Looking Backward

By Edward Bellamy

First published in 1888, Looking Backward was one of the most popular novels of its day. Translated into more than 20 languages, its utopian fantasy influenced such thinkers as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Eugene V. Debs, and Norman Thomas. Writing from a 19th century perspective and poignantly critical of his own time, Bellamy advanced a remarkable vision of the future, including such daring predictions as the existence of radio, television, motion pictures, credit cards, and covered pedestrian malls.
On the surface, the novel is the story of time-traveler Julian West, a young Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in the late 19th century, and awakens in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia. In conversations with the doctor who awakened him, he discovers a brilliantly realized vision of an ideal future, one that seemed unthinkable in his own century. Crime, war, personal animosity, and want are nonexistent. Equality of the sexes is a fact of life. In short, a messianic state of brotherly love is in effect.
Entertaining, stimulating, and thought-provoking, Looking Backward, with its ingenious plot and appealing socialism, is a provocative study of human society as it is and as it might be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Mar 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9780486112251

Edward Bellamy

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American journalist, novelist, and political activist. Born in Chicopee, Massachusetts, he was the son of Baptist minister Rufus King Bellamy and his wife Maria. Educated at public school, he attended Union College for just one year before abandoning his studies to travel throughout Europe. Upon returning, he briefly considered a career in law before settling on journalism. Before his life was upended by tuberculosis at the age of 25, Bellamy worked at the New York Post and Springfield Union. After his diagnosis, he sought to recuperate in the Hawaiian Islands, returning to the United States in 1878. Thereafter, he pursued a career in fiction, publishing such psychological novels as Six to One (1878) and Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880). His first major work was Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a utopian science fiction novel which became an immediate bestseller in the United States and Great Britain. Its popularity spurred the founding of Nationalist Clubs around the country, wherein readers of Bellamy’s work gathered to discuss the author’s revolutionary vision of a new American society. In 1891, Bellamy founded The New Nation, a political magazine dedicated to the emerging People’s Party. A left-wing agrarian populist, Bellamy advocated for animal rights, wilderness preservation, and equality for women. His novel Equality (1897), a sequel to Looking Backward, expands upon the theories set out in his most popular work and was praised by such political thinkers as John Dewey and Peter Kropotkin. At the height of his career, Bellamy succumbed to tuberculosis in his hometown of Chicopee Falls.

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DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: STANLEY APPELBAUM

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: THOMAS CROFTS

Copyright

Copyright @1996 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 1996, is an unabridged republication of the work first published by Ticknor and Company, Boston, in 1888, under the title Looking Backward: 2000-1887. A new introductory Note has been specially prepared for the present edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bellamy, Edward, 1850—1898.

Looking backward / Edward Bellamy. p. cm. — (Dover thrift editions)

Originally published: Looking backward, 2000-1887. Boston : Ticknor, 1888. With new introd.

9780486112251

ISBN-10: 0-486-29038-7

1. Time travel — Fiction. 2. Utopias — Fiction. I. Title. II. Series. PS1086.L6 1996

813’ .4 — dc20

95-49596

CIP

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

29038707

www.doverpublications.com

Note

EDWARD BELLAMY was born in 1850 in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, to a long line of New England Baptist ministers. He was educated in the United States and in Germany, and at length studied law (though he was admitted to the bar, he never practiced). Working as a journalist and editor in New York and Springfield, he began to publish fiction in 1879, and by 1898 had published five novels and a collection of short stories. Among these was the novel now considered the author’s masterpiece, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888). The visionary novel not only brought literary fame to Bellamy but established him as an important social and economic theorist.

Looking Backward, which boasts a time-travel plot predating Wells’s in The Time Machine by seven years, is the tale of Julian West, a man of nineteenth-century Boston, who suddenly, through a hypnosis-related mishap, finds himself in the year 2000. In the Boston of the future, he discovers a world where injustice, poverty, religious conflict and corruption do not exist. As the protagonist is brought up to date by the sympathetic Dr. Leete and his family, he finds that the new American Utopia is founded on a set of sensible and humane collectivist principles that, freely espoused by all citizens, allow everyone to live in comfort, work with dignity and have equal access to education and medical care. The result, happily, is a society of greater kindness and intelligence: removed from the yoke of an evil system (i.e., barbarous, heartless capitalism and brutal social Darwinism), humanity, naturally and serenely industrious, flourishes. The ideas put forth in this book were so popular as to lead to the formation of a Nationalist party advocating the form of state capitalism envisioned by Bellamy. In addition, Bellamy himself founded two magazines (the Nationalist [1888—1891] and the New Nation [1891—1894]) to serve as platforms for the propagation of his theories. He is still credited with having an important influence on social and economic thought in the United States.

