SOURCE: White, Frederic R. Introduction to Looking Backward: 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy, pp. v-xxviii. Chicago, Ill.: Packard and Co., 1946.

[In the following essay, White asserts that Looking Backward is an important and unique novel in American literature and explores the three main elements that he believes contribute to its popularity: namely, that it is a romantic novel, that it portrays a realistic criticism of society, and that it dramatizes the concept of equality.]

Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, was the product of two parental extremes. His father, a jovial and well-beloved Baptist minister, was “so fat he could not lean over.” His mother, slight and silent, was “a piece of frail Dresden china.” Edward, the famous offspring of this union of opposites, gave no sure outward sign of any inward grace. He underwent the education customary among his caste. The usual public schooling, a year at college, a year abroad, and study for the bar, was followed by a mildly distinguished career in journalism. He was a mild and temperate man, of middle stature, with regular features, somewhat reserved manners, and a strong store of common sense. Had Looking Backward not taken the civilized world by storm, Bellamy might now be remembered only as a minor novelist who lived for years on the somewhat unorthodox diet of milk, raw eggs, and whiskey. A faery godmother with only a mediocre talent for prophecy might have murmured as she hung over his cradle: he will be a moderately well-to-do, moderately well-liked business man who will be mentioned occasionally in future histories of literature as a moderately talented follower of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Perhaps it was this very moderation that was the key to Bellamy's one masterpiece. For one brief moment in his career he combined, in their proper proportions, three several talents which he possessed. The first was a real, though slight, gift for romantic fiction. The second was a strong sense of reality. The third was an acute and lively interest in contemporary ideas. The chance conjunction of these three traits resulted in Looking Backward, a book which lifted Bellamy from relative obscurity to international fame as a novelist and thinker. On the surface it is a romantic tale of impossible events; in content it is a serious and sustained criticism of capitalist society; essentially it is a dramatization of an idea fundamental to American democracy,—the concept of equality. These three seemingly discordant elements make it a book unique in American literature.

Bellamy himself did not at first seem aware of the trinitarian character of his book. Perhaps he possessed only a moderate amount of introspection. At any rate, he valued it at different times for different things. It is possible to trace this changing attitude toward his masterpiece from an initial interest in its romantic aspect, through a growing concern with its realistic analysis of society, to a final and complete obsession with the implications of its central idea.

Thus, at first he conceived of the story primarily as a fantastic and romantic utopia:

In undertaking to write Looking Backward I had, at the outset, no idea of attempting a serious contribution to the movement of social reform. The idea was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity. There was no thought of constructing a house which practical men might live in, but merely of hanging in mid air, far out of reach of the sordid and material world of the present, a cloud palace for ideal humanity.

The completed book, however, was so obviously pertinent to the social and economic ills of the time that he could not fail to perceive its application. His interest in contemporary affairs had shaped the work more than he intended. He wrote to his publisher, Ticknor, that “now is the time for publications touching on social and industrial questions to obtain a hearing”; and he later consented that the book be puffed only that his criticisms might reach a larger audience. In his eyes the fairy tale of social felicity had now become a sociological treatise.

The extent to which he finally became wholly absorbed in the central idea of the book and in its logical implications can be seen from the curiously dessicated remark that he made about it some time after its appearance:

… the only question which Looking Backward has raised which it is worth the time of serious men to discuss, is whether or not there has come to be, between the intellect and the conscience of men and the actual conditions of science and industry, such a degree of incongruity and opposition as to threaten the permanence of the existing order, and whether there is enough ground for faith in God and man to justify a hope that the present order may be replaced by one distinctly nobler and more humane.

Yet, if this “degree of incongruity and opposition” to egalitarianism were all that serious readers really had found in the book, it is difficult to believe that it could have won such acclaim. In fact, had the book itself been written in this later turgid style, it is difficult to believe that anyone, however serious or frivolous, could have read it at all. Looking Backward was popular and influential and enduring, not merely because it contained innumerable logical implications, nor merely because it analysed acutely the economic ills of the day, nor even because it was an entertaining piece of romantic fiction, but precisely because it united, so curiously and so nicely, all three elements.

Never again was Bellamy able to strike the same happy balance. The propitious moment, which had been almost unconsciously seized and used, had passed forever. His earlier novels and tales, built upon strange and wonderful themes, no longer meet the popular taste. They are too bizarre, too romantic, too obviously limited by the passing fashions and literary currents of the day. His later works, on the other hand, the essays, articles, and lectures, and even Equality, the rather weighty sequel to Looking Backward, are too serious and solemn ever again to appeal to a large audience. This later ascendancy of sober dialectic over fiction can easily be seen in Equality. As Howells properly remarked at the time:

I thought it a mistake to have any story at all in it, or not to have vastly more. I felt that it was not enough to clothe the dry bones of its sociology with paper garments out of Looking Backward.

