It might seem strange that one of the most culturally influential books in the history of literature is now so little-known—until you read it. Stories endure; manifestoes thinly disguised as novels become slaves to history.
Julian West is a feckless aristocrat living in complacent luxury in Boston in 1887, preparing to marry his saintly fiancée. Suffering from insomnia, he is mesmerised by a quack doctor and falls into a trance in a soundproof subterranean vault. Like Rip Van Winkle, he oversleeps, and wakes up over a century later in the home of one Doctor Leete, who proceeds to explain how society has attained perfection based on “the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man.” Narrated by Julian, the novel is little more than a series of conversations about policy. Bellamy later admitted that he added a romance subplot “with some impatience, in the hope of inducing the more to give it at least a reading.” Considering that the only women Julian meets are Doctor Leete’s wife and his daughter Edith, the reader is not exactly on tenterhooks.
Although Bellamy predicted, in passing, such innovations as the debit card and the clock radio, he was no Jules Verne. In order to make his utopia appealing to “the sober and morally-minded masses of American people,” Bellamy had to make it accessible. Like Louis-Sebastién Mercier’s The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One, a publishing sensation in pre-Revolutionary France, Bellamy’s utopia had a date and a map reference.4 Bellamy originally planned to describe “a cloud palace for an ideal humanity” but “stumbled over the destined cornerstone of the new social order.” In a postscript to the second edition he said that it was “intended, in all seriousness, as a forecast.”
Doctor Leete is a tireless exposition machine. In each chapter Julian, as a surrogate for the nineteenth-century reader, asks how this or that development could be possible, and Leete blandly replies that nothing could be simpler: it is all “the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions.” This was a common view among socialists in the 1880s. In his 1946 essay “What is Socialism?,” Orwell wrote that until the Russian revolution, “all Socialist thought was in some sense Utopian,” because it had not yet been tested in the real world. “Only let economic injustice be brought to an end and all other forms of tyranny would vanish too. The age of human brotherhood would begin, and war, crime, disease, poverty, and overwork would be things of the past.”
In Doctor Leete’s world, equality is the skeleton key that unlocks everything. The new system, which conscripts every citizen into an “industrial army,” does away with the need for lawyers, lawmakers, soldiers, clergymen, taxmen and gaolers. Women are equal, albeit segregated into a separate industrial army. The air is clean, work is painless, lying is almost obsolete, and life expectancy exceeds eighty-five. People are fitter, kinder, happier and better in every way. Here are all the standard fixtures that Orwell mocked in his review of Herbert Samuel’s 1942 utopia An Unknown Land: “the hygiene, the labour-saving devices, the fantastic machines, the emphasis on Science, the all-round reasonableness tempered by a rather watery religiosity . . . There is no war, no crime, no disease, no poverty, no class-distinctions, etc., etc.” Looking Backward is a very etcetera kind of book.
Bellamy’s vision suffers from one extraordinary omission. Not long after Julian wakes up, Doctor Leete takes him to the roof of his house and shows him the view. Julian sees miles of boulevards, buildings, trees, parks and fountains, arranged in exquisite harmony, but no human beings. It is like an architect’s diorama before the miniature figurines have been inserted. When the masses do at last appear, the prose convulses with horror. So effectively has Bellamy acclimatised the reader to the placid efficiency of 2000 that when Julian wakes up to find himself back in the Boston of 1887, the grimy hubbub shocks the senses. Designed to defamiliarise the present and jolt the reader into political action, the sequence also reveals that Bellamy was the kind of paternalistic socialist who loved the working man in theory but struggled with the actuality. Before Julian wakes up yet again to find that 1887 is a nightmare and 2000 the reality, he recoils from the “festering mass of human wretchedness” before him. Sadly observing their “brutish masks,” he says, “They were all quite dead.” If there is hope, it does not lie in the proles.
“The only safe way of reading a utopia,” William Morris wrote in his wary review of Looking Backward, “is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author.”
