Looking Backward, 2000 1887

Bol

''Looking Backward, 2000-1887'' is a science-fiction novel written by Edward Bellamy in 1887 that tells the story of his utopian, socialist vision of America set in the year 2000. By the time "Looking Backward, 2000-1887" was published, America had come through Civil War, economic depression, and violent uprisings over the formation of unions. Businesses were becoming more powerful by monopolising industries and controlling wealth. High immigration numbers meant there was an abundance of workers who were largely happy to have any job and wage. Many Americans were struggling and had little opportunity to change their situations. In the novel, Bellamy's main character, Julian West, was transported to the year 2000 when these problems were no longer going to be a burden. His utopia is one in which production is nationally owned and all goods are distributed equally to the citizens. In short, Bellamy had created a world in which all of society's ills could be solved through socialism. As he writes from the perspective of Dr. Leete, West's future guide, ''The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community''...

Bol Partner

02 First published in 1888 and a phenomenal best-seller, Looking Backward is Edward Bellamy's utopian novel about ninteenth-century Bostonian who awakes after a sleep for more than one hundred years to find himself in the year 2000 in a world of near-perfect cooperation, harmony, and prosperity. More than just a fanciful novel, Looking Backward was, in effect, Bellamy's blueprint for a socialist-type state, conceived in response to problems of the Gilded Age brought on in part by the pace of the late-nineteenth-century industrialization. The novel had an enormous impact at the time of its publication, setting in motion a wave of reform activity and creating a vogue for utopian novels that continued over the next three decades. In addition to an extensive introduction, Daniel Borus's new edition of Looking Backward contains a chronology of Bellamy's life, a bibliography, questions to consider when reading the novel, and an index.