he added, were destined to hold significant appeal
not only among men but for women as well, noting that ‘Perhaps the gentler sex is the most
susceptible to all the influences, privileges and possibilities which are contained in the use
of a motor-car, enabling as it does every aspect of the country to be opened up to the
curious gaze.9
Jarrott’s discussion of early motor racing is notable as well for its assertion of a preference for
amateur values in all sports and especially in the sport of motor racing, which he feared had already
been damaged by high costs and the competitive leverage available to well-funded racing teams. In
spite of sceptical views to the contrary, motor racing in Jarrott’s opinion was ‘the greatest sport
evolved by man’. Although a self-admitted fierce competitor by nature, Jarrott wrote that:

Competitive effort for any reward except the gain of money is exhilarating and ennobling to the indi-
vidual character. The curse of commercialism is the ruin of every sport, and the degeneracy of motor-
racing as a sport is due to the financial issues involved in each race.

Likening motor sports to other commercialised athletic pursuits, Jarrott added that ‘I can see in the
near future, and before the racing of motor-cars dies the death which is yearly predicted for it, the
 120 J. E. Ryan

sporting element obliterated altogether by the all-devouring monster of commercialism – the

curse of the twentieth century’. For serious amateur motorists like Jarrott, then, the threat of
highly commercialised and richly funded races such as the Peking–Paris event lay in their sup-
planting the ennobling competitive virtues of what he called ‘the sport of the gods’. After a
brief golden age during which freelance motor racers like himself prevailed, he lamented the
ways that monetary considerations – and the need for speed at all costs – were beginning to
erode a pursuit grounded in individual competitiveness and the slower, pleasurable experience
of motor competition and replacing those virtues with a financial contest promoted as a public
spectacle.10 Indeed, in a letter to the English motoring journalist, A. B. Filson Young, in 1904,
Jarrott confided to him that while his enthusiasm for the sport remained high, ‘the true sport of
road-racing is finished’.11
Published the same year as Jarrott’s review of the earliest decade of motor racing and just one
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year before the great Peking to Paris event, A. B. Filson Young’s The Happy Motorist (1906) set
out advice for the English driving public, adopting a similar view of the automobile as a practical
instrument that lends itself to new forms of richly pleasurable movement and travel.12 While Jar-
rott’s memoir had attested to his enjoyment of the rich sensory experience of motor travel and
balanced that theme by emphasising his enthusiasm for the fierce competition among heroic
early motor racers, Filson Young addresses the ordinary driver. The Happy Motorist shows the
best ways for ordinary people to experience the motor car and its pleasures. Above all, in
Young’s view, the motor car provided a practical method of travel vastly superior to railways:

A railway journey for most of us consists only of two extremes – departure and arrival; we have no
sooner started than our thoughts are set upon our destination; and what lies between is but the intan-
gible diminishing barrier of space. But on a journey by road every yard, whether we measure it with
foot or wheel, is of equal importance.13

Young also draws useful comparisons between the relative importance of the motoring experi-
ence for English vs. American drivers. Whereas ‘England was already built and in existence when
the railways came’ so that the best views of historic England are available only to those who travel
the ancient roads (preferably by automobile), the situation in the newer United States was much
different: ‘The railways are the true roads of America; they have made the towns, and the towns
turn to them in grateful acknowledgement, not banishing them to back regions, but receiving them
in their very midst’. In a prescient remark, however, Young anticipated a time in the near future
when the United States railways would diminish in importance alongside a yet-unbuilt national
highway system, which he saw as way of recovering scenes of rural life for the enjoyment of
American citizens, noting that

a development of roads there will mean a rediscovery and delight in the old placid country life of
America that is far from the din of cities, and has its roots in a past that knew nothing of railways.
If I had the wealth of a Rockefeller I think that I should care for nothing so much as to build a
great main road from New York to San Francisco.14

Similarly incorporating practical concerns with philosophical reflection, much of Barzini’s

motoring book, like those of Charles Jarrott and A. B. Filson Young, is given over to the logistical,
mechanical and physical challenges of the summer-long race to China. But Barzini also takes time
in Peking to Paris to reflect on two primary issues: the profound (but shrinking) gap between
Eastern and Western cultures, and the remarkable new experience of travelling the globe with
hitherto unknown independence and speed. Early in the book, after encountering a frustrating
delay because of deteriorating road conditions west of Peking, Barzini and Borghese take
flight once again in their custom-built 40 h.p. Itala motor car:
 Studies in Travel Writing 121

We experience the inebriation of conquest, the exaltation of triumph, and with it all a kind of aston-
ishment, a sense of unreality, because of the strange thing this is – the running of such a race in such a
country! . . . The civilisation of Europe overshadows us; it is symbolised by the speed of our flight.
The great longings of the Western soul, the true secret of all its progress, is embodied in the short word
– faster! Our life is pursued by this violent desire, this painful insatiability, this sublime obsession –
faster! Here in the midst of Chinese immobility we truly carry with us the essence of our feverish
advance.15