Ironically for a reformer, Bellamy confessed to a “deep-seated aversion to change.” One of four sons of a popular Baptist minister and a puritanical Calvinist, he spent almost his entire life in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, a formerly idyllic town transformed into an industrial powerhouse. From the windows of the Bellamys’ two-storey house beside the Connecticut River, young Edward could see it all: the smoke-belching mills and foundries, the shabby tenements crammed with immigrant labourers, and the grand mansions of the factory owners, who reminded him of feudal barons. When he was fourteen he had a religious epiphany and “saw the world with new eyes.”
As a precocious student at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Bellamy first encountered the utopian socialism of the late French thinkers Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. In 1868, he spent a year in Germany with his cousin William Packer. There he became hideously aware of “the inferno of poverty beneath our civilization” and spent long hours with William earnestly pondering “some plan for equalising human conditions.” Back home in Chicopee Falls, Edward passed the bar but promptly quit the law after he was hired to evict a widow for non-payment of rent, and turned to journalism. He spent 1872 exposing parlous living conditions and political chicanery for the Evening Post in New York, a tough, seething city under the thumb of wealthy power broker Boss Tweed and his outrageously corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine. “Hard to live,” Bellamy wrote in his notebook. “Sees lots of suffering, becomes a Nationalist.”
Witnessing poverty at home and abroad shook Bellamy’s faith in God and made him determined to solve the “mystery” of life for himself with a universal theory which would unite politics, economics, society, art and religion. Bellamy laid out his mystical species of socialism in his 1873 essay “Religion of Solidarity,” in which each human being is a manifestation of the infinite “not-self ” and true happiness is only attainable by putting the interests of the commonweal before individual desires. He wanted to make others see the world with new eyes.
Bellamy’s essay coincided with the financial panic of 1873. During industrial capitalism’s first depression, ten US states, hundreds of banks, thousands of businesses and more than one hundred railroads went bankrupt. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was America’s first nationwide labour dispute, suppressed only after forty-five days of riots and bloodletting. There were street battles in Chicago and Baltimore, a massacre in Pittsburgh, martial law in Scranton. Even once the economy rallied in 1879, American capitalism felt unnervingly fragile. In the first chapter of Looking Backward, Julian observes that some of his gilded contemporaries fear “an impending social cataclysm.” This anxiety, mirrored across the Western world, inspired a vogue for post-apocalyptic novels like Richard Jefferies’s After London and Joaquin Miller’s The Destruction of Gotham —the 1880s equivalent of disaster movies.
During the depression, Bellamy wrote wonkish editorials for The Springfield Union, a Massachusetts newspaper, and several novellas and short stories driven by ideas rather than persuasive characters. In 1880, Edward and his brother Charles launched the Daily News, “the people’s newspaper,” which diligently covered labour disputes. Edward was sympathetic to the strikers’ plight but thought that the unions didn’t aim high enough. The goal should be an entirely new system, not just a better deal for particular interest groups. Marriage and parenthood spurred Edward to imagine the better world which, he hoped, his children might inhabit. “When I came to consider what could be radically done for social reorganization,” he confided to his notebook, “I was helped by every former disgust with
the various socialist schemes.”
Bellamy started writing Looking Backward in the midst of his country’s first Red Scare. On May 4, 1886, a dynamite bomb killed seven police officers during a workers’ rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Most of the era’s violence was committed by the state or the bosses’ armed thugs—the police shot dead several protesters at Haymarket—but the conviction, on outrageously flimsy evidence, of eight anarchists enabled a crackdown on anarchists, socialists and labour unions. Any successful prospectus for socialism would therefore need to be as unthreatening as possible.
To Bellamy, like Orwell fifty years later, socialism was a tremendous product with terrible salesmen. “In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed I may seem to outsocialize the socialists,” he wrote to his friend and fellow utopian William Dean Howells, “yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a foreign word in itself and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion.” (Orwell, too, complained of the “smell” of socialism.) In Looking Backward, Doctor Leete explains that “the followers of the red flag” in the 1880s “so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing.” In fact, he reveals, they were secretly paid by the capitalist monopolies to discredit radical ideas with violent rhetoric, leading Julian to raise the popular conspiracy theory that the real Haymarket bomb-thrower was a capitalist stooge.