Aside from this, however, Looking Backward is more than a thinly disguised tract. It is a fully developed, and immensely readable, novel, ending in nothing less than a wedding knot. Its protagonist, in his sadness for the squalor and degradation of modern urban life, which he holds up in constant tragic comparison to the newfound Utopia, speaks eloquently to the concerns of present-day America, which, of course, bears more resemblance to the novel’s 1887 than to its 2000.

A sequel to Looking Backward, titled Equality, followed in 1897, but is thought to be less a novel than a vehicle for ideas. Bellamy died, at the height of his fame, of tuberculosis in 1898.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Note

AUTHOR’S PREFACE - HISTORICAL SECTION SHAWMUT COLLEGE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 26, 2000.

Chapter I.

Chapter II.

Chapter III.

Chapter IV.

Chapter V.

Chapter VI.

Chapter VII.

Chapter VIII.

Chapter IX.

Chapter X.

Chapter XI.

Chapter XII.

Chapter XIII.

Chapter XIV.

Chapter XV.

Chapter XVI.

Chapter XVII.

Chapter XVIII.

Chapter XIX.

Chapter XX.

Chapter XXI.

Chapter XXII.

Chapter XXIII.

Chapter XXIV.

Chapter XXV.

Chapter XXVI.

Chapter XXVII.

Chapter XXVIII.

Postscript. - THE RATE OF THE WORLD’S PROGRESS.

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

HISTORICAL SECTION SHAWMUT COLLEGE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 26, 2000.

LIVING AS we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval! The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!

The object of this volume is to assist persons who, while desiring to gain a more definite idea of the social contrasts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are daunted by the formal aspect of the histories which treat the subject. Warned by a teacher’s experience that learning is accounted a weariness to the flesh, the author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative, which he would be glad to fancy not wholly devoid of interest on its own account.

The reader, to whom modern social institutions and their underlying principles are matters of course, may at times find Dr. Leete’s explanations of them rather trite, — but it must be remembered that to Dr. Leete’s guest they were not matters of course, and that this book is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader to forget for the nonce that they are so to him. One word more. The almost universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this bi-millennial epoch has been the future rather than the past, not the advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny. This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during the next one thousand years, than by Looking Backward upon the progress of the last one hundred.

That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose interest in the subject shall incline them to overlook the deficiencies of the treatment is the hope in which the author steps aside and leaves Mr. Julian West to speak for himself.

LOOKING BACKWARD.

Chapter I.

I FIRST saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. What! you say, eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course. I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.

These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grand-parents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one’s support on the shoulders of others. The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never criticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of lawgivers and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had, however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given up trying to regulate the subject at all.

By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil? Had they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach. At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was gotten over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers’ sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before. If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it always would be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in a singular hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents and grandparents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I was engaged to wed Edith Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the top of the coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves further with an illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of giving the reader some general impression of how we lived then, her family was wealthy. In that age, when money alone commanded all that was agreeable and refined in life, it was enough for a woman to be rich to have suitors; but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and graceful also.

My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. Handsome she might have been, I hear them saying, but graceful never, in the costumes which were the fashion at that period, when the head covering was a dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible extension of the skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughly dehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy any one graceful in such a costume! The point is certainly well taken, and I can only reply that while the ladies of the twentieth century are lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate drapery in accenting feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers enables me to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly disguise them.

Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was building for our occupancy in one of the most desirable parts of the city, that is to say, a part chiefly inhabited by the rich. For it must be understood that the comparative desirability of different parts of Boston for residence depended then, not on natural features, but on the character of the neighboring population. Each class or nation lived by itself, in quarters of its own. A rich man living among the poor, an educated man among the uneducated, was like one living in isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house had been begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been expected. The spring of the following year found it, however, yet incomplete, and my marriage still a thing of the future. The cause of a delay calculated to be particularly exasperating to an ardent lover was a series of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on the part of the brick-layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, and other trades concerned in house building. What the specific causes of these strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had become so common at that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular grounds. In one department of industry or another, they had been nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of laborers pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a time.

The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognize in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of the great movement which ended in the establishment of the modern industrial system with all its social consequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not being prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us. What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation between the workingman and the employer, between labor and capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to have become dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very generally become infected with a profound discontent with their condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord, they preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings, better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it then was. Though they knew something of what they wanted, they knew nothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any light on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some of whom had little enough light to give. However chimerical the aspirations of the laboring classes might be deemed, the devotion with which they supported one another in the strikes, which were their chief weapon, and the sacrifices which they underwent to carry them out left no doubt of their dead earnestness.

As to the final outcome of the labor troubles, which was the phrase by which the movement I have described was most commonly referred to, the opinions of the people of my class differed according to individual temperament. The sanguine argued very forcibly that it was in the very nature of things impossible that the new hopes of the workingmen could be satisfied, simply because the world had not the wherewithal to satisfy them. It was only because the masses worked very hard and lived on short commons that the race did not starve outright, and no considerable improvement in their condition was possible while the world, as a whole, remained so poor. It was not the capitalists whom the laboring men were contending with, these maintained, but the iron-bound environment of humanity, and it was merely a question of the thickness of their skulls when they would discover the fact and make up their minds to endure what they could not cure.

The less sanguine admitted all this. Of course the workingmen’s aspirations were impossible of fulfillment for natural reasons, but there were grounds to fear that they would not discover this fact until they had made a sad mess of society. They had the votes and the power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should. Some of these desponding observers went so far as to predict an impending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued, having climbed to the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn round, and begin to climb again. Repeated experiences of this sort in historic and prehistoric times possibly accounted for the puzzling bumps on the human cranium. Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity.

Reviews for Looking Backward

[darthdeverell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy tells the story of Julian West, who goes to sleep in a hermetic chamber and finds himself waking “exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days” after he retired for the night, now in the year 2000 (pg. 31). In the future, Dr. Leete explains to him how the United States and the world became a socialist utopia, with people working jobs that bring them satisfaction and knowing that they are bettering society. Further, without money, people receive what goods they want free of charge. These same goods are instantaneously delivered without the chaos and pressures of commercialism.Bellamy discusses the transformation of the future in generalized terms, focused as he is on the larger ideas of human improvement and the betterment of society, but this works to his advantage as advances in technology would normally lead to the novel feeling too dated. Some of his few examples include a predecessor to debit cards and the use of electronic music. Interestingly, though he does not give much detail about fashion, West’s reaction to modern clothing reflects the general stability in men’s wear since the mid-1800s: “It did not appear that any very startling revolution in men’s attire had been among the great changes my host had spoken of, for, barring a few details, my new habiliments did not puzzle me at all” (pg. 40).The popularity of Looking Backward – second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur in its own time – led to the creation of Bellamy Clubs which arose to discuss and promote Bellamy’s socialist utopian ideas and fostered several utopian communities. In many ways, the ideas Bellamy describes closely align with those Gene Roddenberry discussed in his Star Trek franchise. As a work of science fiction focused on time travel, Bellamy’s book predates H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine by seven years, though it lacks a time machine and instead relies on the protagonist sleeping through the passage of time, like Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fût jamais from 1770, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle from 1819, and Wells’s other time travel story, When the Sleeper Awakes from 1899. Though Irving and Wells remain familiar to modern audiences, Bellamy’s work speaks to ideas that seem all the more relevant in the early twenty-first century amid the actions of oligarchs and the effects of late-stage capitalism.

[justagirlwithabook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The crazy thing about this book is when it was written. The main character travels far into time and 'looks backward' into the past. The future has changed dramatically, but so much of what the author writes is applicable to 2018, which is a bit creepy to think about but also interesting. In the age of populism and Trump, this is recommended reading!

[mmoj_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To think we really aren't any closer.