Barzini demonstrates with this passage – in its delirious infatuation with speed, modernity and
social transformation – aspects of the Futurist sensibility that characterised radical Italian politics
before World War I.
The triumph of the motor car, in Barzini’s estimation, thus symbolised the triumph of dynamic
European modernity that appeared even more profound to him as he observed an Asian rural
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scene characterised by ‘Chinese immobility’. The imperial gesture of dismissing the Chinese
and later Russian cultures as both Orientally mysterious and immobilised by history, so
evident in this passage, coexists with a palpable sense of his own experience of accelerating
speed and movement through motoring. The experience of driving automobiles, he seems to
suggest, points toward an emerging possibility that age-old boundaries between East and West
are vast but also ripe for dismantling. In this way, Barzini’s rather breathless account of automo-
bilism’s reconfiguration of space and time uncannily anticipates the modern and postmodern
problem or opportunity of colliding ethnicities and empires. For example, Barzini’s reflections
about the great motor-race experience harmonise in certain ways with Jean Baudrillard’s
acerbic comment, made nearly 80 years later, about the perceptual shifts engendered by the
later twentieth-century motoring experience: ‘Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Every-
thing is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated’.16 Judging from technologically sublime
inventions like the Los Angeles freeway system, Baudrillard, like many of the earliest automobile
writers, concluded that the most important contributions made by motor cars were not so much
technological but perceptual, social and even moral. ‘Pulling away effortlessly, noiselessly
eating up the road, gliding along without the slightest bump . . . braking smoothly but instantly,
riding along as if you were on a cushion of air, leaving behind the old obsession with what is
coming up ahead, or what is overtaking you’, he noted, the experience of motoring ‘creates a
new experience of space, and at the same time, a new experience of the whole social
system’.17 These new relationships between space, time and personal mobility are relevant
when considering the insights and observations of the early automobile writers. However,
while, for Baudrillard, the mind-altering qualities associated with driving are a deeply troubling
aspect of technological modernity, from Barzini’s perspective the identical sensations fostered by
motor-car use, perceived at the dawn of the automobile era, are understood as sure signs of dis-
orienting but ultimately beneficial human progress.
It is in oil-rich Siberia, for example, that Barzini finally comes to the realisation that these
Eastern lands are anything but historically static and stagnant. Crossing the culturally and linguis-
tically variegated regions of the Asian tundra, he admits that

we had felt innumerable shades of difference between races and consciences; we had noticed relation-
ships in nature and in character, affinities between tongues and opinions; and without understanding it
we had yet perceived a slow movement of races, an incalculable coming and going of emigrations, a
continual stream of people, with all their apparent immobility, away from their common land in the
heart of Asia; and had watched them, as it were, returning transformed.

This transformation of peoples, this slow diffusion of cultures through the modern world, which
had been difficult to register for all but the most venturesome nineteenth-century motorists,
 122 J. E. Ryan

Barzini records from the perspective of a transportation technology with the potential for accel-
erating that rate of human transformation beyond all previous comprehension, so that the pleasur-
able aesthetic of motor travel is to a certain extent knit together with aspects of his political
consciousness.
It would be uncontroversial to claim that the automobile has contributed immensely to the
transformation of modern working and living arrangements, but beginning with the earliest
motor car enthusiasts, there is a clear sense in which the new technology was sponsoring new
forms of enhanced human perception and even in certain ways a new political consciousness.18
It is helpful to consider the reasons for these vivid writings during the early motoring era, which
have to a large extent been neglected, from the perspective of contemporary theorists of technol-
ogy. To Baudrillard’s observations about automobility, which mainly focus on a (to him) disturb-
ing alteration of traditional social order, we might add Arnold Pacey’s suggestion of a powerful
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relationship between certain technological innovations and pleasurable or liberating human

sensations. Specifically, Pacey replaces the usual focus by historians on what he calls the
‘impact these inventions [such as the bicycle or automobile] have had on society’ with a new
focus on the ways that ‘many inventions arise from the impulse to play, the enjoyment of
motion, and the sense of being invited by nature to explore or imitate’. In short, Pacey interprets
the impact of technological innovation, and the enthusiasm that frequently is expressed by earlier
adopters of these technologies, as extensions or consequences of human desires.
Even more importantly, Pacey argues that paradigm-shifting inventions like ‘printing, fire-
arms, bicycles and automobiles . . . are self-revealing inventions. It is what we learn from
them about ourselves – our impulses, purposes, abilities and potential – that makes these technol-
ogies seem revolutionary’. The evidence of a whole range of driver-responses by the first gener-
ation of motorists, including motor racers, constitutes a rich archive that aims much light on the
ways that automobile technology, in the years before driving had become a commonplace activity,
was seen initially as a stimulating mode of travel with profound implications for the self and
society. The early motoring writers imagined themselves as users of a product that promised
not just pride of ownership and personal mobility but also a space for experiencing self-making.19
No longer shackled in their itineraries by the limits of rail travel, prosperous American and
European motor enthusiasts took their inspiration from the dashing transcontinental racers.
They too looked forward to embracing the speed, freedom, glamour and thrill of the motor car
while simultaneously engaging in the ardent pursuit of world culture through automobile explora-
tion and tourism. A survey of early motoring book titles provides some flavour of this nascent
global consciousness, through which geography’s limits and boundaries appear to dissolve
before the adventurous driver: Motor Cars and the Genius of Places (1904), The Car of
Destiny (1907), Across the Sahara by Motor Car (1924) and Motoring Through Spain (1927).
Moreover, the documentary evidence available in fiction, essay, image and song from the earliest
era of motoring through the early decades of the twentieth century suggests that early motor-age
writers confronted the possibilities and problems of their travel revolution in ways that show them
embracing not just the prospect of easy travel but also distinctively new habits of mind. At first, of
course, only the affluent classes had access to these new experiences, because during the pre-
Model T era, the motor car’s high cost made it a commodity beyond the reach of all but the
wealthy. Within a few decades, however, ordinary middle-class individuals began to revel in
the automotive technology and, more precisely, the augmented human experiences it provided
(Figures 1 and 2).20
Automobile races and other long-distance motoring adventures situated the nascent automo-
tive technology at various exotic frontiers throughout the world, and the publicity caused by these
spectacular events contributed to the rise of a number of literary and semi-literary representations
of motoring adventurers. These accounts include adventure narratives written by what James
 Studies in Travel Writing 123
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Figure 1. Escape artist, Harry Houdini, at the wheel, c.1910, courtesy Harry Ransom Center, The Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin; reportedly, driving made Houdini nervous. Although he was a daring aviator – the
first man to fly in Australia (1910) – Houdini had taught himself to drive so as to travel to the Australian
airport, but he soon gave up both flying and driving after the Australian aviation tour.

