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Edward Bellamy

Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 Hardcover – August 18, 2008

by Edward Bellamy (Author)

4.3 371 ratings

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This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Print length

232 pages
Language

English
Publisher

BiblioLife
Publication date

August 18, 2008
Dimensions

6.14 x 0.56 x 9.21 inches
ISBN-10

0554379570
ISBN-13

978-0554379579
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ BiblioLife (August 18, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0554379570
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0554379579
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.11 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 0.56 x 9.21 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,950,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #116,636 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #232,770 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #246,236 in Science Fiction (Books)

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4.3 371 ratings

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Sequoia

Star Trek or Star Wars?

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2023

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Before I stumbled onto this book I was in the habit of complaining that the only fiction in human history in which the future is better than the present is Star Trek. In all other cases, the future is worse. Now I've got a second example -- and I'm not the only one hungry for this. When the book was published in the 1880s, it was the best selling book after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben Hur. Clubs sprung up around the country so people could share its optimistic view of the future. There was even a political party for a while.

Those who disdained it, at the time, did so because it offered a socialism that was evolutionary, not revolutionary; that supporters wanted the benefit without spilling blood for it. But that optimism is part of the author's formula, that it makes no sense to presume state-controlled protection but disdain state-controlled production. In both Star Trek and Star Wars, there's a Federation, representing what happens when people band together into an authority. Whether you like this book depends on whether you think that's likely to be a good thing or bad.

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Kindle Customer

Looking Backward portrays too perfect a future

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2015

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(Read in 2014) When we read stories about the predicted future, we need to take into context the time the author is writing. When we are living in that future, it's easy to criticize because we have the benefit of history and present tense. We are also used to our future tales involving Sci-Fi, flying machines, fancy technology.

Looking Backward provides such a conundrum. Author Edward Bellamy deserves credit for developing his version of an Utopian society in such detail, thinking out every facet. He is writing in 1887. The premise is Julian West falls asleep in a bed chamber that is below his house in Boston. He suffers from insomnia, so has a doctor who puts him into hypnotic states to help Julian fall asleep. It is May 30, 1887. He wakes up in the year 2000 in Boston, when the chamber is exscavated. At the time of his sleep, West - and Bellamy - are wealthy, and grappling with how to deal with the issues being raised by the laborers, who are advocating for better wages and working conditions.

Dr. Leete, his wife, and beautiful daughter, Edith (the same name of Julian's fiance in 1887), now occupy the property.

What transpires is a long conversation as Dr. Leete tells Julian the new world that is Boston, the United States, always referred to as the "nation," and world. Everybody is equal. No divisions of wealth. Men are positioned to work in areas that take advantage of their talents. No one works past age 45. Means of distribution are so organized that the exact amount that is needed for each person is known, so in the case of food, there is no hunger. The nation controls production and distribution. There is no cash, but a credit card system, but not like our credit cards. A certain amount is deducted at purchase. There is no want, so no competition and no poverty. Private business, large and small, does not exist. People rarely prepare meals at home, instead eating in the only dining hall in the ward they live. Women have been freed from housework. However, they work in fields that “aren't strenuous for them,” and elect their own leaders. While the primary elected woman can serve in a cabinet of the President of the nation, it wasn't clear whether the woman could be President. There is no mention of African Americans’ participation in the new society.

While occasionally Julian sees the Boston outside the house with the Leetes, most of the dialog is a conversation between Julian and Dr. Leete, which makes the book lack excitement and action. The other challenge for the reader is it is written in 1887 formal language, with some words we're not familiar with, and using too many words to say something. Even though it is the year 2000, Dr. Leete is afflicted with the same problem, though I guess Bellamy couldn't help that.

The hints at future technology is a device that plays music, your favorite tunes, and can wake you up with music, which they call a telephone. Radio? Alarm clock radio? Ipod? There are mechanisms to transmit information about how much of a product is needed. Computers? Internet? However, no technology dealing with the visual.

This is a "perfect" Utopian society. Many aspects might seem great: a world at peace is something we wish for, and for every body to have enough food. The maddening thing about Looking Backward is it's too perfect to believe. As our current lingo would say, "everybody's all in."

To Bellamy's credit, Julian asks all the right questions. To his discredit, are the answers. One of the first questions is there must have been some conflict or war preceding the establishment of this new world. Paraphrasing, "No," Dr. Leete says, "everybody realized it was the right thing to do." For me, this hangs over the book. Every time Julian asks a question that some change must have caused conflict, the answer is always that's not the case; that didn't happen. When Dr. Leete criticizes how things were done in Julian's time, a period he didn't live in, and how it confounds people of today, it comes across as arrogant. Much of the analysis of the 19th century, though, seemed accurate - and for the actual 20th and 21st centuries.