And the reading public has agreed with Howells. Yet the wonder is not that Bellamy failed to repeat his initial success, but that, with the modest gifts at his command, he succeeded so happily in the first place.

A great book is beyond minute analysis, and it is impossible fully to explain how Bellamy succeeded in fusing into one unified whole the three somewhat disparate elements that went into it. Yet each of these separate elements is susceptible of discussion, and it is possible to examine with some care the romantic form of the story, its realistic criticism of contemporary society, and the central idea of equality which it embodies.

II LOOKING BACKWARD AS A ROMANTIC UTOPIA

In externals, Looking Backward is a fanciful and fantastic tale of incredible events, that draws on romantic literature and on the romantic implications of contemporary science to overwhelm the reader with the wonders of a brave new world. Literature, in the 1880's, was dominated by the extravagances of dying romanticism. At its best, it continued the bizarre and philosophic tradition of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. At its worst it descended to grandiose nonsense and gaudily cloaked insipidity. It was the period of the purple pageantry of Ben Hur and the papier-machéities of F. Marion Crawford. To the south, writers were indulging in the crinolined curiosities of Old Creole Days and In Ole Virginia. In the west it was Ramona; on the east coast Little Lord Fauntleroy bore all before him. From foreign shores came the exotic extravagances of Dumas, the mysterious horrors of Eugene Sue, and the delicately-styled derring-do of Stevenson. Howells and James, to be sure, were injecting a few decorous dribbles of realism into literature; and, on the western horizon, shone the rising stars of Twain, Harte, and Garland. But the books most widely read and imitated were far removed from the bread-and-butter realities of everyday life.

Writers of the time found in contemporary science and pseudo-science many items to swell the romantic tradition. Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Fiske, however serious in intent, were making evolution and material progress a romantic and colorful philosophy. The path into a roseate utopian future was ineluctable. Technology, with its blazing electric lights and its automatically revolving phonographs, promised an ever-expanding world of wonders. Mechanical inventions flooded the patent office. Submarines invaded the seas, balloons the skies, and the minds of men leaped to ever greater heights. The pseudo-sciences were no less glamorous. Mesmerism promised an entrance not only into the dark recesses of the subconscious, but into the mysterious world of those who had already wrapped the drapery of their couches about them. Magic, in the hands of such world-famous wizards as Robert-Houdin, brought mortals face-to-face with the forces of the spirit-world. All in all, it was an expanding universe, and the elements of that expansion served to keep blood coursing through the veins of aging romantics.

Bellamy was thoroughly familiar with the romantic tradition and with the romantic implications of modern science and technology. He had worked the vein for ten years. His four early novels and his various tales had delved into the past, into the future, into the remoteness of the South Seas, into those romantic speculations about the possibilities of science which were shortly to prove so profitable to Mr. Wells, and even into the supersensible realm of the spirit-world. When he came to the writing of Looking Backward, his romantic proclivities had already been highly developed and fairly thoroughly exploited. It was inevitable, then, that there appear in his masterpiece many of the romantic details common to his period.

These romantic elements can easily be seen from a bare summary of the story. In a sealed chamber, underground, a rich and handsome young American falls into an hypnotic trance from which he is awakened, more than a century later, in a new and wonderful era. There he becomes enamoured of the attractive grand-daughter of his first love, and with her help gradually familiarizes himself with all the improvements of this brave new world. His memory, stored with impressions of the past, furnishes abundant material for striking contrasts between the old and new societies. Much of the book is devoted to lively dialogues between the incredulous hero and a kindly old physician who, from the reader's point of view, is yet unborn. Through experiences and through these conversations are revealed all the mechanical, social, intellectual, and spiritual marvels of this land of plenty, peace, and pleasure. The technological improvements anticipate many of the most brilliant achievements of our day, and prophecy others yet to come. Social relations are superior to any that the world has yet realized. The release of new intellectual and spiritual forces has tremendous implications in the fields of education, literature, and religion. And in the end … but to reveal the conclusion, even sixty years after the book's appearance, would rob the reader of a pleasant and exciting dénouement.

The romantic details are obvious enough. The projection of an individual into the future, the weaving of the incidents around a central love story, the construction of an ideal society, hung in mid air, where men finally find those “summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth, and oarless sea,” the striking contrasts between this ideal world and the real world of Bellamy's own time, and above all, the creation of an atmosphere wherein these impossible events seem real and vivid and credible,—these are all at variance with common experience and with the practise of those writers who deal in common experience. Bellamy had, as Shurter notes, a magic gift “to make the unreal seem real.” This gift, however, was not a purely original one. Many of the romantic details can be found in Bellamy's immediate predecessors, particularly among the utopians.