H. Ducker has labelled the ‘gentleman auto adventurer’, who ‘combined the chest-thumping
machismo epitomised by Theodore Roosevelt’s hunts in Africa and South America with an enthu-
siasm for the quickly emerging, fast-changing, and experimental technology of the early auto-
mobile’.21 Well before the appearance of an aviation ‘jet-set’, the rich and famous of Europe
and America quickly adopted the early automobile (especially the racing automobile) as their
plaything. As a consequence, the automotive fiction of this period expresses repeatedly the
linkages between wealth, power, technology and travel.22 The excitement generated by the
new motor-car phenomenon was both palpable and public. As David E. Nye observed of one
early automobile distance event, ‘In 1899 an automobile trip from Cleveland to New York was
such a novelty that it merited extensive daily press coverage, and crowds turned out all along
the route. When the car arrived in New York, a million people turned out to see it’. Clearly, a lit-
erary market for popular motoring narratives had already been established by the beginning of the
twentieth century.23
Women, too, began to adopt the automobile as a means to express their own urges for inde-
pendent travel and sporting adventures. By 1905, an American woman named Joan Newton
Cuneo had begun to enter auto races, and soon after, in 1909, Alice Huyler Ramsey spent 59
days completing the first woman’s transcontinental drive across the United States.24 Harriet
White Fisher, a rugged New Jersey matron and wealthy owner of an anvil and vice factory,
made headlines around the world when she and her Boston terrier, ‘Honk-Honk’, travelled
round the globe by chauffeured automobile in 1910. Although the arrival of inexpensive and
reliable autos would result in the motor car ceasing to be an exclusive status symbol for the
wealthy, especially with the all-important arrival of the Model T, the early motor car was an
 124 J. E. Ryan
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Figure 2. Imagining adventures in the early motor car. Pictured: Weston-Super-Mare automobile (1909).
Postcard, Tom Phillips collection.

undeniable status symbol. In his media analysis of the early motoring generations, for example,
McShane notes that ‘Overwhelmingly, pre-1908 stories [in the New York Times] contained reports
of elite travel in autos, covered on the society pages, a measure of the status associated with the
new vehicles’ and that ‘By 1906 photos of elite car owners were no longer news’.25
Across the Atlantic, the rhetoric of automobilism occasionally was inflected with brisk imper-
ial confidence, as in a description of the pioneering British motorist, Sir Malcolm Campbell
(a racer who began setting land speed records in 1908), which characterised him as ‘a national
 Studies in Travel Writing 125

asset – an ambassador not only of trade, of Imperial prestige, but of the spirit of manliness and
adventure. He is a living inspiration to our children’. Moreover, in this account, Campbell
stands as ‘one of the first of that new and glittering breed of heroes who have set new and
shining ideals before our youth. He has taken on something of the halo of a Nelson, the helm
of a Galahad, the romance of Robin Hood’. Indeed, from the rather worshipful perspective of
his biographer, Campbell’s career as racer and driver, which straddled the ages of horse, rail
and automobile travel, suggested the possibility of a new driver’s mentality uniting patriotism
with individual transcendence:

The men who can inspire in the minds of our children the ideal of speed and efficiency, the sixth sense
that we call ‘air-mindedness’, the new standard of patriotism that thinks Imperially and not in terms of
parochial nationalism, have done a great work for the future of the British Empire – and thus of the
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world.

