Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian time travel science fiction novel by the American journalist and writer Edward Bellamy first published in 1888.
The book was translated into several languages, and in short order "sold a million copies." According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, "In the 19th-century United States, only Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies in its first years" than Bellamy's book.
The novel inspired several utopian communities. In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas. According to Erich Fromm, "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement."
Looking Backward influenced many intellectuals, and appears by title in many socialist writings of the day. Owing to its commitment to the nationalization of private property and the desire to avoid use of the term "socialism," this political movement came to be known as Nationalism (not to be confused with the political ideology of nationalism).
Synopsis Bellamy's novel is set in Boston, Massachusetts, and tells the story of a young American man named Julian West who, in 1887, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself at the same location but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000, and while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia. The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving the future. The major themes include problems associated with capitalism, a proposed socialist solution of a nationalization of all industry, and the use of an "industrial army" to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions.
The young man is awoken to a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age, including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, internet-like delivery of goods. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens (realized as factory-kitchens in the 1920s–30s in the USSR). The productive capacity of the United States is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with 19th-century society.
Although Bellamy's novel did not discuss technology or the economy in detail, commentators frequently compare Looking Backward with actual economic and technological developments. For example, Julian West is taken to a store which (with its descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste in a similar way to the consumers' cooperatives of his own day based on the Rochdale Principles of 1844) somewhat resembles a modern warehouse club like BJ's, Costco, or Sam's Club. He additionally introduces a concept of credit cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26, but these actually function like modern debit cards. All citizens receive an equal amount of "credit." Those with more difficult, specialized, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs work fewer hours. Bellamy also predicts both sermons and music being available in the home through cable "telephone" (already demonstrated but commercialized only in 1890 as Théâtrophone in France).
Bellamy's ideas somewhat reflect classical Marxism. In chapter 19, for example, he has the new legal system explained. Most civil suits have ended in socialism, while crime has become a medical issue. The idea of atavism, then current, is employed to explain crimes not related to inequality (which Bellamy thinks will vanish with socialism). Remaining criminals are medically treated. One professional judge presides, appointing two colleagues to state the prosecution and defense cases. If all do not agree on the verdict, then it must be tried again. Chapters 15 and 16 have an explanation of how free, independent public art and news outlets could be provided in a more libertarian socialist system. In one case, Bellamy even writes, "the nation is the sole employer and capitalist."
Publication history The decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873–1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath.Sylvia E. Bowman, The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy. New York: Bookman Associates, 1958; pp. 87–89. Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms—monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts—began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate. The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.
Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), a relatively unknown New England-born novelist with a history of concern with social issues,Bowman, The Year 2000, p. 96. began to conceive of writing an impactful work of visionary fiction shaping the outlines of a utopian future, in which production and society were ordered for the smooth production and distribution of commodities to a regimented labor force. In this he was not alone—between 1860 and 1887, no fewer than 11 such works of fiction were produced in the United States by various authors dealing fundamentally with the questions of economic and social organization.Bowman, The Year 2000, p. 107.
Bellamy's book, gradually planned throughout the 1880s, was completed in 1887 and taken to Boston publisher Benjamin Ticknor, who published a first edition of the novel in January 1888.Bowman, The Year 2000, p. 115. Initial sales of the book were modest and uninspiring, but the book did find a readership in the Boston area, including enthusiastic reviews by future Bellamyites Cyrus Field Willard of the Boston Globe and Sylvester Baxter of the Boston Herald.
Shortly after publication, Ticknor's publishing enterprise, Ticknor and Company, was purchased by the larger Boston publisher, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and new publishing plates were created for the book. Certain "slight emendations" were made to the text by Bellamy for this second edition, released by Houghton Mifflin in September 1889.Bowman, The Year 2000, pp. 115–116.