Though Bellamy was no doubt acquainted with the ideal societies of Plato, More, Campanella, and Bacon, he seems to owe little to them. He may have been influenced by the economic egalitarianism of More and by the interest in science, technology, and material progress of Bacon, but there are more obvious sources much closer to his own day.

Two British and two American utopias immediately preceded Looking Backward, and Bellamy seems to be indebted to each of them.

Bulwer-Lytton, in his strange romance, The Coming Race, had described a subterranean species of mankind. Their society, through a mastery of vril, a force akin to, but far more magically effective than, electricity, had achieved a level of material well-being which made economic inequality meaningless as a motive to labor. Equality, indeed, had been pursued to such an extreme that not only was one man or woman as good as another, but in the words of Thackeray's Irishman, “a good deal better, too.” For the traditional inequality of the sexes had been more than redressed. It had passed beyond mere equality to the dominance of the male by the female. In this complete reversal of the customary relation of the sexes, the women of this underground utopia were accustomed to propose to the men. This detail, as well as many of the technological devices of Subterranea, can be found in Bellamy's novel.

A second British utopia of the period was Samuel Butler's Erewhon, the most widely read of all his books and still one of the most popular satires of modern times. The central purpose of the work is to criticize middle-class British society by turning all its values, institutions, and ideas upside down. In this unusual position they can be seen in all their naked absurdity. Bellamy was perhaps influenced by this critical purpose, as he certainly was indebted to Butler for two particular details. In the land of Erewhon, criminals were treated not as voluntary violators of tribal law, but as involuntary victims of hereditary illness. Hence they receive commiseration and medical care, rather than punishment. Butler, an inveterate Italianate, probably derived this idea of crime as atavism from the great Italian criminologist, Caesare Lombroso. Since Lombroso's works had not yet appeared in English, Bellamy must have been indebted to him indirectly through Butler. Again, Butler's bitterly humorous dramatization of the conflict between men and machines anticipates Bellamy's awareness that the crucial problem in an industrial society is whether machines shall become the masters or the servants of humanity.

An American utopia of the period, John Macnie's little-known novel, Diothas, furnished Bellamy with many of the romantic details for his work. The central incident, that of a young man transplanted into a future culture by means of mesmerism, appears in Diothas. Moreover, the hero's strange love affair with two consanguineous females by the name of Edith is identical in both books. Other similarities between the two books suggest that this was one of Bellamy's chief sources. A second American fantasy, Alfred D. Cridge's Utopia: the History of an Extinct Planet, anticipated Bellamy in its discussion of the class struggle, the possibility of technological progress, the nature of state capitalism, and the desirability of economic, as well as social and political, equality.

The sources of the romantic strain in Looking Backward thus lay in contemporary fashions of literature and in the particular utopias of his time. These external features were borrowed more frequently than they were invented, yet the purpose for which they were used more than justified the method by which they were gained. For Looking Backward is more than a mere romance. Whereas Bulwer-Lytton's novel and the romances of Macnie and Cridge have totally disappeared, Bellamy's story of an ideal world still lives on in the imagination of humanity. The solidity with which the romantic details are woven together, the vividness of the narrative, and the strong illusion of reality clothe his picture of the good society with an irresistible charm. As Ross, in a recent essay On Rereading Bellamy, remarks: “Of all the Utopias from Plato's Republic to Butler's Erewhon, Bellamy has created the most interesting, plausible, and appealing.” And this was due, in no small part, to the strong sense of reality which Bellamy infused into his romance.

III LOOKING BACKWARD AS A REALISTIC CRITICISM OF SOCIETY

Had Looking Backward been nothing more than another romantic utopia, it is unlikely that it would have achieved such world-wide fame. That it did was due, in part, to its acute analysis of the contemporary scene. By creating an ideal society, in which all political, social, and economic problems had been successfully solved, Bellamy had a pou sto from which to criticize, directly and indirectly, the ills of his time. The nature of this criticism was largely determined by the nature of the society in which he lived, but its force and pertinency has not yet been lost, nor is it likely to be, so long as political, social, and economic problems endure. The essential similarity of human problems in all ages is one of the strongest guarantees for the continued popularity of the work. Like the criticisms of such divergent authors as Tacitus, Bunyan, Voltaire, and Twain, it will always have a sure relevancy to society.

America, during Bellamy's life, was torn by periodic panics, depressions, and wholesale bankruptcies. It was the period of violent reconstruction in the South, of agrarian discontent in the West, and of continual and violent industrial strife in the North, where the strongly entrenched powers of the monopolies met, for the first time, the rising powers of the unions. The financial panic of '73 issued into six bitter years of depression. Production was halted again by the briefer panic of '83. A decade later the nationwide collapse of '93, with all its attendant ills, seemed to herald a complete breakdown of the industrial system. And under these surface waves of alternate depression and recovery, three movements went on continually. They were the increasing differentiation between rich and poor, the imminent danger to democratic institutions through this concentration of power in the hands of a few industrial overlords, and the consequent development of new theories in the field of political economy.