Speed . . . will link our Empire more closely, bind our communications more firmly, and give us a
new understanding of other nations. We owe much in comfort, safety, and luxury to the kings of
speed. We are beginning to owe them much more in closer Imperial unity, in wider international
friendships.26

Aside from the grim irony that his biographer’s veneration of empire and international friendships
appeared in print during a decade when Europe and England were poised historically between the
wreckage of two World Wars, what should be noticed in this passage is that it longs for a con-
nected, globalist future that will leverage imperial forces for the benefit of individual experiences:
the improvement of ‘communications’, ‘a new understanding of other nations’, and ‘wider inter-
national friendships’. The British motoring historian Piers Brendon, working from documents
produced in the last few years of the nineteenth century by officials for the Royal Automobile
Club, concludes that the early ‘motorists realised the dream of the nineteenth [century]: the sen-
sation of autonomous speed’ as these drivers succumbed to ‘the fascination and the frenzy of
speed for speed’s sake: the rush through the air, mocking the bird in its flight’. The promise
of enhanced communication and friendship through motoring thus had the added attraction of
being formed as a result of personal travel at a thrilling velocity.27
Travelogues in the early years of the twentieth century were filled with accounts of intrepid
motor travellers absorbing and describing myriad aspects of the world’s cultural riches. The
American novelist, Edith Wharton, counted herself among the most enthusiastic early users of
the automobile for European sojourns and jaunts through scenic New England. Characteristically,
in her book-length narrative recounting a summer’s European trip, A Motor-Flight through
France (1908), she begins with her conviction that:

The motor-car has restored the romance of travel. Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of
the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town, the area of
ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given back the wonder, the adventure and
the novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grandparents.

Motor travel, in Wharton’s account, because of its more intuitive movement over the landscape,
offered not just the experience of cultural depth in particular places but a finer awareness of cul-
tures and geography. Exploring by automobile the scenic roadways of the Loire Valley, she
observed further that ‘Had we visited by rail the principal places [of the Loire Valley], necessity
would have detained us longer in each, and we should have had a fuller store of specific
impressions; but we should have missed what is, in one way, the truest initiation of travel, the
sense of continuity, of relation between different districts, of familiarity with the unnamed,
 126 J. E. Ryan

unhistoried region stretching between successive centres of human history, and exerting, in deep
unnoticed ways, so persistent an influence on the turn that history takes’.28 Just a few years before
the advent of passenger airplanes, which eventually ushered in another (but very expensive and
thus less democratically available) radical advance in travel practices and motive perceptions,
Wharton’s concept of the ‘motor-flight’ suggests how some motor travellers took pleasure in
experiencing themselves as being released from geographical boundaries and limits.29
In an era long before the near-total, franchised homogenisation of the modern traveller’s food
and lodging, early automobile writers revelled in the serendipity of automobile travel. After a dis-
appointing meal at an Indiana restaurant during her 1916 transcontinental drive, the etiquette
writer, Emily Post, waxed metaphysical, remarking that

just such experiences and disappointments . . . make the high spots of a whole motor trip in looking
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back upon it. It is your troubles on the road, your bad meals in queer places, your unexpected stops at
people’s houses; in short your misadventures that afterwards become your most treasured memories.
In fact, after years of touring, I have in a vague, ragged sort of way tried to hold to what might be
called a motor philosophy.

Bound up with the adventure of driving West from New York to the Golden Gate Bridge,
however, came Post’s perception of the increasing sameness and monotonous commercialism
visible from coast to coast, the logic of democratic travel written onto the transportation landscape
even before the First World War. On the Iowa plains, Post laments the disappearance of the Amer-
ican frontier: ‘Where, Oh, where is the West that Easterners dream of – the West of Bret Harte’s
stories, the West depicted in the moving pictures? . . . We have gone half the distance across the
continent and all this while we might be anywhere at home’.30
When the English writer, Dorothy Levitt, herself a keen bicyclist and equestrienne, discovered
the motor car, she described it this way: ‘I was one with those who declare that the most glorious
of all out-door life is in the saddle, on a fast, clean-jumping hunter; but when, by accident, I took
up motoring I found the exhilaration, the delights of the gallop doubled’. The weightlessness and
thrill of automotive travel, as described by such early devotees, provided one effective, and yet
troubling, antidote for the apparently oppressive gravity of particular places in the modern experi-
ence. The exhilaration of Dorothy Levitt, as she compares her enjoyment of horses and motor-
cars, anticipates the exhilaration of the twenty-first century driver who is enabled to multiply
her pleasures of independent mobility, while at the same time it demonstrates the raw pleasure
attending the motoring experience.31
Examples like these, drawn from popular writers and intellectuals alike, show that the literary
marketplace found it impossible to ignore the automobile, and consequently adventure novels and
romances based on the use of cars began to appear even well before mass-produced cars reached
the middle classes. And when automobile advertising reached its maturity in the decades between
the World Wars, novelists – like writers of popular motoring songs – began to narrate the intoxicating
brew of power and eroticism engendered by the emergent motoring culture. For instance, as Arnold
Pacey has observed, by 1910, ‘E. M. Forster used automobiles in his novel Howard’s End as a means
of portraying men who enjoy “the exercise of power without concern for the consequences”,
especially when driving with women passengers’. For early writers of motor-fiction, automobiles
eventually began to signify not only wealth and romance but also the exquisite pleasures of an unpre-
cedented brand of global tourism that would soon be within the grasp of ordinary people.32
Savvy writers for the popular press quickly recognised that the early automobile could serve
as a compelling emblem within popular fiction. Best-selling writers like Richard Harding Davis
set the tone for an entire new genre of motoring novels. Davis’s romance The Scarlet Car (1906)
typifies the representation of the chauffeured automobile as an upper-class possession par
 Studies in Travel Writing 127

