Looking Backward, 2000-1887

A Book About the Gilded Age*

If a good book should engage a reader in a debate about its themes, Looking Backward is a good book. Edward Bellamy sends his protagonist, Julian West, forward in time to the year 2000 to witness the social transformation America has undergone in the 113 years since Julian's unusual hypnotic session propels him into the future. The novel is full of criticisms of Julian's original time, the Gilded Age, detailed through the contrasting organization of business and society in the future.

If a good book has a basis in the reality of human nature, Looking Backward fails to qualify. The America of the future is a utopia of social equality where there is no need for money, or armies. Where the citizens of the country show more have voluntarily migrated to this new arrangement in which the government owns all means of production and distribution, even decides what should be imported from foreign countries. Where all citizens, even children, receive an equal share of the national wealth annually to spend as they see fit (although they are so satisfied with their condition that they are incapable of spending it all). In other words, America has been overrun by non-humans who fervently believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one (regards, Mr. Spock) and act in accordance.

Looking Backward is an interesting read which I recommend with caveats. I laughed at Bellamy's thoughts on freedom and equality, because the patriarchy of his day is still in effect in the future. The equivalent of noblesse oblige has been transferred from the wealthy and their obligations to the less-fortunate to men and their treatment of women. If you take offense at patronizing attitudes about the delicacy of women you might skip this book. Even if you can accept travel across time, the novel also contains a fantastic coincidence, which I won't spoil, which overwhelms even the most ludicrous of Bellamy's visions of an enlightened future. If you read and enjoy 18th and 19th century fiction, this twist will be in keeping with those of greater works such as Les Miserables and Jane Eyre. If you need a plot grounded in the semblance of the possible, this book isn't for you. But overall it's an enjoyable book, if for no other reason than to see what Marx might have done as a novelist.

* - I've had to set my themed reading list aside for now, as I'm taking a couple literature classes this summer through a state program that provides free tuition for Texas residents over 55. This novel is assigned for my 19th Century American Literature class focused on the Gilded Age. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more broadcasts, centralized production eliminating the need for strikes, &c.).

Worth a read as an example of historical utopianism, if nothing else. show less

A truly terrible book. It's an extremely naive, optimistic, earnest political treatise masquerading as a novel. Most if not all of the political content comes off as repugnant to modern ears as well. Especially the frankly terrifying national industrial army, where citizens do their best for the glory of the "fatherland." It brings up scary WW2 echoes, but is packaged in an annoyingly earnest, naive "utopian" novel. The novel also suffers from a distinct lack of imagination. Bellamy's future society is basically exactly the same 19th century society in which he lived, only improved. Just a terrible, terrible book.

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 show more 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. show less

Often Mentioned, Little Read Now

You don't have to wonder what the author would make of the year 2000 he had so much hope for. While the technological whiz-bang, cleaner environment (by comparison), plentiful food (for many more but not all), and public education (though of varying and spotty quality) would have been familiar, by a degree, to what he'd foreseen, those advancements of most importance to him would certainly rank as major disappointments. Efficient business operations and capital deployment, concentration of wealth, judicious and fair governance, full employment, equitable pay, an intelligent and very polite populace, absence of crime, plenty of leisure time, and sundry other items, while better than in the latter 19th show more century, remain wanting. But, then, Bellamy imagined a utopia, an alliance of men and women, that by the very nature of humans seems nearly (as hope always exists) impossible. Or, as the editor of the Boston Transcript of his day opined might occur 75 centuries from his time. Which, you would suppose, is to say, "Never."

If you've never read Looking Backward, you'll want to for a couple of reasons. It has proven to be an influential book, practically spawning an entire publishing industry of both satire and serious commentary and fiction. Politically, it also exerted influence, with readers forming Nationalist Clubs and adding foundation to the People's Party, better known as the Populist Party. And it must touch some part of our national soul for it has never been out of print, managing to find new readers in successive generations of thinkers, or perhaps dreamers.

But be forewarned before picking up a copy. Bellamy wrote Looking Backward as a fantasy novel. However, reading tastes of the 19th and 21st centuries are vastly different. By today's standards, the writing strikes one as cumbersome, dense, and turgid. The plot, if you can call it that, is paper thin, and the suspenseful element is so obvious a YA reader would groan. So, none of this is why you would read the book. You read it for the political and economic philosophy laid out systematically by the author. As you read, questions arise and you raise objections, and as if Bellamy were beside you, lo and behold he answers them. In his rendering, Bellamy makes the 19th century system, which is still pretty much what we have today, seem quite awful, and the solution, a highly organized socialistic state, admittedly just a notch or two away from a fascist regime, appealing in a bland sort of way.

In short, guaranteed to water the eyes of the already doe-eyed as it inflames the ire of Ayn Rand warriors. Perhaps this is why it remains in print: it moves people. So, give it a look and you can say you've read, if it ever comes up in conversation. show less

Often Mentioned, Little Read Now

You don't have to wonder what the author would make of the year 2000 he had so much hope for. While the technological whiz-bang, cleaner environment (by comparison), plentiful food (for many more but not all), and public education (though of varying and spotty quality) would have been familiar, by a degree, to what he'd foreseen, those advancements of most importance to him would certainly rank as major disappointments. Efficient business operations and capital deployment, concentration of wealth, judicious and fair governance, full employment, equitable pay, an intelligent and very polite populace, absence of crime, plenty of leisure time, and sundry other items, while better than in the latter 19th show more century, remain wanting. But, then, Bellamy imagined a utopia, an alliance of men and women, that by the very nature of humans seems nearly (as hope always exists) impossible. Or, as the editor of the Boston Transcript of his day opined might occur 75 centuries from his time. Which, you would suppose, is to say, "Never."

If you've never read Looking Backward, you'll want to for a couple of reasons. It has proven to be an influential book, practically spawning an entire publishing industry of both satire and serious commentary and fiction. Politically, it also exerted influence, with readers forming Nationalist Clubs and adding foundation to the People's Party, better known as the Populist Party. And it must touch some part of our national soul for it has never been out of print, managing to find new readers in successive generations of thinkers, or perhaps dreamers.

But be forewarned before picking up a copy. Bellamy wrote Looking Backward as a fantasy novel. However, reading tastes of the 19th and 21st centuries are vastly different. By today's standards, the writing strikes one as cumbersome, dense, and turgid. The plot, if you can call it that, is paper thin, and the suspenseful element is so obvious a YA reader would groan. So, none of this is why you would read the book. You read it for the political and economic philosophy laid out systematically by the author. As you read, questions arise and you raise objections, and as if Bellamy were beside you, lo and behold he answers them. In his rendering, Bellamy makes the 19th century system, which is still pretty much what we have today, seem quite awful, and the solution, a highly organized socialistic state, admittedly just a notch or two away from a fascist regime, appealing in a bland sort of way.

In short, guaranteed to water the eyes of the already doe-eyed as it inflames the ire of Ayn Rand warriors. Perhaps this is why it remains in print: it moves people. So, give it a look and you can say you've read, if it ever comes up in conversation. show less