America was rapidly changing from an agricultural to an urban society. This change, greatly hastened by the Civil War, opened up enormous opportunities for the alert entrepreneur. Many made fortunes during the war itself, by patriotically supplying their government with goods and money for a satisfactory return. Others demonstrated their individual initiative by sitting firmly on their land till its value, enhanced by population movements, automatically increased a thousand-fold. Some, like Gould and Fiske and Rockefeller, eked out a living by combining small enterprises into huge managerial empires. Still others, like Morgan, built fortunes by creating magic kingdoms of paper and gilt. It was the age of the Robber Barons, the rising aristocracy of America. In the three decades after 1861, the number of millionaires rose from three to three thousand eight hundred.

While initiative was being properly rewarded, the fortunes of the poor sank with startling swiftness. Without land, tools, or property, they herded into the urban industrial centers, searching for work. As Beard puts it:

Housed in the back streets and alleys behind the symbols of riches and power lived the urban masses who washed the linen, dug the trenches, served the wheels, and watched the forges for Midas and Dives. … With scarcely any direction other than that given by avid real estate speculators and greedy landlords, the tenements of the poor stretched and sprawled forward and outward in haphazard fashion, devoid of beauty, comfort, or health—made worse by the incoming hordes of Europe who pressed of necessity into the cheapest districts already cursed by squalor, dirt, and disease.

Divorced from the life-giving soil, the masses became increasingly dependent upon the magic pieces of paper that Morgan manipulated. With a piece of this paper in his pocket, a man could eat; without it, he could starve. Life was dominated more and more by the “cash nexus.” Once that umbilical cord, that bound man to society, was severed, he was through. The result was a huge urban proletariat, politically and socially “free,” but economically enslaved.

This differentiation of rich and poor went on at an increasing rate, as though by the iron laws of nature. If wealth was power, poverty was impotence. The possession of wealth put one into a strategic economic position to increase that wealth and into a correspondingly powerful political position to protect invested capital. Thus the circle grew more vicious. Through political privilege, any risk to capital was duly removed. The Fourteenth Amendment, intended as a defense of human rights, was perverted into a defense of property. Meanwhile, the poor, by the very nature of their position, were unable to protect themselves, either economically or politically. Before the Civil War any citizen might obtain land and hence become a property owner. After the Civil War the relative lack of free land and the concomitant concentration of population in the great cities made America a nation of property-less proletarians. Less than ten percent of the people in New York owned even the homes in which they lived, nor in the other great cities did the percentage of homeowners rise above fifteen or twenty percent.

Since government was unable, or under the pressure of capital unwilling, to secure their rights to the masses, these turned more and more to extra-legal means of protection. The 70's and 80's saw not only the rise of great corporations, but the rise of labor unions as a means of combating these new embodiments of divine right. In the mines, in the factories, in the mills, and along the rapidly lengthening lines of the railroads, these two hostile forces faced one another. Periodically, pitched battles broke out, the unions using whatever weapons lay at hand, the corporations employing private police and government troops to break the power of the masses.

Thus, the differentiation of rich and poor dangerously strained the fabric of democracy. Since power lay with wealth, and since that power was inevitably used to protect and increase wealth, the democratic rights of the masses were cavalierly regarded. Individual liberty and political and social equality were meaningless terms when the economic means to sustain the individual had disappeared. For the poor, rights were unimportant without bread, and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” became idle words when confronted with the realities of unemployment, ejection, black-lists, and debt. Once the cash nexus was severed, political, social, and legal rights, however strongly guaranteed by the law, inevitably disappeared. Economic realities were shattering the very foundations of the American dream.

This threat to democracy brought an inevitable realignment in theories of political economy. The old liberalism of Locke, Montesquieu, and Jefferson no longer seemed to fit the facts of an industrial society. And the economic theory of Adam Smith, which had been an effective device to free productive enterprise from the tyranny of the state, signally failed to fit a society where economics tyrannized so effectively over the state itself. Those who most ardently defended the rights of the individual in theory were the very ones who were doing the most to destroy those individual rights in practice. It depended so much on which individual one meant. And those who spoke most eloquently in public about the sanctity of laissez-faire and the free market were the very ones who were doing their utmost to destroy it in private. The railroads, heavily subsidized by a benevolent government, the Standard Oil Company, ruthlessly exterminating those who sought to enter its market, the House of Morgan, using its holding companies to maintain prices at an artificial level, were the very antithesis of a “free” economy. Consequently, the mythology of a “free market” began to give way to more realistic analyses of the economic situation as it actually operated in practice.

