Bikey the Skicycle

Bikey the Skicycle and Other Tales of Jimmieboy is a collection of children’s stories by John Kendrick Bangs, the American humorist who lived from 1862 to 1922. The book belongs to the Jimmieboy series of children’s fictions that Bangs produced across many years, featuring a young boy named Jimmieboy whose vivid imagination repeatedly produces adventures involving talking animals, magical objects, and various other characters from the fairy tale tradition.

The Skicycle of the title is a magical vehicle that combines the functions of a bicycle and a sleigh and that takes Jimmieboy on various adventures across the snowy countryside of his imagined world. The story is essentially an extended children’s fantasy in which Bangs uses the talking vehicle as the central character to introduce his young readers to various comic situations involving other invented characters, mild physical danger that is always resolved happily, and the kind of cheerful nonsense humour that was Bangs’s particular speciality.

Bangs had been the editor of various humorous magazines including Puck and Harper’s Bazar during the 1890s and 1900s, and he had developed a substantial reputation as an American humorist alongside Mark Twain and the somewhat older generation of newspaper humorists. His adult humour was generally considered less successful than his children’s writing, and the Jimmieboy books are probably his most enduring contribution to American literature.

The collection runs about two hundred pages and works as a series of bedtime stories or as light evening reading for children of roughly seven to ten years old. The Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about children that run through the book may feel dated to modern readers, but the basic comic warmth of the writing remains. It pairs naturally with the other Jimmieboy books.