"The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll" by H. G. Wells

The hero of The Wheels of Chance, Mr. Hoopdriver, is a frustrated "draper's assistant" in Putney, a badly paid, grinding position (and one which Wells briefly held); and yet he owns a bicycle and is setting out on a bicycling tour of "the Southern Coast" on his annual ten days' holiday. Hoopdriver survives his frustration by escaping in his imagination into a world of fantasy.