SOURCE: Gardiner, Jane. “Form and Reform in Looking Backward.” American Transcendental Quarterly New Series 2, no. 1 (March 1988): 69-82.

[In the following essay, Gardiner contends that the form and structure of Looking Backward were perhaps more instrumental in generating a movement toward social reform than was the implied comparison between nineteenth-century Boston and Boston in the year 2000.]

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (2000-1887), published in 1888, sold more copies during the nineteenth century than any previous American book with the sole exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a circumstance surely attributable, in some measure, to the casting of Bellamy's reformist tract, like Stowe's before it, in the form of a novel (Shurter xiv-xv). One hundred years after its publication, however, the literary form of Looking Backward has still received far less serious attention than its philosophical content. When Tom H. Towers complains of critics “dismissing the narrative, characters, setting, and language as irrelevant decoration” (52), he states a truth suggested by Bellamy himself. Admitting that his original intention had been to write “a mere literary fantasy” rather than “a contribution to the movement of social reform,” Bellamy states that his intention had changed during the course of planning the work when he “stumbled over the destined corner-stone of the new social order” and

this led to a complete re-casting in form and purpose of the book I was engaged upon. Instead of a mere fairy-tale of social perfection, it became the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial reorganization. The form of romance was retained, although with some impatience, in the hope of inducing the more to give it at least a reading. Barely enough story was left to decently drape the skeleton of the argument and not enough, I fear, in spots, for even that purpose.

(“How I Came to Write [Looking Backward]” 1, 3)

With this disavowal of “mere” literary purpose on the part of the author, it only remained for Howells, in 1898, to pronounce Bellamy's epitaph with the melancholy doubt as to “whether his ethics will keep his aesthetics in remembrance,” and the literary claims of Looking Backward were effectively extinguished (256). One hundred years after the work's publication its literary form has still received far less serious attention than the reformist content.¹

Predictably, Bellamy's disciples in the Nationalist movement placed even greater emphasis on the overt didacticism of the book. Thus, in 1890, H. P. Peebles, president of the Los Angeles Nationalist Club, wrote:

As this is a practical age, the whole merit and attraction of the Bellamy theory rests upon its application to society. Plato and More gave us beautiful dreams. Men read the Republic or the Utopia with a sigh of regret. They read Bellamy with a thrill of hope, and the heart responds as if unseen chords had been played upon.

(574)

Peebles stresses the blueprint for social reform in Looking Backward but, paradoxically, goes on to imply the success of Bellamy's work in terms more relevant to the utopian novel—the novel that is, in Northrop Frye's elegant phrase, simply “an informing power in the mind,” not a reform-manifesto (332). Moreover, in the act of asserting the practicality of “the Bellamy theory” Peebles' own prose takes flight into the realms of the metaphysical. Rather than dismiss this paradox as the result of Peebles' intellectual confusion and fondness for inappropriately flowery prose, one might suggest that what the disciple sensed in the gospel of his prophet was that happy congruence of form and content—of utopian novel and social blueprint—that made Looking Backward the Bible of a reform movement that, in its time and place, surpassed Marxism in importance (Morgan 243). Beginning with Peebles' enthusiastic endorsement of Looking Backward, one might suspect that a measure of the popularly perceived “applicability” of Bellamy's “theories” may be a consequence of its literary form, that an examination of the form of Looking Backward might add significantly to existing explanations, not only of its phenomenal popularity with the reading public, but also of its ability to generate an international movement for the creation of utopia.

The reader's first perception of the structure of Looking Backward is likely to be that it conforms to the pattern of the standard utopian novel: it is a “traveller's tale” in which a voyager from “our world” stumbles into a utopian world, the workings of which are gradually disclosed to him in dialogue with a new-found utopian mentor. In Looking Backward, however, major departures from that familiar mode can be found within these otherwise typical structures—departures which conform to Bellamy's determination to write a work of reform-propaganda rather than of “mere literary fantasy.”

The most obvious deviation from usual narrative devices is that Bellamy's late nineteenth-century traveller is bound by the certainties of nineteenth-century geography. With no “new worlds” to discover and no immediate possibility of leaving this one, Julian West is reduced to travelling in time instead of latitude. Bellamy, unlike his contemporary, Howells, whose “Altrurian Romances” are much more in the familiar philosophical tradition, rejects the option of a frankly fantasy “no-where-land” as well as the many possibilities for continuing the kind of utopian travels that might have been suggested by the subterranean and submarine fantasy-travelogues of Jules Verne. Bellamy's protagonist “travels” no farther than his own city of Boston, and, in rejecting the more common utopian alternatives, Bellamy signals his different intention to write a blueprint for a real utopia, saying, in effect, that “this” was as much world as there ever would be, and that any utopian society dreamed of by his readers had to be created from this world.