The 80's saw the publication of a number of shrewd diagnoses of the economic structure, and many proposals for the solution of the difficulties to which that structure gave rise. The most influential was the analysis and solution of Henry George. Far more important to the understanding of Looking Backward, however, are the theories of Laurence Gronlund in his study, The Cooperative Commonwealth. Although Bellamy once disclaimed any extensive familiarity with Gronlund's work, there is little doubt that he was indebted to it for much of his criticism of contemporary society and for many of the details of his utopia. Gronlund, whose book appeared in 1884, four years before the publication of Looking Backward, agreed with Henry George in his attack on individualism and the theory of laissez-faire. His analysis, however, based as it was on the work of Marx, was more thoroughgoing, and his solution was correspondingly more drastic. Since the ills of society arise from unrestrained individualism, which owns no duty to the state but rather uses it as a further instrument of exploitation, the only solution is to substitute collective for individual ownership. The state, rather than the individual, should become the manager of all property and all labor in the interest of society as a whole. Distribution of goods should be made in accordance with the concept of equality.

Bellamy's analysis and solution followed the lines laid down by Gronlund. Individualism is merely the application of “the brutal law of the survival of the strongest and most cunning” at the expense of the weak. It is opposed both to the Christian doctrine of brotherhood and to the economic doctrine of unrestricted production through cooperative activity. Where Bellamy surpassed Gronlund was not so much in the cogency of his analysis as in the dramatic quality that he was able to give to his ideas. By embodying both the evils of unrestrained individualism and the excellences of cooperative activity within the compass of a single book, he made concrete both the economic causes of human ills and their cure. Thus, describing the covered sidewalks of his utopia, he opposes the two systems by pointing out that

in the nineteenth century, when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.

Consequently, while Gronlund's treatise has disappeared, Bellamy's book, which borrowed so extensively from it, still survives. It is, perhaps, another instance of the triumph of literature over learning. In observing accurately the nature of the society in which he lived, and in borrowing wisely from the significant theories of his day, Bellamy succeeded in giving enduring expression to them by embodying them in an appealing fiction. As he himself said, with his usual gift for analogy:

If you want to induce a bachelor to enter matrimony, you don't begin by giving him a manual of courtship and wedding etiquette; you just show him the girl and let him fall in love with her, and after that he will find a way or make one.

So, in his picture of an ideal society as a criticism of the society of his own time, Bellamy made real and appealing the economic theories which he had evolved.

IV LOOKING BACKWARD AS A DRAMATIZATION OF THE CONCEPT OF EQUALITY

As a romance, Looking Backward tells the story of the love, under somewhat unusual conditions, of a nineteenth-century man for a twentieth-century woman. As a realistic criticism of society, it contrasts the anarchic conditions of the past with the cooperative world of the future. As a philosophical tale, it dramatizes the conflict between two of the most fundamental and compelling of all ideas,—the concept of inequality and the concept of equality. The villain and the hero of this action are of considerable antiquity. Inequality, doubtless, is rooted in the very nature of our being. The “state of nature,” whether considered as the pre-civilized condition of the human animal or as the raw psychological given of individuals, uninfluenced by environment, is the reign of inequality. This carries over into the earliest societies and into our own social attitudes. Ancient society was often an attempt to codify this “natural” inequality. Modern democratic society is, in a sense, an attempt to mitigate it. Since inequality seems to spring from the very nature of things, what Arnold called “the religion of inequality” has always been a popular and plausible excuse for attacking democracy. It is a religion rooted in nature, fixed in the psyche, and embodied in all existing societies.

The hero of the drama, the concept of equality, is of less exalted lineage. His ancestry has been traced, with some exactness, through ancient to modern times. The Greeks seem to have been the first to embody the concept in actual social relations, although an old Chinese proverb declares, somewhat mournfully to be sure, that “he who sits in the chair is a man; he who carries the chair is a man also.” Solon noticed that “equality prevents wars,” and Plato, though he ruled equality out of his hierarchical state, remarked that

all men are by nature equal, made, all, of the same earth by the same Creator, and however we deceive ourselves, as dear to God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Athenian democracy embodied some measure of equality in the political practices of equality before the law (isonomia), social equality (isotimia), and the equal rights of speech and assembly (isegoria). The justification of this divergence from “natural” law is offered in the funeral address ascribed to Pericles.

Neither the Romans nor the Christians evinced any overwhelming anxiety to apply the concept of equality to the world of practical affairs, but they did strengthen its existence as a philosophical desideratum. The Romans embodied it in their legal codes and thus preserved for Europe the notion of equal rights before the law; quod ad jus naturale attinet, omnes homines aequales sunt. The early Christians, practising of necessity a crude communism, left to posterity the injunction of II Corinthians: “Your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want; that there may be equality.” Though there was no room for equality in the feudal organization of the Church, the Platonic belief, that all are equal in the eyes of God, hung on and eventually led the Protestants to insist that all men have equal access to God's word and to God's grace.

