Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Alex Macdonald (University of Regina)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1888

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

All through the 1870s Bellamy kept notebooks in which he considered a variety of utopian schemes, but he concluded that such schemes were not practical. When he began to think about Looking Backward, he told us later, it was not with the idea of making a serious contribution to social reform but merely as “a literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity” (245). But as he realized the potential of the idea of universal military service his plan for the book changed, and “instead of a mere fairy tale of social perfection, it became the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial reorganization”(247). He had married Emma Sanderson in 1882, and the birth of their two children in 1884 and 1886 hastened Bellamy’s wish t…

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2149 words

Citation: Macdonald, Alex. "Looking Backward: 2000-1887". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 August 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3876, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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