Significantly, Bellamy had originally chosen the year 3000 for the setting of his “mere literary fantasy” but

with my new belief as to the part which the National organization of industry is to play in bringing in the good time coming, it appeared to me reasonable to suppose that by the year 2000 the order of things which we look forward to will already have become an exceedingly old story.

(“How I Came to Write” 4)

The shift in date is a result of Bellamy's shift in purpose. Not only must utopia be created in the real world, the world of Bellamy's readers, it can be created virtually in the lifetimes of his readers. Instead of dreaming of a bright but nebulous future, the readers are invited to create, and then become participants in, the utopia described in the novel. The propaganda effect of this choice of date was utilized by Bellamy in exhorting the faithful in a speech given at “Tremont Temple, Boston, on the Nationalist Club Anniversary, December 19, 1889”: “men now past middle age are likely to see … in America the first complete and full-orbed republic arise, a republic at once political, industrial, and social” (“Nationalism” 180). And when H. P. Peebles wrote in 1890

Bellamy is the Moses of today. He has shown us that a promised land exists; … and now that the Moses has appeared, let us labor and wait for the coming Joshua, to lead us to the promised land

(576-577)

the confidence with which he proclaims the present-tense existence of utopia and its accessibility to present readers indicates the persuasiveness of Bellamy's choice of “the year 2000.”

A similar sense of urgency and practicability is a result of the device which Bellamy used to enable his protagonist to travel in time. Ten years later H. G. Wells would suggest the possibility of a “time machine” and to twentieth-century readers familiar with Einstein, Wells' method might seem the more credible of the two. But it is almost certain that this was not the case then. To propound the theory of Wells' time-traveller, that time is a dimension like height, width and depth—but, unfortunately, imperceptible to the eye (or any other of the senses) and of no known relationship with the other three dimensions—would have taxed the nineteenth-century New Englander's credulity to a far greater degree than the suggestions that mesmerism could keep a man alive and un-aged through more than a century. Mesmerism, after all, was a subject of enormous interest throughout the nineteenth century in America. A British visitor, J. F. Muirhead, wrote in 1898 that “Boston, of all places in the world, is, perhaps, the happiest hunting ground for the spiritualist medium, the faith healer, and the mind curer”—surpassed only by California (where else?) where “astrologers and soothsayers … [are] as much recognized [as members of professions] as in the Greece of Homer” (17-18). People were regularly mesmerized on stage and in salons up and down the country, as Henry James testifies in The Bostonians, and it was not new either to utopian fiction or reform movements; Hawthorne had coupled mesmerism with the reform movement in his Blithedale Romance (1852). Poe had actually suggested, in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), a possibility similar to the one advanced by Bellamy. No, it was travel in the fourth dimension that would have been the incredible suggestion; a one-hundred-year trance would have seemed an eminently credible method of sending a nineteenth-century Bostonian into the future. By means of mesmerism Bellamy establishes his novel, for his contemporaries, as only slightly romanticized reality rather than “literary fantasy.”

An additional advantage of having his protagonist mesmerized into the future—and thus, perforce, awakened in exactly the same place where he had fallen asleep a century earlier—is that the device enables Bellamy to sharpen the contrast between “now” and “then” for his readers, who are, after all, contemporaries of Julian West. When West, newly awakened into the twentieth century, and believing himself to be still in the nineteenth century—but the victim of an elaborate and persistent hoaxer—is taken to the top of the house by Dr. Leete, he sees:

a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings … stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city, nor one comparable to it before. Raising my eyes at last towards the horizon, I looked westward. That blue ribbon winding away to the sunset, was it not the sinuous Charles? I looked east; Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not one of its green islets missing.

(115)

The nineteenth-century reader is thus presented with a delightful image of paradise; given proof that it is, indeed, his own Boston; and assured, by West's concluding words, that it is attainable: “I knew then that I had been told the truth concerning the prodigious thing which had befallen me” (115). Boston could indeed become utopia.