excellence. One of the wealthy young couples featured in The Scarlet Car, which is set among the
Brahmin upper crust of Massachusetts, includes both a Mr. Winthrop and a Miss Forbes, the latter
of whom rides the motor car as a passenger but observes cars that ‘[pass] like a thing driven by the
Furies’ and at the same time ‘felt the elation of great speed, of imminent danger. Her blood tingled
with the air from the wind-swept harbor, with the rush of the great engines, as by a hand-breadth
they plunged past her’. The conclusion of the novel is even more telling, in terms of the way
motoring fiction worked to clear the way toward a globalist mentality. Jaded and bored by the
diminutive adventures of motoring life in Massachusetts, the novel’s protagonist announces his
intentions to set out for travels in East Africa (presumably by automobile). Comfortably
ensconced in the rich leather seats of his expensive automobile, the young Winthrop enquires
of the young Forbes ‘Which way do you want to go next?’, to which his wealthy fiancée
replies jauntily: ‘To Uganda’.33
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Other novelists were quick to follow the lead of Richard Harding Davis’s motoring fiction. In
an exuberant motoring novel entitled The Car of Destiny (1907), published just a year before the
introduction of Henry Ford’s Model T, the writing team of C. N. and A. M. Williamson creates a
dashing fictional hero named Chris Trevenna, a Spanish aristocrat who is travelling incognito with
his companion, Dick Waring, in search of love and adventure, and to see the royal family of Spain.
He is a wayfaring playboy with many previous travel exploits under his belt, undertaken after
being accused of revolutionary activity and cast out of Spain:

It was after this that I flung myself off to Russia, and through friendly influence got a commission in
the army. I had some adventures in the Boxer uprising; and though Heaven knows I have no grudge
against the Japanese, the fight I made later on the Russian side gave me something to do for two years.
After the Peace with Idleness, came the motor mania, and I thought of nothing else for a time. But
when you have run your car for months, motoring for its own sake ceases to be all in all. You ask
yourself what country you would like best to visit with the machine you love.34

In this remarkable passage, ‘motoring for its own sake’, or the notion that automobilism could be
pursued as a pleasurable diversion with aesthetic dimensions, gives way to the idea of proliferat-
ing options for global tourism and adventure – imperiously vanquishing limits on space, time and
culture.35
In a previous novel by the Williamsons, The Lightning Conductor (1905), which like The Car
of Destiny was published before inexpensive cars became available to the masses, the intrepid
American Molly Randolph recounts the gilded-age motorists’ whirlwind of sensory delight:

‘This is life!’ said I to myself. It seemed to me that I’d never known the height of physical pleasure
until I’d driven in a motor-car. It was better than dancing on a perfect floor with a perfect partner to
pluperfect music; better than eating when you’re awfully hungry; better than holding out your hands to
a fire when they’re numb with cold; better than a bath after a hot, dusty railway journey. I can’t give it
higher praise, can I?

Her peak physical experience of descending the French Alps strikes a similar tone:

Oh, that descent! I feel breathless, just remembering it, but it was a glorious kind of breathlessness,
like you feel when you go tobogganing – only more so . . . I found myself thinking of Poe’s descent of
the Maelstrom, and when I said so to [the driver] afterwards, it turned out he’d read it. He had the car
perfectly in hand, and steered it to a hair’s breadth. We were down in a moment – or it seemed so; and
coming out into the bright little streets was like waking up after a strange dream.36

Even before embarking on her European motoring adventure, Molly had been anticipating the
sense of power and entitlement that an automobile would permit, and she concludes: ‘We
 128 J. E. Ryan

ought to have a motor-car and a chauffeur. Then we might say, like Monte Cristo, “The world is
mine”’.37
So it was that early-twentieth-century motorists were on track to be convinced, with some
justice, of their new and supple grasp of the world and its possibilities, or, as Marshall
McLuhan would later observe, ‘The simple and obvious fact about the car is that, more than
any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into a superman. It is a hot, explosive
medium of social communication’.38 Or, put another way, by an Iowa motorist recalling a
1910 journey by automobile to a distant wedding, the experience was ‘almost like blazing a
trail through the wilderness’.39 Used in this way, automobiles become more than a technology
of labour-saving convenience; the physical drama and extraordinary sensations experienced by
early motorists extend the function of motoring adventure from simple transport to self-transform-
ation. As one fictional motorist insisted, automobiles represented thrills and freedom in equal
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measure:

There’s nothing in the world to equal travelling on a motor-car. You can go fast or slow; you can stop
where you like and as long as you like; with a little luggage . . . you’re as independent as a bird; and
like a bird you float through the open air, with no thought for timetables. When will the poet come who
will sing the song of the motor-car?40

Harmonising with the techno-passion of Italian Futurists like Marinetti – a noted automobile
enthusiast – the early motoring memoirs and novels thus celebrate the perception of freedom
through automobilism, whose effects were heightened through the driver’s sensation of shrinking
distances, transforming economies and blurring national boundaries.
Vernon Lee, a gifted British travel writer who sang the praises of motor travel, touted the auto-
mobile not only for its pleasant utility for the independent traveller, but also for its moral force.
Describing an idyllic jaunt through her beloved Southern England, she marvelled at the way
motoring brought her into a ‘curious new relation’ with a familiar and beloved landscape.
Hearing this remark, one might expect that a large proportion of this curious relation might
be attributable to the thrilling speed of automobile travel, but in the extended quotation below
Lee insists that the ‘rapture of mere swift movement’ holds little attraction for her. Instead, the
automobile figures in her account as a welcome antidote to the monotony of trains and railway
travel:

A drive like this one through a very familiar and prosperous country makes one understand, if not the
imaginative value, at all events the moral mission, of the motor-car in the future; in the future, of
course, when it will be a thing of honorable utility, not swagger, and within the reach of many. For
instead of travelling, like irresponsible outlaws, imprisoned between fences and embankments, it
takes us into the streets and on to the roads where people are moving about naturally; it makes us
slacken and deflect for waggons [sic] and go-carts, nay, stop short, decently, for children and dogs,
feeling the claims of other life than ours, and suggesting that remote districts are not our tea-gardens
and racecourses; for I fear that railways have merely diminished the sense of enlarged brotherhood
which should come from reasonable travel. Moreover, the motor-car will remove the degradation
of being conveyed like cattle or luggage, irresponsible and unresponsive; and will reinstate the
decorous sense of mystery connected with change of place. The place I was in recedes, vanishes;
the one I am in slips away as I speak; and the hospitable distance approaches and unfurls to
receive me; and I am full of wonder and regret and gladness. These are the moral advantages
which the motor-car will bring.41

As with American and European writers of the period, Lee hints strongly in this essay at her
embrace of technological utopianism; specifically, her belief in the improvement of human
perception and sociability through the experience of motoring, which appeared to her as an
 Studies in Travel Writing 129

affordable, tractable machine that nevertheless had the capacity to enhance personal and interper-
sonal experiences while vanquishing space and time.
The genuine wonder and adventure engendered by the novelty of personal motor exploration,
which characterises many of the earliest motoring writers, appear even more striking when com-
pared with another book from the same genre but published 17 years after the great Peking to
Paris race, George Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil’s Across the Sahara by Motor
Car (1924). This post-World War I narrative unfolds according to the same travelogue method,
whereby the perceptual glories of mechanised adventure are written into a Western triumph
within Third-World landscapes. Yet the theme of Across the Sahara has shifted markedly and iro-
nically since the fleeting golden age of automobiles, particularly with the advent of militarised
uses for motor cars and with emphasis on pragmatic industrial applications and imperial utility
for motorised travel. This book opens with an introduction by French car-maker André
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Citroën, whose ‘Caterpillar Car’ (similar to a modern half-track vehicle) was used in the
Saharan traverse. Although its title resembles those of motor travelogues of the early period of
motoring, the book instead describes a military-industrial collaboration intended to demonstrate
French technological and logistical superiority while supporting the French colonial project in
Africa. Neither race nor holiday adventure, the motoring experience across the Sahara as
described by Haardt and Audouin-Dubreuil is central to establishing a transportation route
between Algeria and French West Africa; once accomplished, according to their account,
French control over that part of Africa would be permanently secured. Unlike earlier descriptions
of the pleasures and cosmopolitan attitude that motor cars could inspire, the post-War French
project described in Across the Sahara concludes its journey by indicating that the daring
venture across the desert will culminate in the introduction of more massive industrialisation in
the form of air and rail travel, so as to ‘push the frontiers of the mother-country beyond the
Equator as far as the Congo’.42 Across the Sahara suggests that individual perception and the
delights of tourism – so evident in the motoring literature drawn from the early period of automo-
bilism – will recede in importance as an imperial military project asserts itself with the assistance
of automotive technologies. This new perspective on the automobile – illustrating how colonial
leverage might be applied through automobile technology – thus radically complicates the early
accounts of how the motorcar might transform and improve human culture.
Embraced as an instrument of competition, pleasure, intoxication and moral renovation during
a golden age of motoring before mass production of automobiles, the motor car after World War I
became even more sophisticated, glamorous and roadworthy. Inexorably, though, the twentieth-
century automobile revealed itself as an often-grim and polluting necessity for the soldier, trucker,
shopper or commuter. Within only a few decades, after a very brief period during which they
appeared in literary culture as a mostly beneficial, space-shrinking, mind-expanding, border-
erasing, and insight-deepening invention, automobiles and their users demonstrated that motor
travel had already become globally significant as far more than a sporting diversion or pleasant
adventure.

Notes
1. A Chicago lawyer and prominent collector of art, as well as an art critic, Arthur Jerome Eddy was noted
for his support of modernist American and European painting, as in his book Cubists and Post-Impres-
sionism (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1914).
2. ‘Chauffeur’ [pseud. Arthur Jerome Eddy], Two Thousand Miles on an Automobile (Philadelphia:
J. P. Lippincott, 1902), 96.
3. Dixon Scott, ‘Motoring at Night’, in A Number of Things (London: T. N. Foulis, 1917), 48. In Narra-
tives and Spaces (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1997), David E. Nye also emphasises the new visual
experience of early motorists and suggests that this transformation eventually led to sporting
 130 J. E. Ryan