This is a book to make you think. Wording is a bit dated and some may become bored with that but I found it interesting.

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A utopian political tract, more interesting for its glimpse into 19th-century radical political idealism than its literary qualities.

Although largely forgotten today, 'Looking Backward' was apparently a runaway bestseller at the time of its publication, spawning dozens of social clubs devoted to improving society in ways inspired by Bellamy.

The ideas are a combination of idealistic and disconcerting.

Some of the ideas are noble and truly something to aspire to - for example, the idea that every person in a society has a right to share in the wealth of that society, and to live with dignity, without want. However, there's also a uniformity and social authoritarianism that many modern people may find repellent.

When Bellamy imagines a mega-store, he sees a temple-like place of fountains, marble, and a virtually unlimited selection of quality merchandise. When I think of a mega-store, I think WalMart.
Bellamy's vision depends on the belief that human beings are, at heart, naturally peaceful and cooperative, and that if people are given a good education, the opportunity to do what they're best at, and all the necessities of a comfortable life, crime and conflict will naturally disappear. Sadly, I disagree. I'm more of the opinion that people will always find an excuse for conflict, and that if everyone is on equal footing, each person will still find a way to try to rise higher than another. If private commerce is banned, black markets will arise.

Although Bellamy specifies that his utopia arises naturally from capitalism, without violent revolution, and that the bureaucratic and administrative tasks of the nation are overseen by a team who have no personal power or self-interest in the matter (no dictators in sight), there are still disturbing similarities to Nazi propaganda here. (Bellamy's vision, here, is undeniably one of a form of National Socialism - without the hatred, intolerance and bigotry that political movement came to be associated with.)

By chance, shortly after reading this book, I read a book review of a volume that sought to explain the rise of the Third Reich. I don't think the author's theories were correct. I think that reading this book, with its vision of a peaceful, united nation with a patriotic, healthy, fully participating and content citizenry, is far more explanatory of how radical ideas can capture the imagination of a people.

Still, it's refreshing, in this era of dystopias and apocalypse, to read something from an era when people widely dreamed that the future might be better, not worse, than the present day.

[jwarren42 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of science fiction's best functions is as criticism of contemporary society, and this book does that extremely well, both implicitly in the first 200 pages or so, and explicitly in the last forty pages or so. Of course we have to ask is it a proper theoretical treatise on society? No. Is it a particularly good novel? No, as well. Is it an interesting attempt to blend the two things? Yes. More importantly, though, is it an important attempt to update the dialogue as a literary form from it's early Greek genre-constraints? Absolutely.

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A book I've intended to read for a long time, ever since learning that Edward Bellamy briefly attended Union College (my alma mater) in the late 1860s. Bellamy's book, which attained great popularity (and also significant ridicule) at the time of its publication, is a utopian manifesto wrapped lightly in the threads of a thinly-plotted Victorian romance novel. Bellamy goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000 to a Boston much changed, and a bulk of the book is spent in dialogue with his interlocutor about how society has been reformed in the intervening century. Heavy-handed? Yes. A bit clunky? Yes. But also thoroughly interesting to see what a utopia might have looked like to a resident of the 1880s (covered sidewalks, radio broadcasts, centralized production eliminating the need for strikes, &c.).Worth a read as an example of historical utopianism, if nothing else.

[csweder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In college, I took a class on Political Literature--a class designed to expose political and historical thoughts and feelings through literature. This would have been an excellent addition to such a class's curriculum, as I feel it is more political commentary disguised as fiction than it is fiction about politics.

Looking Backward is the story of a man who goes to sleep in 1887 Boston, and wakes up in 2000 Boston. (It is fiction, remember so this kind of jump can happen.) He awakens and learns of the incredible advancements society has made. Indeed every person is cared for, every person works, there are no poor, there are no crimes. The president serves 1 five year term (after being voted in my the army), and Congress meets but once every few years--and really doesn't make any new laws. Every man and woman is taken care of, given the same amount of 'credit' (money is a bad term, but it is essentially the same thing--a card that gets the same amount put onto it every month, and it isn't allowed to accumulate) regardless of how much they work or what they do. The genders are equal. People seem happy.

