Looking Backward Totally Explained

Everything about Looking Backward totally explained

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, and was first published in 1888. It was written in reaction to the disillusionment with an increasingly competitive and industrial society. Looking Backward sold more than 1 million copies. His work known as "nationalism" inspired the formation of more than 160 Nationalist clubs to propagate his ideas.

Synopsis

The book tells the story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up more than a century later. He finds himself on the same spot (Boston, Massachusetts) but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000 and, while he was sleeping, the U.S.A. has been transformed into a socialist utopia. This book outlines Bellamy's complex thoughts about improving the future.
The young man readily finds 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 community kitchens for busy housewives. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45. The productive capacity of America is commonly 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 an issue and Leete explains it.
Although the author was unable to envision the technology that would support some of his predictions in the future, they're frequently compared with actual social and technological developments since the book was written. 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. He additionally introduces the concept of credit cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26. Bellamy also predicts classical music being available in the home through cable "telephone".

Sequel(s)

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.

Sequels written by other authors include:

Looking Beyond (1891), by Ludwig A. Geissler
Looking Forward (1906), by Harry W. Hillman
Looking Further Forward (1890), by Richard C. Michaelis
Looking Further Backward (1890), by Arthur Dudley Vinton.
Young West (1894), by Solomon Schindler
Mr. East's Experiences in Mr. Bellamy's World (1891), by Conrad Wilbrandt

Reaction

William Morris's 1890 utopia News from Nowhere was partly written in reaction against this utopia, which Morris didn't find congenial. The book's descriptions of utopian urban planning had a practical influence on Ebenezer Howard's founding of the garden city movement in England, and on the design of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles. During the Great Strikes of 1877, Eugene V. Debs, though already a union member, opposed the strikes and argued that there was no essential necessity for the conflict between capital and labor. However, Debs was influenced by the 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 was re-written in 1974 by American 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 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 employed Bellamy's "Looking Backward" as their heuristic model for understanding Progressive ideology as it shaped the Canal Zone.

Further Information

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