experiences like hang gliding, snowmobiling and rollerblading. After technology changes the way we
move through the land and air, ‘People demand speed and immediacy, a maximum of experience in a
minimum of time. Vision becomes central and the nuances of feeling through the other senses are often
ignored’ (185).
4. Harris and Kipling qtd. in Piers Brendon, The Motoring Century: The Story of the Royal Automobile
Club (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 50–52.
5. The French mainstream press joined with specialty journals to celebrate the powerful globalising influ-
ence of the automobile. Advancing roughly on a pace with United States manufacturing, and in the
earliest years of auto design working at the forefront of engineering advances, French cars totalled
about 3000 at the turn of the century but approximately 100,000 by 1913. Even before 1900, 10 or
more journals had begun publication in support of the craze for ‘automobilism’. See Stephen Kern,
The Culture of Space and Time, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 113.
6. Luigi Barzini, Peking to Paris: A Journey Across Two Continents in 1907 [1907], trans. L. P. de Cas-
telvecchio (New York: The Library Press, 1973). Samuelo Pardini has noted that Barzini’s dispatches
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also appeared in the British Daily Telegraph, which along with Il Corriere della Sera had made
arrangements with Le Matin to coordinate their foreign news coverage. In the 1920s, Barzini left
the Corriere della Sera and moved to the United States, where he directed the Italian-American news-
paper Corriere d’America from 1923 to 1931. After his return to Italy, he directed the Il Mattino.
Pardini, ‘Before the Future/ists, or, the Rise and Fall of the Machine: Luigi Barzini’s La Meta del
Mondo Vista da une Automobile’, Annale d’Italianistica 27 (2009): 209–24.
7. Charles Jarrott, Ten Years of Motors and Racing (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), 25.
8. Jarrott, Ten Years of Motors and Racing, 26.
9. Jarrott, Ten Years of Motors and Racing, 280.
10. Jarrott, Ten Years of Motors and Racing, 96.
11. A. B. Filson Young, Complete Motorist: Being an Account of the Evolution and Construction of the
Modern Motor-Car; With Notes on the Selection, Use, and Maintenance of the Same; and of the Plea-
sures of Travel on the Public Roads (New York: McClure, Phillip/ London: Methuen, 1904), 280.
12. A. B. Filson Young had previously written The Complete Motorist, a popular book detailing the history
of automotive technology and early reflections on what changes motoring would bring to ordinary
drivers. He also includes in The Complete Motorist a collection of letters from prominent motormen,
including one from the racer Charles Jarrott.
13. Young, Happy Motorist, xxvii.
14. Young, Happy Motorist, xxx.
15. Barzini, Peking to Paris, 43.
16. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner [1986] (London: Verso, 1988), 9.
17. Baudrillard, America, 54.
18. As Lynne Kirby has conjectured for the relation between the experience of railroad travel and the
aesthetic of silent cinema, the early automobile, too, shared ‘film’s illusion of movement’ and provided
an experience similar to that of postmodern globalism, in which the car-driver experiences the ‘con-
struction of the journey as an optical experience’ in a ‘machine of vision and an instrument for con-
quering space and time’. Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), 2.
19. Arnold Pacey, Meaning in Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 77.
20. For a discussion of the automobile as an emblem of wealth and power, see Richard Garrett, Motoring
and the Mighty (London: Stanley Paul, 1971). As the automotive historian Clay McShane has demon-
strated, it did not take long before the motor car came to be imagined as a mobile, private site for court-
ship and sexual experimentation. Popular media quickly took the measure of motoring’s romantic
dimensions, and early twentieth-century readers could entertain themselves with breezy romance
novels such as Edward Salisbury Field’s A Six-Cylinder Courtship (New York: Grosset and Dunlap,
1907), whose story line was adopted regularly in Hollywood films like A Six-Cylinder Elopment
(1912). Tin Pan Alley songs wink at the erotic potential supplied by automobile travel. For
example, one of the first signs of the sexualisation of the motor car appeared in the hit song ‘In My
Merry Oldsmobile’(1905), which led to the sheet music publication of over 120 songs on automotive
themes from 1905 to 1908. Titles of pre-World War I songs like ‘I’d Rather Have a Girlie Than an
Automobile, or Anything Else I Know’ (1908), ‘Auto Race’ (1908), ‘On an Automobile Honeymoon’
(1905), ‘The Girl on the Automobile’ (1905), ‘When He Wanted to Love Her (He Put Up the Cover)’,
and ‘Fifteen Kisses on a Gallon of Gas’ (1906) all highlight the erotic potential of automobile travel.
McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia
 Studies in Travel Writing 131