While it sounds like socialism, Bellamy is clear on this point: it is not. In fact it is capitalism. Extreme capitalism not in the way of Freidman and his associates, but capitalism in that everyone in the nation (and all nations by this point are run this way because it just makes more sense) works for one company--the nation. The county produces everything, and everyone gets an equal share. If there are certain types of work that are harder than others, those occupations work less hours.

An interesting look into how the evolution of capitalism does not have to mean only a few at the top succeeding, but in fact, the evolution and support of us all.

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What I find most interesting about Looking Backward is how contemporary readers of the work are willing to dismiss is it as nothing more than a failed attempt to accurately predict the future, as if Edward Bellamy was nothing more than another hokey Criswell predicting homosexual cities in giant undersea aqua-domes. Whenever Bellamy is mentioned these days in reference to Looking Backward, there's a good chance it is done so out of contempt, or to even imply that he wasn't worth mentioning in the first place. In The Fickle Muse by media critic and popular culture guru Paul A. Cantor, for example, he states that "Edward Bellamy, in his otherwise eminently forgettable 188 utopian novel Looking Backward, correctly forecast the invention of the radio, which he cleverly called 'the musical telephone.' By the end of the paragraph, it becomes apparent that his main reason for bringing this up at all is to set up an amusing jab at Howard Stern. "Eminently forgettable" is a remarkable way to describe a book that was not only one of the three top selling novels of its time (right behind Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur) but managed to spawn its own political movement. We might not be quoting Looking Backward in Facebook memes, but that shouldn't obscure the impact that the novel made at the time of its release. As psychologist philosopher Erich Fromm pointed out in his forward to an edition of the book, "Three outstanding personalities, Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Edward Weeks, independently making a list of the twenty-five most influential books published since 1885, all put Bellamy's work in the second place, Karl Marx's Das Kapital being in the first."Utopian novels seem to be less palatable to contemporary readers. There's something about classic works being hopeful about the future that leaves a bad taste the collective mouth of today's literary audience. They tend to be more comfortable with bleak Dystopian future worlds full of regret and doom. Perhaps it's more comforting to give up hope. You won't hear anybody claiming that George Orwell got it all wrong because we don't live in a world as oppressive as in 1984, or that Aldous Huxley was delusional because we don't take Soma holidays or play Obstacle Golf like in Brave New World, yet it isn't hard to find yourself tripping over articles like Daniel Hope's "The Accuracy of Edward Bellamy" going out of their way to refer to Bellamy's vision of an idyllic future society as "juvenile enthusiasm" full of "wrong-headedness and wildly unfounded optimism."There has to be psychological reason why current readers find Bellamy's heavenly socialist new world order any less credible than Centrifugal Bumble Puppy or the Ministry of Love. In Looking Backward, upper-class fiancé Julian West goes to bed in his fortified underground sleeping chamber (with the helpful application of some new-age mesmerism) in 1988 only to wake up in the year 2000. Aided and supported by the doctor who discovered him and his attractive young daughter (who looks an awful lot like his future bride from 1988), Julian - and through him, the reader - is given a tour of the utopian future city of Chicago, now almost completely devoid of crime, poverty, or hunger. Even boredom has been stamped out. We're talking the perfect society. Thomas More's quaint little island has got nothing on this place.The Chicago of Bellamy's future is part of a larger system in which labor organization has been taken over by the government, profits are shared through subsidized - well, everything, really - and all wealth created by labor is diverted back into society. In short, everything your conservative uncle warns you about during Thanksgiving dinner. Without a doubt, Bellamy's stab at utopian wonderland is extreme enough that there is something to please and anger most anybody: he gets rid of the lawyers, demolishes capitalism, allows women in the workplace (okay, so maybe he got some things right), fully funds the arts and public recreation, and did I mention that he gets rid of the lawyers?Yes, many of the novel's "predictions" seem far-fetched or implausible, and even downright frightening if you lean to the right of the political spectrum. But what is easy to forget is that utopian novels are usually meant to be filled with over the top idealism, as their extreme versions of unobtainable perfection (the word Utopia itself translating to "no-place") act as satire and/or commentary on current affairs. Despite Bellamy's repeated defense of his description of the next century's rapid cultural evolution, it is much more effective to look at the novel's time travel device as an effective way of highlighting our society's perpetual near-nearsightedness when it comes to changing the current sociopolitical system. In fact, the very name of the book references this theme, although it might be easier to look at it from afar first, as Julian does.When the novel starts out, our young well-to-do hero can only see the flaws in society and the struggles they produce as they affect him directly: his main focus on recent labor disputes over wages is that they are holding up the construction of his newlywed home, and therefore stalling his wedding. Suffering from insomnia (perhaps a symbolic jab at modern man's inability to "dream" of a life other than the one he inhabits), Julian is put to sleep by a mesmerist only to awaken a century later. When the magnanimous Dr. Leete introduces him to the future version of his home city of Chicago, he does so by taking him to the rooftop of his home so he can gaze down upon the cityscape from above. Like the title itself, this moment foreshadows the intent of the novel, which is to attempt to jar the reader from a myopic worldview by introducing him to his own world from a new perspective.It isn't just that Julian gets to see what has become of the world in his absence, but that his tour through an idyllic future forces him to look upon his own time of 1988 as a historical landmark rather than the unavoidable real world. People always have an easier time recognizing change and progress when witnessing it through the filter of time, are more willing to accept radical advances in society and politics after the fact than to comfortably accept that such a thing might happen in their own lifetime. Bellamy, perhaps unintentionally, illustrates this point when he responds to a review of Looking Backward which criticized the brief time-span that the book allows for such massive global change by pointing to historic examples of rapid bursts of societal and cultural advancements. History is so often used as context that the future seems almost inaccessible without the past to claim as context. The book's narrator says as much to the reader directly, as Julian finds himself remarking at one point: "One can look back a thousand years easier than forward fifty." Society struggles when it comes to looking forward and seeing any substantial change.So, Bellamy attempts to usurp this bias for the past by turning the present into the past, and doing so by painting a future that, he claims, is a possible achievement. Yes, it is wishful thinking at its most optimistic, but the contrast it offers is just as informative - perhaps even more so - than the contrast that Dystopian tomes afford us against the worst-case scenario. It might not seem totally feasible that a future would exist in which all citizens share equally in the bounty of their labors, but by taking us through the detailed mechanisms of how this future America manages just that, we are forced to examine the inequalities and shortcomings of the current era and contemplate whether it is more unreasonable to dismiss the offered solutions, or accepting the flaws of the present as unavoidable.Sometimes solutions aren't meant to be practical answers as much as they are to expose us to the problem. Jonathan Swift's suggestion that poor people could ease their economic hardships by eating their children when the couldn't afford food is not, according to most, a reasonable solution, but it not only highlights the problem at hand, but the callous attitude towards that problem by certain segments of society. Of course, Looking Backward doesn't fall as neatly into the category of satire as Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal" or Voltaire's Candide, but the literary device of using the extreme and extraordinary to highlight the commonplace is just as effective. It might seem ludicrous to reduce the number of laws to four or five and eliminate lawyers and juries altogether, but this only goes to illustrate the absurdity of a legal system so complex that people must devote their entire lives to studying the law to even begin to understand it. You don't hear anybody knocking Kafka for making the same point in The Trial. But that was a Dystopian novel, so that's a bit easier to accept.Looking Back doesn't necessarily have all the answers, and it might be just as hit-or-miss with its predictions as Back to the Future II - Although you have to give it to Bellamy, he not only predicted credit cards, he called them credit cards! - but the Utopian paradise of the year 2000 that never was still manages to cast a shadow on many societal problems that still exist over a hundred years before Julian's lengthy nap, and maybe that's more significant than Bellamy's failure to predict how little we've managed to change.

