It is the year 2000-and full employment, material abundance and social harmony can be found everywhere. This is the America to which Julian West, a young Bostonian, awakens after more than a century of sleep. West's initial sense of wonder, his gradual acceptance of the new order and a new love, and Bellamy's wonderful prophetic inventions - electric lighting, shopping malls, credit cards, electronic broadcasting - ensured the mass popularity of this 1888 novel. But however rich in fantasy and romance, Looking Backward is a passionate attach on the social ills of nineteenth-century industrialism and a plea for social reform and moral renewal. In her introduction, Cecelia Tichi discusses how the novel echoes the anguish and hopes of its own age while it embodies a sustaining myth of the American literary tradition-that man's perfectibility is attainable in the New World.

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First published in 1888, Looking Backward was one of the most popular novels of its day. Translated into more than twenty languages, its utopian fantasy influenced such thinkers as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, Eugene V. Debs, and Norman Thomas. Writing from a nineteenth century perspective and poignantly critical of his own time, Bellamy advanced a remarkable vision of the future, including such daring predictions as the existence of radio, television, motion pictures, and credit cards.
On the surface, the novel is the story of time traveler Julian West, a young Bostonian who is put into a hypnotic sleep in the late nineteenth century and awakens in the year 2000 in a socialist utopia. Crime, war, personal animosity, and want are nonexistent. Equality of the sexes is a fact of life. In short, a messianic state of brotherly love is in effect.
Entertaining and stimulating, Looking Backward, is a provocative study of human society as it is and as it might be.

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy Looking Backward: 2000

Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in Boston in 1887, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep. When he wakes up in the year 2000, America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years, the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. Broad streets have replaced the squalid slums of Boston, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller.
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.

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Edward Bellamy's prophetic novel about a young Boston man who is mysteriously transported from the 19th to the 21st century--from a world of war and want to a world of peace and plenty.

The year is 2000. The place: Utopian America. The hero: anyone who has ever longed for escape to a better life...

Translated into more than twenty languages, and the most widely read novel of its time, Looking Backward is more than a brilliant visionary's view of the future. It is a blueprint of the perfect society, a guidebook that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age. Today--in the very era it attempted to visualize--it is even more compelling than ever.

With an Introduction by Walter James Miller
And an Afterword by Eliot Fintushel

Reproduction of the original: Looking Backwards 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy

In Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, what is, on the surface, a time travel love story quickly becomes a deep exploration of society, its values, and the proper role of government. Bellamy offers a utopian vision of the future in which industry is nationalized and wealth is equalized in a classless society. A work of huge consequence in its day, the novel shaped politics in both the U.S. and Europe and inspired a grassroots movement. It was also one of the most commercially successful novels of the nineteenth century, selling more than two hundred thousand copies when it was first published in 1888 and one million copies by the end of the century.

This Warbler Classics edition includes commentary by eminent American historian Lewis Mumford and a detailed biographical timeline of Edward Bellamy's life and work.

A staple of Progressive Era utopian novels, Edward Ballamy's Looking Backward follows young Julian West after he wakes up in the future to a society founded on humanist and scientific principles. Work is efficient and fair, industry is owned by the federal government, and goods are distributed equally. Looking Backward, written in 1888 eerily predicts many modern comforts and consumer innovations now taken for granted. The novel became a cult hit among America's intellectuals, with 162 'Bellamy Clubs' founded in America alone and influencing socialist and Progressive thought. Nonetheless, many of its ideals may leave a bad taste in a modern reader's mouth. George Orwell's 1984 served as a direct counter to Bellamy's state-utopia. Even in a post-Stalin world, Looking Backward endures as a thought-provoking experiment, deserving to be debated for its merits and shortcomings alike.

Reproduction of the original: Looking Backwards 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy

Meet Julian West, who falls asleep in Boston for over a hundred years... then wakes to find himself in a futuristic socialist utopia, where people retire at 45 to live out the rest of their lives in leisure. His guide in this brave new America is Doctor Leete, with whom he discusses the wonders he encounters and the perils he envisions. These social-minded dialogues range from discussing religion, an improved legal system and class equality, to the use of credit cards, overnight deliveries, and the dangers of the stock market.

Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward in 1887, and the descriptions of his futuristic socialist utopia quickly ignited spirited debate, and led to a political movement which came to be known as Nationalism. The book also inspired the creation of new utopian communities, as well as influencing over a century of urban planning, including the Garden city movement in England.

This full size collectible edition has been designed for students and scholars, and features a new introduction, as well as a contemporary look at the life and influence of Edward Bellamy. It has been updated and completely restored for a modern audience.

Excerpt from Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy - A Utopian Novel (Chapter 26)
Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It was the sincere belief of even the best of men at that epoch that the only stable elements in human nature, on which a social system could be safely founded, were its worst propensities. They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or curb their operation. In a word, they believed - even those who longed to believe otherwise - the exact reverse of what to us seems self-evident; they believed, that is, that the antisocial qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive force of society.... It seems absurd to expect anyone to believe that convictions like these were ever seriously entertained by men....

With a tear for the dark past, turn we then to the dazzling future, and, veiling our eyes, press forward. The long and weary winter of the race is ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.

Critical reviews for Looking Backward

One of the most remarkable books ever published in America... it is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement. --Erich Fromm

While almost prophetic in its 19th century predictions of many modern contrivances, socially, 'Looking Backward' stands in stark contrast to America as it exists in the grip of the early 21st century world economic recession. Yet even more than a century after it was written, Bellamy's masterpiece now burns even brighter as a beacon of hope for class equality and the ideas associated with Christian socialism. --Shawn Conners, editor of Men & Women by Robert Browning - Transcendentalism: A Poem in Twelve Books

This collection of literature attempts to compile many classics that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

Edward Bellamy was a popular American author known for his socialist thinking and his utopian book Looking Backward, which starts in the future year of 2000 and goes backwards.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888. It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. 1] It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement.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.

That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose interest in the subject shall incline them to overlook the deficiencies of the treatment is the hope in which the author steps aside and leaves Mr. Julian West to speak for himself. Chapter 1 I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. What you say, eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course. I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000. These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grand- parents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence. But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large.

First published in 1888, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is the highly influential work of utopian science fiction by American journalist Edward Bellamy. In the years following the American Civil War a growth in inequality led to an increase in social and economic turmoil. The rise of ever larger and less competitive firms was causing wages to stagnate and created an appetite amongst the populace for solutions to help mitigate the negative effects of an unrestrained and increasingly plutocratic form of capitalism. This appetite gave rise to a popular new literary genre, the utopian socialist novel, of which Looking Backward is arguably one of the most famous examples of. It is the story of young Julian West who is induced by hypnosis into a deep 113 year sleep. When he awakes in the year 2000 he finds that America has been transformed into a socialist utopia. Upon waking West readily encounters Doctor Leete, who explains to him what has transpired since he has slept. Society through a combination of technological advancement and the nationalization of the productive capacity of the United States has become a world in which people work together in mutual cooperation and harmony. Looking Backward was one of the best-selling novels of the 19th century, one which would inspire a large number of people to promote more socialistic public policies. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and includes an introduction by Sylvester Baxter.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 By Edward Bellamy
Looking Backward 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888. It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement.

Looking Backward was a small book, and I was not able to get into it all I wished to say on the subject. Since it was published what was left out of it has loomed up as so much more important than what it contained that I have been constrained to write another book. I have taken the date of Looking Backward, the year 2000, as that of Equality, and have utilized the framework of the former story as a starting point for this which I now offer. In order that those who have not read Looking Backward may be at no disadvantage, an outline of the essential features of that story is subjoined: