Looking Backward, 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy

Jan 2008 · Project Gutenberg Ibhuku elingu-1 · Cosimo, Inc.

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Originally published in 1888, Looking Backward is Edward Bellamy's most famous work. The story revolves around Julian West, a man who falls asleep near the end of the 19th century and wakes up in the year 2000. During the time he slept, the United States became a socialist utopia. The majority of the book is a vehicle for Bellamy to expound upon his ideas about societal improvement. Americans in his year 2000 work fewer hours, retire early, and receive all they need from the government. Entertaining and oddly prophetic in some ways, Bellamy's vision of the future from the perspective of the late 19th century is highly engaging. American author EDWARD BELLAMY (1850-1898) also wrote Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), Equality (1897), and The Duke of Stockbridge (1900).

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It is as a romantric Utopian rather than a novelist or profound thinker that Edward Bellamy is remembered and read today. While working as a journalist in Springfield, Massachusetts, he began to write novels and later short stories but did not achieve much success until the publication of Looking Backward (1888). The hero of this fantasy falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to find himself in a humane scientific and socialistic utopia. After selling fewer than 10,000 copies in its first year, Looking Backward became enormously popular. Clubs were formed to promote Bellamy's social ideas, and he became a leader of a nationalist movement, crusading for economic equality, brotherhood, and the progressive nationalization of industry. Americans as diverse as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey have been influenced by Bellamy's suggestion that the products of industrial energy, intelligently organized, could be used to obtain a nobler future. His The Religion of Solidarity (1940), long out of print, is again available.