The modern development of the concept is bound up with the erroneous belief of Locke and Rousseau in a “state of nature” in which equality prevailed; this initial egalitarianism was voluntarily abdicated by mankind only under the conditions of the “social contract.” A breach of contract would, consequently, allow humanity to throw off its rulers and return to its original state, for, as Southey has Wat Tyler say: “ye are all equal; nature made you so. Equality is your birthright.” Though some primitive societies perhaps indulged in communal ownership of land, the concept of equality as rooted in “nature” is so far at variance with modern ideas that it has lost all compulsion. Nevertheless, it was still sufficiently persuasive in the eighteenth-century to furnish the slogans and the philosophy for the American and French revolutions, and to provide, through the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, documentary grounds for a belief in the “real” existence of equality.

The nineteenth century was a battlefield in which the armies of equality and inequality strove for mastery. While many philosophers and scientists were demonstrating, with minute laboriousness, the falsity inherent in Rousseau's treatment of the concept, others, including some very practical politicians, were engaged in securing equal rights for negroes, women, workers, and even, in the anti-vivisection societies, animals. The most extreme views were expressed on the subject. Thus De Tocqueville held that

The equality of conditions is more complete in the Christian countries of the present day, than it has been at any time, or in any part of the world. Its gradual development is a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree; it is universal, it is durable, and it constantly eludes all human interference; and all events, as well as all men, contribute to its progress.

Yet what seemed to De Tocqueville a “divine decree” appeared to his contemporary, Paulding, an instrument of the devil:

Equality is one of the most consummate scoundrels that ever crept from the brain of a political juggler—a fellow who thrusts his hand into the pocket of honest industry or enterprising talent, and squanders their hard-earned profits on profligate idleness or indolent stupidity.

though the religion of inequality is. Bellamy did not anticipate the persecutions of whole races and nations for the glorification of this religion, but the answer that he would give to these modern manifestations of inequality is the same that he gave so clearly and unequivocally to the economic inequality of his day. And if the reader, tempted by the eternal spirit of denial, murmurs that the extension of the concept of equality to economic spheres is impossible, let him recall the jeers and the prophecies that greeted the founders of American democracy when they sought, for the first time in history, to embody the concept of equality in political and social spheres of their new nation. The right Christian Dean of Gloucester, for instance, took a quick look at the unhappy experiment and murmured through his nose:

A disunited people to the end of time, suspicious and distrustful of each other, they will be divided and subdivided into little commonwealths or principalities according to natural boundaries.

For, according to the religion of inequality which Bellamy so thoroughly belabored, it is impossible for people to rule themselves, to unite together, or to provide, for their common interest, the goods to sustain their lives and their liberties.

V THE REPUTATION OF LOOKING BACKWARD

Bellamy's modest gifts as a romantic tale-teller, a keen observer of contemporary society, and a philosopher were distilled, for one brief period in his life, into the masterpiece of Looking Backward. The subsequent history of the book suggests how indissolubly united were these three apparently disparate elements. It has rarely been discussed purely as a romantic tale, or as an economic treatise, or as the statement of an idea, but as a work sui generis, compact of all these aspects. After an initial enthusiastic reception, it enjoyed a steady popularity for some ten years, and then suffered a partial eclipse from which it recovered during the second decade of this century. Its position as an American classic, on the level of Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle or An American Tragedy, would now seem to be secure, since it has survived the vicissitudes of more than half a century.

Although Looking Backward got off to a slow start, selling only about 10,000 copies during the first year, it soon hit its stride. Two years after publication it had gone to 371,000. Before the end of the century a million copies were sold. Besides a tremendous sale in England, in Germany, where it was translated in 1889, and in France where it appeared under the title, Seul de son Siècle, it was soon translated into Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, and Arabic. Within ten years there appeared, in America alone, more than sixty utopias, most of which owed their inception to Bellamy's book, as such titles as Looking Further Backward, Looking Beyond, Looking Within, A.D. 2000, Young West, etc., clearly show. It influenced such major American writers as Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee appeared the following year, and Howells, whose Traveller from Altruria was one of the happier imitations of Looking Backward. In addition to the spate of utopias in America, Bellamy's work was the inciting force for the writing in England of William Morris' News from Nowhere and H. G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, in Germany of Ernst Mueller's Ein Rückblick, in Italy of Paolo Mantegazza's L'Anno 3000, and in France of portions of Anatole France's Sur la Pierre Blanche. In its influence over the minds of subsequent writers it ranks with Plato's Republic and More's Utopia.

Moreover, its influence was not limited to literature. It stirred the minds, not only of writers, but of millions of voters. The first Bellamy club was organized in Boston in September, 1888. Within two years, the number of clubs devoted to study of and agitation for Bellamy's principles numbered more than 160. The Nationalist Party, founded While Stephens and Huxley sought to scotch the deadly snake, Lincoln, Lowell, and even such a gentle apostle as Matthew Arnold, persisted in defending it.