[maxwellt-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Socialist/comunist BS

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

There was a time once when this was revolutionary. I was impressed by what it correctly foresaw, but disappointed about how much that this utopia was still influenced by the antiquated ideas about gender and the past. As for socialism itself, the whole idea seems to have trappings of utopianism.

[jddunn_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Man, what a crappy socialist utopia. Americans would figure out how to make a socialist utopia as saccharine and colorless and authoritarian as possible, wouldn't we?So, I read this out of historical interest, because it was a landmark work in American leftism, sold millions of copies in the 1890's, etc. I kinda wanted to know what got early American leftists excited. Evidently, it was very-thinly-novelized half-informed hectoring about proto-Marxist political economy. He sketched just barely enough of his utopian future to force the medicine down. For a supposed seminal work of scifi futurism, there's just no imagination at all... he even goes so far as to kinda just give up and make his year 2000 Boston look almost exactly like his 1887 Boston, just with less squalor and more monumental architecture. There are a few futurist stabs at what the society and technology of tomorrow would look like, but they're all ancillary and don't seem to have much at all to do with his political and economic vision. I don't know how anyone could have possibly read this for entertainment.And what he does sketch out is not very appealing. He had a big hardon for organizing things on a military footing, and his utopia is awfully authoritarian. The results he posits seem pretty ok, but the means of getting to them are either implausible or would likely preclude those results. And everything is annoyingly, Socratically just-so. And then to top it all off he has the temerity to throw in a totally cloying, shallow, and implausible romance, topped off with a gratuitous double-twist ending, just to mess with us.Ok, ok, I shouldn't be so hard on him. This guy was essentially an amateur, trying to find the best way he could to expound his political ideas to a large audience. And obviously, it worked. I just can't believe this had such broad appeal. Americans must have been absolutely starving for good socialist agitprop back in the Populist Era. I had hoped it would be interesting on its own terms, but it's really only worth reading as a curiosity of historical and political interest, and barely at that.

[la2bkk · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

With the exception of "telephone music" as a precursor to modern day radio, Bellamy's work is less science fiction and more a well written manifesto for Marxism. Unfortunately, Bellamy was more concerned with an unrealistic utopian socialism and criticism of capitalism than historical fact. Two centuries prior, Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" detailed how the colonists attempt at collective farming aka communism discouraged production- in fact, only when the colonists resorted to private land ownership did the settlement produce positive results. The subsequent history of the 20th century has further proven Bellamy's ideas a failure.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting 19th century novel depicting a utopian America in the year 2000 where society has abolished all distinctions of rich and poor and there are no politicians, bankers, armed forces, lawyers or any kind of prejudice or injustice. At one level, the depiction is almost laughably unrealistic, but in another shows the type of idealism that held sway in some quarters in the late 19th century (the author says in a postscript that he expects society to have moved in this direction in the lifetime of the children of the 1880s, if not that of the adults). The story is told through the medium of an 1880s gentlemen who is hypnotised to help him sleep, but oversleeps and wakes up 113 years later. There is a twist and a counter-twist at the end that keeps the reader guessing. Interesting at a philosophical level, if not in terms of realism.

[servuslibri_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward: 2000-1887” is a novel in which he presents and describes his Utopia. It is well worth reading, and may be enjoyed by both those who are pleased and horrified by his vision.Written in 1887 and set in Boston, the plot involves a sleeper (Julian West) who awakens in 2000 from a nap of over a century. He is introduced to his new world by the family of Dr. Leete, who discovered and revived him. There is also a love story with a twist between the Leete daughter and West, but the majority of the work concentrates on the socialist-Commune society. Many aspects of this could be discussed, but space permits me only a few. First, the story-line used lets us very neatly see the highlights of Bellamy’s vision without any dirty details of how it came to being. So what is his Utopia?Bellamy was very much a Yankee, and was familiar with the works of Karl Marx. Some of Marx is co-opted into his result, but the whole is rather more French, and served with a Yankee flavoring. The living arrangements seem largely based on the French commune Utopian plans of the mid-nineteenth century, while some of the features of government and society evoke issues being debated today in our courts and congress, So how did Bellamy have them come out?Egalitarianism won over American equality, government won over any other form of organization. He even quotes the French goals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The expected working life was age 20-45. There was only one form of organization, that of the U.S. Army. The government owned all the houses (you rented), factories, farms, and distribution centers. Everyone got the same size paycheck, from birth to death. There were unions, but they looked more like European guilds. Since all were equal, they had no problems with crime or greed; there were no brokers, lawyers, or salesmen; and the standard wage (equal for all) was about the equivalent of $150,000 a year. Everyone had a rank, from private to general, but got the same pay. Sounds great, doesn’t it?But, except for the pneumatic tube delivery system, everyone in Boston got everywhere by walking. All the neighborhoods were largely the same. Since everyone went to basic college (age 17-20), they were all educated, similar in outlook, and lacked any impulse to cheat the system and any greed for more than normal consumption. If that sounds good to you, and you can believe it, this is your kind of Utopia. If you, like me, cannot believe it, then some of its features sound like hell. Either way it’s a great read, and gives much to think about. You should be aware that this was a very popular book about the time that the first wave of ‘Progressivism’ began to hit the US.