In such a tense climate, Bellamy proposed evolution rather than revolution. Just as in his journalism he advised reformers to be clear, direct and polite, in his novel he tidied up and smoothed out socialism until it no longer appeared remotely dangerous. He reassured his wealthier readers that they need not feel nervous or guilty, because they, too, were blameless victims of “a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blunder,” i.e., capitalism. Once that has been removed, without a drop being shed, in Looking Backward, so too has all tension between social classes, sexes, races and regions, for all time. This kind of utopian assumption confounded Orwell, who thought that one of the left’s great fallacies was “the belief that the truth will prevail and persecution defeats itself, or that man is naturally good and is only corrupted by his environment.”
Bellamy’s dramatisation of exactly that belief made Looking Backward a flat novel but a seductive political argument. America in 1888 was eventful to a fault; by comparison, a future in which all our hero has to do is sit in a nice house while Doctor Leete explains things to him must have seemed very attractive. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
The publication of Looking Backward transformed a provincial journalist into one of the most celebrated thinkers in the world. Nationalist Clubs launched dozens of newspapers, two of which Bellamy edited himself, and gave the nascent Populists an intellectual framework, although he disapproved of their fiery rhetoric. In his preamble to the Populists’ manifesto in the 1892 election, Ignatius Donnelly fulminated, “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organised on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.”
Donnelly, a Minnesota congressman who was variously known as “the Tribune of the People” and “the Prince of Cranks,” was one of the people responsible for injecting conspiracy theories into the bloodstream of American politics. He wrote his own hair-raisingly lurid utopian novel, Caesar’s Column, in which paradise is carved out in a Swiss-owned Uganda while American capitalism perishes in blood and fire; the titular column consists of a quarter of a million corpses, piled high in New York’s Union Square and covered in cement. In the 1896 election, the Populists endorsed the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, whose rabble-rousing style was too salty for Bellamy’s palate. When Bryan was soundly defeated, the Nationalist moment was over.
Bellamy’s influence, however, transcended the movement. Among American socialists, he was more widely read than Marx. Eugene Debs, co-founder of the Socialist Party of America, claimed that Bellamy “not only aroused the people but started many on the road to the revolutionary movement.” Britain’s fledgling Fabian Society, whose Beatrice Webb toyed with writing her own Bellamyite utopia, Looking Forward, asked Bellamy to write the introduction to the American edition of Fabian Essays in Socialism. He had fans among the women’s movement, too. Frances Willard joked that perhaps Edward was secretly “Edwardina”: “a big-hearted, big-brained woman.”
Bellamy died of tuberculosis in 1898, at the age of forty-eight. His swansong was the 1897 novel Equality, a diligent exercise in filling in the gaps left by Looking Backward, while responding to his critics. Bellamy took pains to respect personal liberty, empower women and emphasise America’s founding values, claiming that economic equality was “the obvious, necessary, and only adequate pledge of these three birthrights—life, liberty, and happiness.” For many of Bellamy’s later admirers, Equality was even more significant than its predecessor. Its best chapter, “The Parable of the Water Tank,” was extracted as a pamphlet, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Russia. Peter Kropotkin, the world’s most famous anarchist, exclaimed, “What a pity that Bellamy has not lived longer!”
In literary terms, Looking Backward was a dandelion clock, each scattered seed producing a bloom. The utopian template that Bellamy popularised proved extremely attractive to first-time novelists, removing the need for psychologically rich characters or dynamic narratives. All writers had to do was transport their curious observer to another land, by airship or shipwreck, dream or trance, locate a helpful guide with time on his hands, and describe the society that dramatised their political beliefs. They came in their scores: serious thinkers and obsessive eccentrics, dry pragmatists and wild-eyed prophets, dreamers and cranks, covering every conceivable fin-desiècle obsession, from vegetarianism and electric lighting to eugenics and imperialism. There were more than 150 responses to Bellamy in the United States alone, many of which were direct homages or ripostes with titles like Looking Forward, Looking Ahead, Looking Further Backward or Mr. East’s Experiences in Mr. Bellamy’s World. Some were essentially fan fiction by virtue of reusing Julian West for their own ends. Even the Wizard of Oz was a Bellamyite, to judge by L. Frank Baum’s description of his egalitarian society in The Emerald City of Oz.