That in itself, makes it hard to believe that one day everybody woke up, liked everybody else, agreed to share food, wealth, the rich gave up their businesses and money. In a post script, Bellamy says the beginning of the transformation was 50 years hence, which would have been 1938. We now know that was right before World II, but Hitler was entrenched in power in Germany.

All political change involves struggle, non-violent or violent. In the 20th century, we saw the rise and fall of Communism and Nazism; two World Wars to end all wars; the Holocaust and more. A hundred years after the Civil War, African-Americans were still marching for civil rights and whites didn’t change their attitude, and say, “sure, that’s great.” Fire hoses were used on African American protesters, and a governor blocked the entrance to a University. Eventually, change happened.

The ending of the book was a bit unexpected, but I don’t want to spoil it. One question Julian struggles with is, “Can I be part of a society I didn’t help to create?”

In the post script, Bellamy tried to address the “rapidity” of the transformation:
“Looking Backward...is intended, in all seriousness, as a forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity, especially in this country; and no part of it is believed by the author to be better supported by the indications of probability than the implied prediction that the dawn of the new era is already near at hand, and that the full day will swiftly follow.”

In 2014, we need to remember that Bellamy was not going to live to see 2000, and though we criticize aspects of his forecast, we shouldn’t stop our contributions to making a better world.

10 people found this helpful

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"Looking Backward": still the great American utopian novel

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2003

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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.

61 people found this helpful

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Lark

Time Travel Utopia

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2009

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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. In its day this novel, and its sequel Equality, where so popular that they actually gave rise to a political movement of Nationalist or Bellamy Clubs. More recently it has been the inspiration to Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel's Participatory Economics project.

The story is one of an insomnaic plantation owner who employs mesmerism and an underground chamber to place himself in a state of suspended animation, unfortunately, like Ash Williams at the end of The Army of Darkness, he sleeps too long and awakens in the distant future.

The story then follows the central character being taken in by a future family, the shock and awe of his totally changed environment where no convention appears untouched, his personal crisis at not just the unfamiliar and undreamed of seachange in values and the economy but also the knowledge that everyone he once knew is now dead. With the passage of time our hero finds love with one of the future family's women and adapts to his new life.

While it is obvious that Bellamy has written a "novel of ideas", and consequently the writting can be a little wooden, but it is none the less a readable book in the same fashion of Well's time traveller fiction such as The Time Machine or When The Sleeper Awakes.

So far as the important of the political ideas goes, I think its very much mistaken to consider it a book infused with marxism, socialism or a radical agenda, instead it's simply futurology with some predictions about social trends which where not that far off the mark, at least with covered malls, credit cards, labour exchanges and radio broadcasting into peoples homes.

Bellamy does depict a society where in mego corporations have merged and merged to the point of a single entity, this trend is accompanied by consensus about full employment but all in all its much more like the Japanese corporation of the seventies or early eighties than the USSR. The second novel, which hasnt been republished in any recent or thrift edition, Equality, is much more so a disection of the politics and business practices of Bellamys future order of superior technics and central planning.

In fact, William Morris is said to have been so perturbed at what he considered a technocratic nightmare that he wrote News from Nowhere, a depiction of a slow, restful, countryside idyle as socialist utopia.

3 people found this helpful

Emergency Tap Off

A literary and social curiosity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2008

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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.

6 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Historical Social Commentary

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2015

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Interesting in an historical standpoint of how a self-absorbed, self-righteous man from 1860s England would perceive the world and how to address social issues facing the nation at the time. Most of it was written as a one-sided introspective conversation with himself (as the main character). Even our protagonist was having a conversation with another character, he was basically just agreeing with himself or using the opponent to segue into another point.

You may have guessed that I found this book to be very one-sided and flat. The reason I purchased this and actually read it was for historical interest, so, for this purpose, I did find it very interesting. I would recommend it for a social commentary by someone who actually experienced 1860s London society.

One person found this helpful

myart

what i ordered

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 19, 2020

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I can'y really comment on a book...it is what it is !! It either is to your liking or not..any opiniuon I might,another reader will hate !!

So physically good, content as expected.

Peter B

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2014

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A reliable and efficient seller - and an excellent book that my grandchildren much enjoyed

One person found this helpful

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Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887 Hardcover – August 18, 2008

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