I’m at the point in my dissertation where I really should be focused entirely on revising, and not collecting any new data. I am mostly succeeding in this endeavor.  However, I started working on revising my chapter on women’s dress and velocipedes, I found myself falling into a vortex trying to fill in some more gaps about women’s clothes.

It turns out that newspaper archives are a dangerous place to wander into if I want to get anything else done. Thus I have found myself searching through the Access Newspaper: Academic Library Version, which is an enormous repository of scanned newspapers (the British Newspaper Archive is also a great resource).

In 1869, velocipedes were wildly popular. When I looked for the term “velocipede” between 1868 and 1870, I ended up with  4,893 results. Narrowing my search to adding “dress” and any combination of “women,” “woman,” “lady,” and “ladies” led to. . .2,005 results. “Velocipede” and “bloomers” gave me a more manageable 24 results, most of which did not really lead anywhere helpful. There are also a number of other terms I could have tried, such as “bicycle,” a term that was in use by the height of the velocipede’s popularity.

This resource also does not give me any French language resources, which would lead me down a slower and more intensive path. I can read/translate French when I need to, but it’s a rather slow process compared to working in English. And it’s not like doing this kind of work in English is fast, either. Fortunately, I can scan through PDFs with word searches– which is much, much faster than working with actual documents– but the scans are often poor quality.

There is very little descriptive information regarding velocipede dress. As discussed in a previous entry, I have been able to piece together a general sense of how women may have dressed, but there just isn’t a complete picture. Granted, trying to determine from bits and pieces what options women may have had is part of the fun of research, at least from my slightly strange perspective. I’m afraid, however, that is time to cut myself off from the research vortex and focus on the information I do have.