As early as 1890, a writer for The Literary World was complaining that “books on the twentieth or twenty-first century are getting to be so numerous that the whole subject will soon be a deadly bore,” and the craze was only getting started. As the United States raced feverishly towards the new century, its upheavals continued to nourish wild imaginations. The Panic of 1893 knocked the economy off its feet for another four years. More cheeringly, the World’s Fair in Chicago that year introduced millions of Americans to such futuristic novelties as the dishwasher, the travelator, the zipper and the Ferris wheel. It was at the fair that Baptist minister Francis Bellamy—Edward’s cousin—launched the Pledge of Allegiance into national life and the celebrated historian of the American West Frederick Jackson Turner declared, “The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” New frontiers—social, political, spiritual, technological—were required.
Scores of writers were inspired to delineate a golden future which reflected their own political priorities. William Morris told a friend that his utopia News from Nowhere was conceived as “a counterblast” to the “cockney paradise” of Looking Backward. Set in 2102, Morris’s ideal society is agrarian rather than urban, anarchistic rather than centralised, and motivated by pleasure, not duty. It became an international bestseller and inspired Ebenezer Howard to start the garden city movement, but its many fans did not include Orwell, who called it “a sort of goody-goody version of the Wellsian Utopia.” “Everyone is kindly and r
easonable, all the upholstery comes from Liberty’s, but the impression left behind is of a sort of watery melancholy.”
Like the Austrian economist Theodor Hertzka’s Freeland and Bellamy’s friend William Dean Howells’s trilogy about the pastoral utopia of Altruria, News from Nowhere gained a substantial following, but most of the post-Bellamy novels made only a modest impact.
In The Human Drift, King Camp Gillette, the razor magnate, relocated every American to one giant city, Metropolis, powered by Niagara Falls; each copy of the book optimistically included a certificate of membership for the United People’s Party, a real-life organisation of which no more was heard. Maine businessman Bradford C. Peck used The World a Department Store to promote the cooperative movement. For J. McCullough, author of Golf in the Year 2000, or, What We Are Coming To, utopia meant uninterrupted golf. Sutton E. Griggs, a Baptist minister and son of a former slave, self-published the first black utopia, Imperium in Imperio, about a secret underground government of African-Americans in Waco, Texas. Feminist utopias such as Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s more successful 1915 novel Herland were absent of men, and therefore of violence. Such utopias made readers believe that fundamental change was possible, however helpless they might feel in real life.
One person’s utopia was, of course, another’s anti-utopia. As Clement Attlee wrote, “We should most of us be very unhappy in each other’s paradises.” For New York lawyer Arthur Dudley Vinton, Bellamy’s imaginary future was closer to hell than to heaven. In Vinton’s fiercely bigoted sequel, Looking Further Backward, Nationalism and feminism have reduced America to a decadent, frivolous, emasculated nation that is easily invaded by China, and a disillusioned Julian must draw on his Gilded Age wits to fight the yellow peril. A much funnier riposte came from Jerome K. Jerome, the British author of Three Men in a Boat, whose short story “The New Utopia” was a droll spoof of both Bellamy’s ideas and his prose. “Have they got it all right by this time?” Jerome’s unflappable narrator asks after waking up one thousand years later. “Is everybody equal now, and sin and sorrow and all that sort of thing done away with?” “Oh yes,” his Leete-like guide replies. “You’ll find everything all right now . . . Nobody is allowed to do anything wrong or silly.” Jerome gave citizens of his drably uniform world (“one language, one law, one life”) numbers instead of names: a joke that would become a science-fiction cliché. In Orwell’s novel Winston Smith is also known as “6079 Smith W.”
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