No one better summarized the importance of the concept to the nineteenth century than Lincoln, when he wrote:

Public opinion on any subject always has a ‘central idea’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The ‘central idea’ in our public opinion at the beginning was, and till recently has continued to be, ‘the equality of man’; and, although it has always submitted patiently to whatever inequality seemed to be a matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady and progressive effort towards the practical equality of all men.

Lincoln himself was instrumental in securing a larger measure of equality for Negroes, and behind him pressed on the hordes of union labor, women suffragettes, and democratic philosophers in an effort to hold and, if possible increase, the measure of equality already attained. With the growing division between rich and poor, philosophers began to turn their attention more and more to the problem of economic equality, without which political and social equality, or even the more moderate notion of equality of opportunity, became meaningless and impossible.

According to Matthew Arnold, who could hardly be accused of harboring radical or revolutionary tendencies, the great extremes of wealth and poverty, with all their attendant ills to both classes, could be overcome only by the practical application of the concept of equality:

Our present organization has been an appointed stage in our growth; it has been of good use. … But the use is at an end, and the stage is over. … We seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a sort of standstill. It is that we are trying to live with a social organization of which the day is over. Certainly equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilization. But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilization is impossible.

Thus, even at the time that Rousseau's romantic concept of equality, as rooted in nature, was giving way before the new sciences of anthropology and psychology to a more just notion of the very real inequalities that exist in “nature” and among individuals, the concept itself was being restated, not as a fact, but as an ideal.

In this transformation of the concept, Bellamy played an important role. By envisaging a future society which had achieved economic equality, he lent his aid to the clarification of this new form of an age-old concept. And by dramatizing the implications of that concept, both as it worked out in an ideal society and as it was contrasted with the contemporary social embodiment of inequality, he performed two distinct services. Equality was not, as the framers of the Declaration of Independence had thought, the natural heritage of man. It was rather a goal to be sought and achieved by conscious and deliberate effort. And equality was not, as so many contemporary critics insisted, an impossible ideal. The society which Bellamy portrayed had achieved it. How convinced Bellamy himself was of the possibility of realizing in practice what he had already envisaged in imagination, can be seen from his optimistic statement, that “the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away. Our children will surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women, if we deserve it by our faith and by our works.”

Bellamy somewhat underestimated the time required. The occurrence of two world wars and one world-wide depression delayed men a little in their pursuit of equality. Yet the vision remains, and the concrete picture of how much preferable is equality to inequality. The hero triumphed in Bellamy's book, and he may yet triumph in the book of men, rampant in 1892 to carry out the practical application of Bellamy's ideas, contributed a stream of egalitarian thought to the Populist and Democratic Parties. An interesting comment on the popular attitude toward the book is preserved in the records of the famous Sunset Club of Chicago. Said one speaker:

The suffering people who have read his book hail it with delight as a new evangel, the economic gospel of brotherhood, which shall relieve mankind from the horrible burdens which have so long made life well nigh unendurable to the many, and undesirable even to the privileged few.

The defeat of Bryan in '96 and the coming of the Spanish-American war put an end to political agitation, but the ideas of Bellamy lived on in the vigorous writings of Thorstein Veblen, Lincoln Steffens, John Dewey, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.

However, the tremendous popularity of the book among the masses was not enough to gain it an entree into the halls of literary history. Barrett Wendell, writing in 1902, carefully avoided mentioning the work, and John Macy, though he managed to include Wallace and Stedman, did not find in Bellamy the real spirit of American Literature. In 1915 Leisy could still dismiss him in a phrase, and the paucity of references during the World War suggest that the book was not being widely read. Upton Sinclair, in his amazingly accurate historical novels, could have his hero, Lanny Budd, declare that the book was practically unknown in the early twenties:

He read Looking Backward, and it seemed surprising to him that this book wasn't more talked about. He tried to find any of his friends who had read it, but there wasn't one. He couldn't see how anybody could fail to want to live in a world like that, a world in which human beings helped one another instead of wasting their efforts trying to keep each other from succeeding.

Two causes no doubt contributed to this temporary eclipse. Caroline Ticknor unconsciously reveals one when, writing on the world's failure to achieve Bellamy's dream, she points to “the vision of Russia's tragedy on the horizon.” A second reason was the odd refusal among the intelligentsia to have anything to do with “materialism.” Thus Lewis Mumford attacked the work, in 1922, for its “materialistic” interest in food, clothing and houses for the masses, rather than in “olives and cheese and beans, simply served.”