The continuity created by the ease with which the protagonist shifts from a distinctly un-utopian present Boston to a utopian future Boston is a departure from the more dislocated manner in which traditional utopian travellers arrive at their strange destinations. The difference is important, for Bellamy had an abhorrence of anything suggesting revolution. In Dr. Leete's first account to West of the origins of the utopian society, he insists that it is “the result of a process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise” (122), and the peacefulness and inevitability of the change are reiterated throughout the novel. Bellamy, in his anniversary speech to the Boston Nationalist Club, re-emphasized the same point:

we are the true conservative party, because we are devoted to the maintenance of republican institutions against the revolution now being effected by the money power. We propose no revolution but that the people shall resist a revolution. … We are not revolutionists, but counter-revolutionists.

(“Nationalism” 176)

The same emphasis on avoiding a sense of dislocation accounts for the device of the lost-and-found fiancee. Not only is Edith Leete, daughter of West's twentieth-century mentor, the great-granddaughter of West's nineteenth-century fiancee (and named after her), but she has clearly spent her life “living in the past.” Among her heirlooms are the love-letters of Julian West to the nineteenth-century Edith, and at their engagement Edith Leete says “I felt I was consecrated to you! As soon as you came back to life, I was as sure as if she had told me that I was to be to you what she could not be.” For his part, Julian West sees his second fiancee as “my love, whom I had dreamed lost, [and who] had been reembodied for my consolation” (292). That this stretching of coincidence should be the point at which many readers finally lose patience with Bellamy's fiction seems to me a little strange; one's credulity has been imposed upon to such an extent by this time as to render the swallowing of one more fantastic device a mere bagatelle. In fact, Bellamy is being perfectly consistent with his propaganda intentions. A different fiancee (and Bellamy did want some “romance to decently drape the skeleton of the argument”) would have moved the traveller into a “new world” and ruptured his argument for the continuity of reform.

Unlike Bellamy's handling of the “love interest” in Looking Backward, his reversal of the standard “dream” device has always impressed readers of the novel. Instead of awakening at the end of the book to discover that his sojourn in paradise was all a dream, Julian West is really in utopia but, near the end of the novel, dreams that he is back in the “bad old days” of nineteenth-century Boston. In fact, though, the overall structure of Looking Backward is far more complex than this; it is really a structure of dreams-within-dreams, and as symmetrical as a hinged mirror, a mirror through which the protagonist—with the accompanying reader—continually passes and re-passes “through the looking glass” to and from utopia. Readers easily miss the point that the novel begins as well as ends with the protagonist in the year 2000. The “Preface” is unsigned, but the dateline “Historical Section, Shawmut College, Boston. December 26, 2000” taken in combination with Dr. Leete's suggestion that Julian West take up “an historical lectureship in one of our colleges” (210) and a careful reading of the “Preface” itself makes clear that this is Julian West speaking in the year 2000. The novel ends, of course, with West's “reunion” with Edith Leete in the garden of her twentieth-century home. The scenes which immediately follow the “Preface” and immediately precede the conclusion of the novel take place in the nineteenth century; the former as a remembrance of the reality of Julian West's early life and the latter as West's nightmare return to that “reality.” Between these two scenes, working in towards the center of the book, are the dialogues with Dr. Leete about utopia. But even these are not the center of the novel's structure, for, in chapter 20, West “returns” to the nineteenth century when he revisits the underground room: the room “fitted up as a bedroom in the style of the nineteenth century” (113); the room in which the most important article of furniture is the fire-and-theft-proof safe containing a nineteenth-century fortune in securities, which are worth no more than paper in the year 2000.

What the structure of the novel achieves is itself a dialogue, reinforcing the dialogue (traditional in the argument of utopian novels) between traveller and mentor that is carried on in Looking Backward between Julian West and Dr. Leete. The dialogue suggested by the structure is a dialogue between the future and the present, between reform and annihilation, between heaven and hell—and between life and death. One could go on multiplying oppositions such as these; all are represented and reflected one upon the other in the alternate “mirrors” of the different sections of the novel. These mirrors not only confront the reader with the choice to be made, but also insist upon the urgency of the choice; delay and the reflection shifts, the moment moves on. And Bellamy was himself in no doubt as to the urgency of the matter. In 1889 he said that

the republic is being taken from us, but it is still possible to bring it back. Soon it will be too late to do so, but today there is yet time, although there is none to waste.

