Pedalling the Death of a Life: A Late V ictorian Variation on Dealing with Grief

This article seeks to explore how one forgotten, V ictorian‐formed individual sought to deal privately with the death of his publicly esteemed father. Through the journey that carried a cyclist and train traveller from the north to the south of E ngland, we discover the conjunction of athleticism and mortality, place and people, pilgrimage and passages, religion and leisure, photography and memorialisation, discipline and dissipation, networks and mourning. It provides a counterpoint to the accent on death‐bed and grave in V ictorian E ngland during a time of national readjustment by arguing that the particular method of dealing with a significant death carved by H enry W estcott for himself was novel, cathartic, and yet constantly interacting with and informed by the legacy of a range of V ictorian values. Those values are explored through the writings of his father, B rooke F oss W estcott, a famous biblical exegete who provided a distinctive interpretation of the key s criptural text of V ictorian death: the G ospel of J ohn, chapter 11. Those values became a legacy that is both reinforced in H enry through the death of his famous father and also subtly interrogated and eroded as H enry pedalled through the complexities of disentanglement from the paterfamilias, a journey that H enry recorded in diary and photograph.