In its second release, Bellamy's futuristic novel met with enormous popular success, with more than 400,000 copies sold in the United States alone by the time Bellamy's follow-up novel, Equality, was published in 1897.Bowman, The Year 2000, p. 121. Sales topped 532,000 in the US by the middle of 1939. The book gained an extensive readership in Great Britain, as well, with more than 235,000 copies sold there between its first release in 1890 and 1935.
The Bellamy Library of Fact and Fiction, by William Reeves, a radical London publisher, printer and bookseller was a systematic effort to organize this literature. The Bellamy Library codified series of texts designed to make political works, defined by their radical content and popular appeal, both intellectually and financially accessible to working-class activists and lower- middle-class radicals. It was especially popular among working men's clubs.Beaumont, Matthew. "William Reeves and Late-Victorian Radical Publishing: Unpacking the Bellamy Library." History Workshop Journal, no. 55 (2003): 91–110.
The first version of the novel published in China, heavily edited for the tastes of Chinese readers, was titled Huitou kan jilüe (回頭看記略). This text was later retitled Bainian Yi Jiao (百年一覺 ), or "A Sleep of 100 Years" and in 1891–1892 this version was serialized in Wanguo gongbao;Andolfatto, Lorenzo. "Productive distortions: On the translated imaginaries and misplaced identities of the late Qing utopian novel" (PDF version). Transtext(e)s Transcultures (跨文本跨文化), 10, 2015. . the organization Guangxuehui (廣學會; Society for Promoting Education) published these pieces in a book format. This first translation, the first piece of science fiction from a Western country published in Qing dynasty China, was done in an abridged format by Timothy Richard.Wang, David D. W. "Translating Modernity." In: Pollard, David E. (editor). Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918. John Benjamins Publishing, 1998. . Start: p. 303. CITED: p. 310. The novel was again serialized in China in 1898, in Zhongguo guanyin baihua bao (中國官音白話報); and in 1904, under the title Huitou kan (Looking Backward), within Xiuxiang xiaoshuo (繡像小說; Illustrated Fiction).
The book remains in print in multiple editions, with one publisher alone having reissued the title in a printing of 100,000 copies in 1945.Joseph Schiffman, "Introduction" to Edward Bellamy: Selected Writings on Religion and Society. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955; p. xxxviii.
Precursors Though Bellamy tended to stress the independence of his work, Looking Backward shares relationships and resemblances with several earlier works—most notably the anonymous The Great Romance (1881), John Macnie's The Diothas (1883),Arthur E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy, New York, Columbia University Press, 1944. Laurence Gronlund's The Co-operative Commonwealth (1884), and August Bebel's Woman in the Past, Present, and Future (1886).Arthur E. Morgan, Plagiarism in Utopia: A Study of the Continuity of the Utopian Tradition With Special Reference to Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward", Yellow Springs, Ohio, privately printed, 1944. For example, in The True Author of Looking Backward (1890) J. B. Shipley argued that Bellamy's novel was a repeat of Bebel's arguments, while literary critic R. L. Shurter went so far as to argue that "Looking Backward is actually a fictionalized version of The Co-operative Commonwealth and little more".Robert L. Shurter, The Utopian Novel in America, 1865–1900, New York, AMS Press, 1975; p. 177. However, Bellamy's book also bears resemblances to the early socialist theorists or 'utopian socialists' Etienne Cabet, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri Saint-Simon, as well as to the 'Associationism' of Albert Brisbane, whom Bellamy had met in the 1870s.Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America, (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991), p. 368, p. 401
Reaction and sequels
On publication, Looking Backward was praised by both the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor.Robert E. Weir, Workers in America: A Historical Encyclopedia.Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO, 2013 (pp. 68–70). Many members of the Knights read Looking Backward and also joined Bellamy's Nationalist clubs. Looking Backward was also praised by Daniel De Leon, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Upton Sinclair.
In 1897 Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality, dealing with women's rights, education, and many other issues. Bellamy wrote the sequel to elaborate and clarify many of the ideas merely touched upon in Looking Backward.