University Press, 1994), 142–47. See also David L. Lewis, ‘Sex and the Automobile’, in The Auto-
mobile and American Culture, ed. David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, Special issue, Michigan
Quarterly Review 19/20 (1981), 123–33, for discussion of twentieth-century laws prohibiting love-
making in cars.
21. James H. Ducker, ‘An Auto in the Wilderness: Dr. Percival’s 1911 Alaska–Yukon Drive’, Pacific
Northwest Quarterly (Spring 1999): 77. In the 1880s and 1890s, just before motor racing was intro-
duced, a similar craze for long-distance bicycle racing and endurance contests had appeared. For a dis-
cussion of the bicycle fad of the late nineteenth century, see Robert A. Smith, A Social History of the
Bicycle, Its Early Life and Times in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 127–82.
22. The railroad fortune heir William K. Vanderbilt created and administered the popular Vanderbilt Cup
races of 1908, a series of contests held on Long Island and intended to highlight American auto engin-
eering. Wealthy motorists also appear prominently in novels of the period, such as E. M. Forster’s
Howard’s End [1910] (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), in which motor cars signify the money and pri-
vilege of the Wilcox family, as well as the need for imperial Britain to colonise oil-producing countries.
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23. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 130.
24. Sherrie A. Inness, ‘On the Road and in the Air: Gender and Technology in Girls’ Automobile and Air-
plane Serials, 1909–1932’, Journal of Popular Culture 30 (Fall 1996): 48. Inness’s study of juvenile
fiction about aviation and motoring takes the position that driving, like other forms of new technology
(bicycles, safety razors, radios) rapidly, but not immediately, became ‘feminised’ through a process of
advertising and representations in the popular press. On early motoring books for juvenile girls, see
Nancy Tillman Romalov, ‘Mobile Heroines: Early Twentieth-Century Girls’ Automobile Series,
Journal of Popular Culture 28 (1995): 231–43. For a discussion of automobile advertising and
women’s driving in the 1920s, see Jennifer Elizabeth Berkley, ‘Women at the Motor Wheel: Gender
and Car Culture in the U.S.A., 1920–1940’ (PhD dissertation, Claremont, 1996).
25. Harriet White Fisher, A Woman’s Tour in a Motor (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1911),
22; McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 128, 129.
26. J.[ames] Wentworth Day, Speed: The Authentic Life of Sir Malcolm Campbell (London: Hutchinson &
Co., 1932), viii-ix. For an excellent discussion of automobility and personal power, see Cotton Seiler,
Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008). Seiler describes the ways in which early motoring discourse was freighted with powerful
notions of autonomy and that ‘The powerful conjunction of self-determination, speed, and mastery
informed the common and durable trope of the driver-as-monarch – a symbolic identity that merged
masculine potency and charisma’ (45).
27. Piers Brendon, The Motoring Century: The Story of the Royal Automobile Club (London: Bloomsbury,
1997), 12.
28. Edith Wharton, A Motor-Flight Through France (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 36, 37.
Needless to say, many careful observers of Euro-American culture neglected to document the rise of
the automobile as a profound cultural force. Wharton’s contemporary and literary master Henry James,
for instance, whose important documentary work The American Scene (London: Chapman & Hall,
1907) appeared only a year before Wharton’s French travelogue, made not a single mention of
motor cars in the American cities he visits and describes after his return from Europe.
29. The term ‘motor-flight’ was used faddishly in the early years of motoring. After Wharton’s travelogue
appeared in 1908, Emma Burbank Ayer published a similar volume, the popular A Motor Flight
Through Algeria and Tunisia (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911). By the post-World War I period,
however, much of the early fascination with the very act of motoring gave way to travelogues of Euro-
pean automobile touring which viewed the automobile as a perfectly ordinary way to move about the
continent. For one example of many, see Arthur L. Kramer, Motoring Through Spain (Dallas:
P. L. Turner, 1928).
30. Emily Post, By Motor to the Golden Gate (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1916), 44, 98.
31. Dorothy Levitt, The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Want
to Motor (London: The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1909), 16. The most compre-
hensive bibliographical listings related to transcontinental automobile travel during the early twentieth
century have been compiled by Carey Bliss in Autos Across America: A Bibliography of Transconti-
nental Automobile Travel: 1903–1940 (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1972).
32. Pacey, Meaning in Technology, 184.
33. Pacey, Meaning in Technology, 184. Davis 12, 106. For a brief non-fictional account of motoring
adventures in North Africa, see Paul E. Vernon, Motoring in North Africa: A Detailed Story Relating
to a Motor Tour (New York: Paul E. Vernon, 1923).
 132 J. E. Ryan

34. C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, The Car of Destiny (New York: The McClure Company,
1907), 4.
35. For a broader discussion of motoring novels, with an emphasis on fiction by women, see Deborah
Clarke, Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007).
36. C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, The Lightning Conductor: The Strange Adventures of a
Motor-Car, rev. ed. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), 13, 104. The Williamsons jointly published
eight separate motoring novels, and eventually marketed the series as a complete collection entitled the
‘Motor Travel Library’ (1913).
37. Williamson and Williamson, The Lightning Conductor, 3. For an in-depth study of the labour politics
and social tension surrounding the ‘chauffeur’ workforce during the early automotive period, see
Kevin Borg’s excellent analysis in ‘The ‘Chauffeur Problem’ in the Early Auto Era: Structuration
Theory and the Users of Technology’, Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 797–832.
38. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 197.
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39. Floyd M. Knupp, ‘Motoring to a Wedding’, Palimpsest 60 (1979): 64.

40. C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, The Lightning Conductor, 246.
41. Vernon Lee, ‘The Motor-Car and the Genius of Places’, in The Enchanted Woods, and Other Essays on
the Genius of Place, second ed [1904] (London: John Lane Company/The Bodley Head, 1910), 96–7.
42. Georges Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, Across the Sahara by Motor Car, Trans. E. E.
Fournier D’Albe (New York: D. Appleton, 1924), 17.