[danconsiglio · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Early socialist propaganda disguised as a utopian dialogue. It's as exciting as it sounds! I'm glad that I read this, though I didn't actually enjoy the process of reading it. Bellamy provides a well detailed look at the ideas of 19th century (military ) socialism. From a historical perspective it's a kind of cool to see where the communists got their ideas. From a reading-a-book-for-fun perspective this book is a steaming, dense pile of dog shit. This is your great-great grandfather's socialism, not your crazy uncle's. Suggesting this to friends will not help them see the value of a single payer health care system. It might help them to understand what you are saying when you bitch about how all profit is theft. They may still not agree with you, but it might help. Also they will hate you for making them read through the Victorian love story bits. I'd just read a few web reviews and call it a day. Power to the people!!!

[jmattas_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A socialist utopia, which tells of a world in which I'd very much like to live, where everybody is all happy-happy-joy-joy. The transition from harsh capitalism to the new order is not so believable, but the description of the socialist system and of the flaws of scattered capital is very attractive, and it made me think, why indeed it couldn't be like that. If only people could be less selfish and greedy...This book still has a lot to give, because Bellamy's prophecies have not fulfilled themselves. I think that today we are further from any possible dramatic transition than in the 1800's, because there is much less extreme poverty, people "kind of get along", and this doesn't excite revolutions.Bellamy states that in a humane socialist nation, the true potential of humans, as given by God, is finally realized. It's an interesting question, whether people are born good or bad, but settling the issue by invoking a deity is not a very satisfying answer.The dialogue is attractively old-fashioned, and apparently even this radical writer couldn't foresee the evolution of the sexes.

[perlle_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not so much a novel as long descriptions of the author's idea of a future utopia. Some really creative ideas. Others a bit scary. A few, like the chimneys and the awnings were just hilarious. Worth for it the glimpse at the past more than the future.

[datrappert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Of all the books I have ever read, this has probably had the most profound impression. Naive and unworkable perhaps - but if only we could dream like this these days.

[aethercowboy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Falling into a hypnotic sleep in the year 1887, the protagonist of LB, Julian West, awakes to find himself in the year 2000. Boston has turned into a socialist utopia, and the people guide Julian through their future land, showing him how all things are improved by their lifestyle, ranging from social hierarchies to technological advancements. He finds true love and has to come to terms with whether or not his is actually dreaming this splendid future.A sort of allegory for Bellamy's social beliefs, LB provides an interesting glimpse of a potential future, idealistic as it seems. If you could handle "controversial" political works such as The Jungle or Native Son, or if you're a big fan of utopian works such as More's Utopia or Plato's Republic, you might just enjoy this book.

[iubookgirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this as part of a course on social movements. Most course readings are dry and dull, but this kept me interested. Thank you to Jack McKivigan for forcing me to read this classical rendering of utopian societies.

[jjmcgaffey · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As it says in the blurb and intro, it's really not a novel, just a novelized presentation of a utopian future. It is fun to read, but Bellamy skips over all the real problems - even accepting what he says about how everyone was ready for the change all at once, what changes first? How jobs are managed? How the President is elected? Who is and isn't part of the 'industrial army'? How people feel about work and pay? He very much took the easy way out by 'looking backward'... Not to mention how poorly he handled women - there's the 'industrial army' which is all the men except the professional men (doctors, etc). Then there are three separate 'armies' - professional men (never any suggestion of professional women), imbeciles (including blind, deaf, retarded, crippled...), and women. Uhuh. Suuuure. Well, it's interesting to read though rather stupid when you start analyzing it - an interesting glimpse into one man's mind at the end of the 19th century.

[beau0p0laurence · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

a 19th c. man wakes up to a future in which every thing is absolutely equitable. ah, such utopian dreams!