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= Looking_Backward =
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Introduction
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'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
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Bellamy's novel is set 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
in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts), 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
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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. 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, 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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'; 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. 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.
Precursors
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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), Laurence Gronlund's 'The Co-operative
Commonwealth' (1884), and August Bebel's 'Woman in the Past, Present,
and Future' (1886). 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". 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.
Reaction and sequels
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On publication, 'Looking Backward' was praised by both the American
Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor. 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'.
The success of 'Looking Backward' provoked a spate of sequels,
parodies, satires, dystopian, and 'anti-utopian' responses. A partial
list of these follows.
The result was a "battle of the books" that lasted through the rest of
the 19th century and into the 20th. The back-and-forth nature of the
debate is illustrated by the subtitle of Geissler's 1891 'Looking
Beyond', which is "A Sequel to 'Looking Backward' by Edward Bellamy
and an Answer to 'Looking Forward' by Richard Michaelis".
The book was translated into Bulgarian in 1892. Bellamy personally
approved a request by Bulgarian author Iliya Yovchev to make an
"adapted translation" based on the realities of Bulgarian social
order. The resulting work, titled 'The Present as Seen by Our
Descendants And a Glimpse at the Progress of the Future' ("Настоящето,
разгледано от потомството ни и надничане в напредъка на бъдещето"),
generally followed the same plot. The events in Yovchev's version take
place in an environmentally friendly Sofia and describe the country's
unique path of adapting to the new social order. It is considered by
local critics to be the first Bulgarian utopian work.
The book also influenced activists in Britain. Scientist Alfred Russel
Wallace credited 'Looking Backward' for his conversion to socialism.
Politician Alfred Salter cited 'Looking Backward' as an influence on
his political thought.
William Morris's 1890 utopia 'News from Nowhere' was partly written in
reaction to Bellamy's utopia, which Morris did not find congenial.
Bellamy's descriptions of utopian urban planning influenced Ebenezer
Howard to found the garden city movement in England, and also
influenced the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles.
German Reclam edition 1919
During the Great Strikes of 1877, Eugene V. Debs argued that there was
no essential necessity for the conflict between capital and labor.
Debs was influenced by Bellamy's book to turn to a more socialist
direction. He soon helped to form the American Railway Union. With
supporters from the Knights of Labor and from the immediate vicinity
of Chicago, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company went on strike
in June 1894. This came to be known as the Pullman Strike.
The book had a specific and intense reception in Wilhelminian Germany
including various parodies and sequels, from Eduard Loewenthal, Ernst
Müller and Philipp Wasserburg, Konrad Wilbrandt and Richard Michaelis.
The Russian translation of 'Looking Backward' was banned by the
Tsarist Russian censors.
In the 1930s, there was a revival of interest in 'Looking Backward'.
Several groups were formed to promote the book's ideas. The largest
was Edward Bellamy Association of New York; its honorary members
included John Dewey, Heywood Broun and Roger N. Baldwin. Arthur Ernest
Morgan, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, also admired the
book and wrote the first biography of Bellamy.
Legacy and later responses
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'Looking Backward' influenced the novel 'Future of a New China' by
Liang Qichao.
Despite never mentioning the book by name in any of his works,
'Looking Backward' postulated a socialist-fueled utopia that
"confounded" Orwell, and his 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' can be seen as a
dystopian counterpoint to the utopian genre, of which 'Looking
Backward' was a progenitor. Orwell wrote of Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of
Man Under Socialism' that "these optimistic forecasts make rather
painful reading."
'Looking Backward' was rewritten in 1974 by American socialist science
fiction writer Mack Reynolds as 'Looking Backward from the Year 2000'.
Matthew Kapell, a historian and anthropologist, examined this
re-writing in his essay, "Mack Reynolds' Avoidance of his own
Eighteenth Brumaire: A Note of Caution for Would-Be Utopians".
In 1984, Herbert Knapp and Mary Knapp's 'Red, White and Blue Paradise:
The American Canal Zone in Panama' appeared. The book was in part a
memoir of their careers teaching at fabled Balboa High School, but
also a re-interpretation of the Canal Zone as a creature of
turn-of-the-century Progressivism, a workers' paradise. The Knapps
used Bellamy's 'Looking Backward' as their heuristic model for
understanding Progressive ideology as it shaped the Canal Zone.
A one-act play, 'Bellamy's Musical Telephone,' was written by Roger
Lee Hall and premiered at Emerson College in Boston in 1988 on the
centennial year of the novel's publication. It was released as a DVD
titled 'The Musical Telephone'.
See also
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* Equality Colony
Further reading
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*Matthew Beaumont, “William Reeves and late‐Victorian Radical
Publishing: Unpacking the Bellamy Library.” 'History workshop journal'
55.1 (2003): 91-110.
* Edward Bellamy, [
https://archive.org/details/lookingbackward200bell
'Looking Backward, 2000-1887.'] Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1888. - First
edition.
* Edward Bellamy,
[
https://archive.org/details/lookingbackward01bellgoog 'Looking
Backward, 2000-1887.'] Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1889. -
Second edition.
* Edward Bellamy,
[
https://archive.org/details/HowICameToWriteLookingBackward-may1889
"How I Came to Write 'Looking Backward,"'] 'The Nationalist' (Boston),
vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1889), pp. 1-4.
* Warren J. Samuels,
[
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.1984.tb02234.x "A Centenary
Reconsideration of Bellamy's Looking Backward," 'The American Journal
of Economics and Sociology', 43(2):129-48].
External links
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*
*
*
*
* 'The Musical Telephone'
[
http://www.americanmusicpreservation.com/TheMusicalTelephone.htm - a
play based on a chapter in Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward,
2000-1887']
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward
