If the character of the newborn Charlot-tramp was extremely violent it would not be incorrect to see an extension of this quality, a quality that many have criticised, in the character in Mabel at the Wheel. This bad guy role – a very particular kind of bad guy – stands on the edge of what has later come to be known as the Charlot cycle. But the cruelty, premeditated revenge and destructive hate of this film, written and directed by Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, has little to do with the pantomime spirit and burlesque poetics that Chaplin experimented with in the comedies in which he gradually turned into the legendary tramp we all know and love.

Thierry Georges Mathieu, La naissance de Charlot. Keystone – 1914, n.6, Ars Regula, 2001