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'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.' Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward 2000-1887" remains the most successful and influential utopian novel written by an American writer mainly because the competition consists mostly of dystopian works, from Jack London's "The Iron Heel" to Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," or science fiction works like Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed." Still, I do not mean to give the impression that Bellamy's 1888 novel gets this honor by default. Magazine covers in 1984 were devoted to judging the track record of George Orwell's dystopian classic and I would argue that Bellamy deserves the same sort of consideration now that we have reached the 21st century. I certainly intend to use him to that end in my upcoming Utopian Images class.
At the end of the 19th century Bellamy creates a picture of a wonderful future society. Bellamy's protagonist is Julian West, a young aristocratic Bostonian who falls into a deep sleep while under a hypnotic trance in 1887 and ends up waking up in the year 2000 (hence the novel's sub-title). Finding himself a century in the future in the home of Doctor Leete, West is introduced to an amazing society, which is consistently contrasted with the time from which he has come. As much as this is a prediction of a future utopia, it is also a scathing attack on the ills of American life heading into the previous turn of the century. Bellamy’s sympathies are clearly with the progressives of that period.
"Looking Backward" does not have a narrative structure per se. Instead West is shown the wonders of Boston in the year 2000, with his hosts explaining the rationale behind the grand civic improvements. For example, he discovers that every body is happy and no one is either rich or poor, all because equality has been achieved. Industry has been nationalized, which has increased efficiency because it has eliminated wasteful competition. This is a world with no need of money, but every citizen has a sort of credit card that allows them to make individual purchases, although everyone has the same montly allowance. In Bellamy's world is so ideal that it does not have any police, a military, any lawyers, or, best of all, any salesmen. Education is so valued that it continues until students reach the age of 21, at which point all citizens enter the work force, where they will stay until the age of 45. Men and women are compensated equally, but there are some distinctions between job on the basis of gender, and pregnancy and motherhood are taken into account.
Bellamy was living during the start of the Industrial Revolution, and like Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella who wrote during the height of the Age of Reason, he sees science and human ingenuity as being what will solve all of humanity's problems. He does not get into too many details regarding the comforts of modern living in the future, but there are several telling predictions (e.g., something very much like radio). However, it is clear that Bellamy is writing primarily to talk about economics and sociology, especially because he always compares his idealized future with the problems of his own time.
Obviously Bellamy's critique of the late 19th century will be of less interest to today's students that his various predictions on the both the future and an ideal world, unless they are specifically studying the American industrial revolution. But the latter two are enough to make "Looking Backward" deserve to be included in a current curriculum and I am looking foward to how well my students think Bellamy predicted the world in which we now find ourselves living.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This books is worth reading due to its historic significance. It is however quite badly written, as it is really a grand tour of the future world of the year 2000, and plot and character development are just means to an end,really. In the year 2000, women still leave men at the end of meals to discuss the real business of life over brandy and cigars.
Interestingly, costume in the year 2000 is not discussed, which would have been interesting.
Contemporary Socialists and Marxists held this book up to ridicule, one reason being that Bellamy appeared to think that many problems of life would be resolved by people being able to have live music piped into their homes via telephone, as well as an unlimited number of consumer goods delivered through pipes! The dismissive phrase used by William Morris was that it was a 'Cockney paradise,' meaning a brainless consumer binge, rather like the lyrics of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
One other aspect of it held up to ridicule -by Victorian contemporaries- was the idea that people doing rotten dirty jobs would work shorter hours than people in-say-libraries. One contemporary satire of this book had 5,000 people working as gravediggers at a funeral, so that each person only had to work for five minutes or so.
Interestingly, the author uses the phrase 'credit card' for possibly the first time in human history, as his utopia's subsitute for money.
Interestingly, costume in the year 2000 is not discussed, which would have been interesting.
Contemporary Socialists and Marxists held this book up to ridicule, one reason being that Bellamy appeared to think that many problems of life would be resolved by people being able to have live music piped into their homes via telephone, as well as an unlimited number of consumer goods delivered through pipes! The dismissive phrase used by William Morris was that it was a 'Cockney paradise,' meaning a brainless consumer binge, rather like the lyrics of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
One other aspect of it held up to ridicule -by Victorian contemporaries- was the idea that people doing rotten dirty jobs would work shorter hours than people in-say-libraries. One contemporary satire of this book had 5,000 people working as gravediggers at a funeral, so that each person only had to work for five minutes or so.
Interestingly, the author uses the phrase 'credit card' for possibly the first time in human history, as his utopia's subsitute for money.
Format:Paperback
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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The Dover edition of Bellamy's classic is one of the most affordable ways to access this enduring time travel utopia. Read more
Published on 8 April 2009 by Lark
Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy is famous for his utopian novel set in the year 2000, Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887, published in 1888. Read more
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A warmly human and enlightening read
Having never really heard of this novel or its author before, I was rather surprised to discover how immensely popular it was at the end of the nineteenth century. Read more
Published on 3 Feb 2003 by Daniel Jolley
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