Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (Broadview Literary Texts) [Paperback]

Edward Bellamy (Author), Alex MacDonald (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1551114062 | ISBN-13: 978-1551114064 | Publication Date: January 2, 2003

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find that the era of competitive capitalism is long over, replaced by an era of co-operation. Wealth is produced by an "industrial army" and every citizen receives the same wage. This edition contains a rich selection of appendices, including excerpts from Bellamy's Equality and other writings; contemporary responses (by William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others); excerpts from utopian works by Morris and William Dean Howells; and an excerpt from Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"There is no better book than Looking Backward for understanding the intersecting private and public spheres in Victorian America. This is easily the best edition on the market, thanks to the fine introduction that puts Bellamy in the sweep of utopian writing, the nice selection of contemporary responses, and the excerpts from Bellamy's 'Religion of Solidarity' and Equality." (Richard Fox )

"This edition is set apart from all other editions by Alex MacDonald's excellent introduction and annotations and an excellent selection of related texts." (Lyman Tower Sargent, editor of Utopian Studies )

"This edition is extremely welcome. The introduction is clear and accessible, and both situates the text historically and stresses its continuing relevance. Above all, the additional texts provide supporting material that makes this edition a truly invaluable resource." (Ruth Levitas )

From the Back Cover

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find that the era of competitive capitalism is long over, replaced by an era of co-operation. Wealth is produced by an "industrial army" and every citizen receives the same wage. This edition contains a rich selection of appendices, including excerpts from Bellamy's Equality and other writings; contemporary responses (by William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others); excerpts from utopian works by Morris and William Dean Howells; and an excerpt from Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Broadview Press (January 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1551114062
• ISBN-13: 978-1551114064
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #249,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Edward Bellamy's classic utopian novel and other writings, November 8, 2003

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (Broadview Literary Texts) (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. This particular edition, while not a Norton Critical Edition, does have a nice selection of additional readings in the back consisting of some of Bellamy's other writings as well as contemporary works by writers of other utopias and social commentaries such as William Morris, Charlotte Perkins, Henry Lloyd George, and William Dean Howells. All of these appendices provide a context for Bellamy's novel in terms of late 19th-century utopianism.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic Victorian fantasy, February 27, 2006

By 

S. Jones (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (Broadview Literary Texts) (Paperback)

Written during the era of the worst excesses of the "gilded age" and some of America's worst early labor upheavals including the Great Strike of 1877 and Haymarket and just prior to the Pullman and Homestead strikes. Looking Backward is an expression of Bellamy's faith that the industrial age and industrial cities could be made to work for all, not just the few. The book, a top seller of its time, above all shows that our ancestors believed they could reach the future without perishing.

5.0 out of 5 stars An Archtypical Utopia, January 16, 2010

By 

Paul Camp (Chattanooga, TN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (Broadview Literary Texts) (Paperback)

Let us start by discussing the characteristics of the modern utopia, which began in the nineteenth century and lasted up to the present. The modern utopia was sometimes isolated by time or by alternate worlds rather than simply by space (such as an island or a mountain top). It also tended to be larger than utopias of the past, sometimes even global in scope. It was no longer treated as a static, unchanging society as much as it was treated like one stage of historical development. It was sometimes (though not always) more high tech than previous utopias. Modern utopias were sometimes (though not always) urban rather than agrarian. Modern utopian writers were more concerned with individual rights and freedoms in utopia, issues which did not bother writers like Plato or Sir Thomas More.

There are a great many good modern utopian novels. But I believe that to date there are seven truly great ones. They are Edward Belamy's _Looking Backward_ (1888), William Morris' _News from Nowhere_ (1890), H.G. Wells' _A Modern Utopia_ (1905), Austin Tappin Wright's _Islandia_ (1942), Hermann Hesse's _Magister Ludi_ (1943, trans. 1950), B.F. Skinner's _Walden Two_ (1948), and Ursula K. Le Guin's _The Dispossesed_ (1974). These novels form a collective bar of quality. In evaluating the quality of other utopian novels, I hold them to the standards of these works. Does a utopia, for example, have the intellectual rigor of _Walden Two_? Is its setting as concrete and realistic as that of _Islandia_? Does it have the beauty of _News from Nowhere_? The literary subtlety of _The Dispossesed_?

What is it, then, that makes Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ so outstanding? To put it simply, it is the _archtypical_ modern utopian novel. It has most of the characteristics listed above. It inspired hundreds of imitations right after it first appeared-- some in agreement, some in the form of rebuttals. Even as late as the 1970s, writers like Mack Reynolds were writing imitations of Bellamy. It has been satirized and parodied. It inspired a short-lived political movement, the Nationalist Party. (At one time, there were over 150 Nationalist Clubs in America.) Whether you are an enthusiast who hands out copies of utopian novels to your friends or a steely-jawed capitalist who gives one-star reviews to utopian novels, you probably think about _Looking Backward_ when you think about utopias.

Bellamy's socialistic utopia has been criticised for being mechanistic and impersonal, and many modern readers would probably argue that consolidated government and business is not necessarily better. A third argument advanced against Bellamy (and indeed against a great many other utopian novels) is that he assumes too readily that rational behavior and happiness will follow from the proper social conditions. Yet Bellamy nevertheless has a point. If we are going to live in a truly great society, we must first meet the basic needs of all of its members. They must receive food, clothing, shelter, education, and job opportunities. Bellamy offers a convincing plan to meet these needs, and his satire of the shortcomings and cruelties of a capitalistic society still stings:

I cannot do better than to compare society as it was then [the nineteenth century] 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 such a hard 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 inhabitants could critically discuss the merits of the straining team. (3)

Bellamy should also receive some credit for his plot. True, it is thin. But he was the first writer to set a utopia in the future rather than on an island or lost valley, and he was the first to imagine a high-tech utopia on a grand scale. Bellamy is probably not read as much today as he was fifty years ago, but he still deserves attention. Pick up a copy of this novel.

Note: There are a number of editions of _Looking Backward_ floating about, but the Broadview edition is especially fine. It is a sturdy, handsomely printed paperback. It has an excellent introduction by Alex MacDonald, a biographical chronology, and a good bibliography. There are a series of appendices of contemporary reviews, commentaries, poems, and excerpts from other utopian writing of the day. It is well worth the few extra dollars that you may spend.