The Duke of Stockbridge: A Romance of Shays' Rebellion

Edward Bellamy

jun 2014 · The Floating Press

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In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, America remained very volatile. One outgrowth of this was Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts that pitted a group of dissatisfied residents against the nascent state authorities. It may seem like an unlikely backdrop for budding romance, but Edward Bellamy pulls it off with aplomb, balancing rich historical detail with tender emotions.

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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.