Two incidents, one literary and one historical, contributed greatly to Bellamy's rehabilitation. The first was Parrington's inclusion of Bellamy in his great study of American literature, in 1927. After this, it was impossible to exclude him any longer from learned works. The second was the sudden recurrence, in 1929, of a situation strikingly similar to the one which Bellamy had so forcefully castigated. Under the impact of the depression, food, clothing, and shelter suddenly seemed important, even to the literati. The Golden Book hurriedly reprinted some select passages for its readers. A gentleman in northern Ohio wrote a treatise applying Bellamy's ideas to the present crisis. Granville Hicks placed Bellamy squarely in the middle of the Great Tradition, and, a little later, Heywood Broun hailed him as one of the great American prophets. The value of Bellamy's criticism and the implication of its central thesis were well put by a recent critic:

Looking Backward is still worth reading. The core of it, the full social use of our resources and productive powers is still sound. … It remains one of the most provocative books of our times. Until we find some adequate answers to the central questions which it poses, it is not for us of a confused and bewildered generation to call the book “dated.”

As America in the post-war period turns once more to the problems of full production and the practical extension of democracy among all its citizenry, Looking Backward promises to retain its high place as a concrete vision of the “good life.”

In the last decade the references to Bellamy have become innumerable. A complete bibliography would run to well over a thousand items. The sources of these references, in biographies, novels, letters, and discussions of current events as well as in histories and learned treatises, suggest that Bellamy's present popularity is not confined to a small clique nor to the erudite alone. It rests, as it did at the book's first appearance, on a broad and democratic base of readers from all walks of life. The reputation of the book, over a period of almost sixty years, has broadened, not from the scholars to the masses, but from the masses to the scholars and critics. Both are now agreed in regarding Looking Backward as one of the indisputable masterpieces of American literature, and as a significant and enduring contribution to the growth of democracy.

Selected Bibliography

Anon., Edward Bellamy Speaks Again, Chicago, 1935

Austin, H., “Edward Bellamy,” National Magazine, IX (Oct., 1898), 69-72

Baxter, S., “Edward Bellamy's New Book of New Democracy,” Review of Reviews, XVI (July, 1897), 62-68

Baxter, S., “Sketch of the Author,” Looking Backward, Riverside Library, Boston, 1931

Baxter, S., “The Author of Looking Backward,” The New England Magazine, I (Sept., 1889), 63-74

Bakeless, John, “Edward Bellamy,” Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, New York, 1936

Bellamy, E., “How I came to Write Looking Backward,” The Nationalist, I (May, 1889), 1-4

Bellamy, E., “Looking Backward Again,” The North American Review, CL (March, 1890), 351-363

Bellamy, E., “Introduction,” The Duke of Stockbridge, New York, 1900

Brooks, Van Wyck, New England: Indian Summer, New York, 1940

Broun, H., “Back to Bellamy,” It Seems to Me, New York, 1935

Catlin, W. (ed.), Echoes of the Sunset Club, Chicago, 1891

Chamberlain, J., Farewell to Reform, New York, 1932

Curti, M., The Growth of American Thought, New York, 1943

Emerick, C. F., The Struggle for Equality in the United States, New York, 1914

Flory, C., Economic Criticism in American Fiction, 1792-1900, Philadelphia, 1935

Forbes, A., “The Literary Quest for Utopia, 1880-1900,” Social Forces, VI (Dec., 1927), 179-189

Franklin, J., “Edward Bellamy and Nationalism,” New England Quarterly, XI (Dec., 1938), 739-772

Herring, J. W., “Forty Years Later,” School and Society LII (Aug. 17, 1940), 97-101

Hertzler, J., The History of Utopian Thought, New York, 1923

Hicks, G., The Great Tradition, New York, 1933

Howells, W., “Edward Bellamy,” The Atlantic Monthly, LXXXII (Aug., 1898), 253-256

Madison, C. A., “Edward Bellamy, Social Dreamer,” New England Quarterly XV (Sept., 1942), 444-66

Morgan, A., Edward Bellamy, New York, 1944

Mumford, L., The Story of Utopias, New York, 1922

Parrington, V., Main Currents in American Thought, New York, 1930

Ross, J. E., “On Rereading Bellamy,” Commonweal XXIII (Feb. 14, 1936), 432-434

Seager, A., They Worked for a Better World, New York, 1939

Shurter, R., “The Literary Work of Edward Bellamy,” American Literature, V (Nov., 1933), 229-234

Shurter, R., The Utopian Novel in America, 1865-1900, Ph.D. Thesis, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1936

Smith, T. V., The American Philosophy of Equality, Chicago, 1927

Tawney, R. H., Equality, New York, 1929

Taylor, W., A History of American Letters, Boston, 1936

Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America, Chapel Hill, 1942

Ticknor, C., “Bellamy and Looking Backward,” Glimpses of Authors, Boston, 1922

Westmeyer, R. E., Modern Economic and Social Systems, New York, 1937