Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Oxford World's Classics)

’ LOOKING BACKWARD 2000–1887 E B was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, in March . He inherited his parents’ religious commitment (his father was a Baptist clergyman) and was baptized in . Having failed the medical examination at West Point, the United States Military Academy, he entered Union College in Schenectady, New York, in . The following year Bellamy visited his cousin in Dresden, where he encountered German socialism at first hand, and they travelled across Europe. In he began legal training in Springfield, Massachusetts, qualifying as a barrister in . He briefly opened an independent practice in Chicopee Falls, but soon became a journalist, working for the New York Post before returning to Massachusetts to become literary editor of the Springfield Union. In the early s he seems to have lost his religious conviction, though not his spiritual commitment, and in composed a lengthy philosophical essay setting out a ‘Religion of Solidarity’. Bellamy began to write fiction in the mid-s, publishing some twenty short stories and four novels between and , many of them in respected magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Lip- pincott’s. Bellamy started work on Looking Backward in ; it was published in and became a best-seller in its second edition of . Thereafter Bellamy devoted himself to promoting its ideas, speaking at the meetings of various Bellamy Clubs and contributing articles to both The Nationalist, a paper set up to publicize these ideas, and its successor, The New Nation, which he also edited. He published Equality, a sequel to Looking Backward, in . He died in May in Chicopee Falls, where he had lived most of his life, leaving behind his wife, Emma Sanderson, and a son and daughter. M B is a Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England – (). ’ For over years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over titles––from the ,-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels––the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS EDWARD BELLAMY Looking Backward – Edited with an Introduction and Notes by MATTHEW BEAUMONT 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Editorial material © Matthew Beaumont 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bellamy, Edward, 1850–1898. Looking backward, 2000–1887 / Edward Bellamy; edited with an introduction and notes by Matthew Beaumont. p. cm.––(Oxford world’s classics) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978–0–19–280629–1 (acid-free paper) ISBN-10: 0–19–280629–7 (acid-free paper) 1. Two thousand, A.D.––Fiction. 2. Social problems––Fiction. 3. Boston (Mass.)––Fiction. 4. Time travel––Fiction. 5. Utopias––Fiction. I. Beaumont, Matthew, 1972– II. Title. PS1086.L6 2007 2006030180 Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc. ISBN 978–0–19–280629–1 13579108642 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction vii Note on the Text xxxi Select Bibliography xxxii A Chronology of Edward Bellamy xxxv LOOKING BACKWARD 2000–1887 Explanatory Notes ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I like to thank several people who have informed this edition in various ways. Kate Flint recommended me to Oxford University Press, and I am grateful to her for this and for her support in the past. John Carey and John Sutherland read a draft of the Introduction, and I am indebted to both of them for the insight and intellectual generosity with which they responded to the task, as well as for their example as the editors of utopias and nineteenth-century novels respectively. Thanks also to Andrew Hemingway, Tim Shallice, Adam Smith, and Thomas Smith, all of whom offered advice or provided bibliographical references and other useful pieces of information. Finally, I would like to record my gratitude to Judith Luna, who has been an excellent editor. M.B. INTRODUCTION I ‘The book is one to be read and considered seriously,’ the poet, designer, and political activist William Morris commented sus- piciously in his review of Looking Backward () in , ‘but it should not be taken as the Socialist bible of reconstruction; a danger which perhaps it will not altogether escape.’1 Edward Bellamy’s celebrated utopian romance, only the second novel published in the United States to sell a million copies, after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (), rapidly became a best-seller once it had appeared in its second edition in . It persuaded thousands of readers to become socialists, most famously the labour leader Eugene Debs. It did so because of its eloquent indictment of capitalist society, undoubtedly; but also because, in spite of Morris’s admon- ition, these readers interpreted it precisely as the socialist bible of reconstruction, a kind of fictional guidebook to post-capitalist society. The book quickly acquired cult status. Almost everybody who was interested in the so-called ‘social question’ debated the book, ‘down to the boot-blacks as they s[a]t on the curbstones’.2 Satirists, gratuitously imitating its fantastical devices, mocked it. Opportun- istic publishers, hoping to cash in on the latest literary phenomenon, rushed unashamedly derivative novels and pamphlets through the press. And, like all cult objects, the book even started to attract obsessives. In , for example, an eccentric English editor called Thomas Reynolds published an elaborate book of exegesis: Preface and Notes, Illustrative, Explanatory, Demonstrative, Argumentative, and Expostulatory, To Mr. Edward Bellamy’s Famous Book ‘Looking Backward’. As this comically cumbersome title implies, Looking Backward had already become the secular equivalent of a sacred manuscript. 1 William Morris, ‘ “Looking Backward” ’, in Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal –, ed. Nicholas Salmon (Bristol, ), . 2 Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth against Commonwealth (New York, ), . viii Introduction Bellamy’s book, published at a time of desperately high unemploy- ment and during a period of intense industrial disputes, embodied the Zeitgeist. Society appeared to be in a state of abrupt transition, the outcome of which none the less could not confidently be predicted. Did the convulsions of the late nineteenth century seem more likely to end ‘in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’, to formulate it as Karl Marx had done in the mid-nineteenth century?3 Analysing English class con- flicts in the American economist David Wells argued that revo- lution and mutual ruination effectively amounted to the same thing: Out of these changes will probably come further disturbances, which to many thoughtful and conservative minds seem full of menace of a muster- ing of the barbarians from within rather than as of old from without, for an attack on the whole present organization of society, and even the permanency of civilization itself.4 On both sides of the Atlantic in the s and s the survival of ‘civilization itself’ seemed to be at stake. And in this context even the plot of Looking Backward, in which the protagonist disappears from Boston in the dystopian conditions of the s and then reappears there, after a catatonic sleep, in the utopian conditions of , captured something of the epoch’s radical sense of its own historical discontinuity. Bellamy’s plot momentarily focused people’s confused understanding of time at the fin de siècle, their collective

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