Looking Backward 2000-1887

Edward Bellamy

Oxford University Press, Jun 25, 2009 - Fiction - 256 pages

'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.' Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and 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. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives.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 (1888) 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. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

About the author

It is as a romantric Utopian rather than a novelist or profound thinker that Edward Bellamy is remembered and read today. While working as a journalist in Springfield, Massachusetts, he began to write novels and later short stories but did not achieve much success until the publication of Looking Backward (1888). The hero of this fantasy falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to find himself in a humane scientific and socialistic utopia. After selling fewer than 10,000 copies in its first year, Looking Backward became enormously popular. Clubs were formed to promote Bellamy's social ideas, and he became a leader of a nationalist movement, crusading for economic equality, brotherhood, and the progressive nationalization of industry. Americans as diverse as Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey have been influenced by Bellamy's suggestion that the products of industrial energy, intelligently organized, could be used to obtain a nobler future. His The Religion of Solidarity (1940), long out of print, is again available.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Looking Backward 2000-1887; Oxford World's Classics, ISSN 2755-4058
• Author: Edward Bellamy
• Editor: Matthew Beaumont
• Contributor: Matthew Beaumont
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009
• ISBN: 0199552576, 9780199552573
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / City Life; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Science Fiction / General; Literary Criticism / American / General; Literary Criticism / General; Philosophy / Political