(“Nationalism” 175-176)

Within this basic structural dialogue, however, are still more mirrors. The “Preface,” for example, sets the crusading tone of the novel in millenial terms by referring to “the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny” (94), while the last pages of the novel have West musing, again in millenial terms, on “the greatness of the world's salvation” (310). By a reversal of chronology—the “Preface” is dated December, 2000, and the end of the novel is set three months earlier, September, 2000—Bellamy contrives to begin the novel with a statement of faith in the “ineffable destiny” of mankind and end it with an assertion of the achievement of that destiny. Thus, the mirror that reflects, at the conclusion of the novel, the optimism of the coming of the millenium expressed in the “Preface,” also justifies that optimism in the reflecting of it.

Moving in from the “Preface” to chapters 1 and 2 (and from the year 2000 to the year 1887), we find a description of nineteenth-century society with its problems and inequities rendered by the famous metaphor of the stagecoach (97-99), and by the exasperated conversation at the Bartletts' dinner-party (103-104). This portrayal of a society under strain is repeated in greater detail in the first part of the last chapter when West dreams of his return to nineteenth-century Boston. In place of the rather satiric metaphor of the stagecoach is an emotional catalogue of the horrors of nineteenth-century society, “seen” by the “returned” utopian traveller on his dream-walk through his old city. At the end of this walk, West finds himself back at the Bartletts' dinner-table, desperately trying to explain the faults of their society to the company seated there. On both occasions (the early, real party and the later, dream-visit) West leaves the company early; the first time upon Edith Bartlett's insistence that he attempt to sleep (104), and the second when he is thrown out by the enraged company (309). On both occasions he emerges mentally dislocated into the relative paradise of the twentieth century.

Again, the mirror both reflects and subtly distorts the image, for the return vision of nineteenth-century Boston at the end of the novel is far more frightening than the more “distant” chronicle of West's old environment in chapters 1 and 2. The reason for this shift in mood is, I think, fairly clear and is reflected in the relative peace of West's leaving the Bartletts and leaving Boston in chapter 2 contrasted with the violence and panic of his rejection from it in chapter 28. Had Bellamy presented the nineteenth century at the start of his novel in such terms of outrage as his protagonist presents them to his fellow Bostonians at the end, Bellamy's readers probably would have done to the novel what the Bartletts' dinner guests did to Julian West—and Nationalism would have won no converts. Thus, while the same social problems are stated at the beginning as at the end, they are, at the beginning, stated metaphorically and obliquely—and with a distant, even playful tone on the part of the narrator (“My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. ‘Handsome she may have been,’ I hear them saying, ‘but graceful never, in the costumes which were the fashion at that period’” [99]). Thus eased into the novel, the reader can be safely left to several chapters of relaxed utopian dialogue before being required to confront the catastrophe of his own world (“this festering mass of human wretchedness about me” [305])—and confront the necessity of making a choice, and of taking effective and immediate action in support of the choice made.

West's nightmare walk through nineteenth-century Boston in chapter 28 is also mirrored in a similar episode in chapter 8, shortly after his awakening in the twentieth century. This further complication is also explained by the need for the novel to reform its readers in order to move them to reform society. Readers of Looking Backward were to be seduced very gently away from the nineteenth century in the course of the novel, and jolted into becoming crusading utopian reformers at the end. In chapter 8, Julian West awakens to his second day in the twentieth century and has forgotten all about his being there; he thinks he is in his “bed chamber at home” and experiences “half-dreaming, half-waking fancies” of Edith Bartlett and his life in the nineteenth century. When the waking dream collapses he “stare[s] wildly round the strange apartment” (140). “On the verge of losing [his] mental balance” (141), he sets off to walk around Boston—the Boston of the year 2000. All is changed; he is lost and disoriented. Finally, he returns by chance to Dr. Leete's house (“my feet must have instinctively brought me back” [142]) and collapses in panic:

The anguish of those moments, during which my brain seemed melting, or the abjectness of my sense of helplessness, how can I describe? In my despair I groaned aloud.

(143)

In chapter 28 West “awakens” in the nineteenth century and “stare[s] blankly” at his servant. He then concludes that he

had but dreamed of that enlightened and carefree race of men … the glorious new Boston. … Dr. Leete and his wife, and their daughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, my betrothed,—these, too, had been but figments of a vision.

(295)

Again, he rises and walks around Boston—nineteenth-century Boston this time—with all its horrors contrasted to the beauties of the twentieth-century one. Again, “obeying some unconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to [Edith Bartlett's] door” (306). Inside the home of his fiancee again, “it seemed to me that my heart would burst with anguish” and “I panted, I sobbed, I groaned” (309).

The essential difference between these two quite startlingly similar episodes then manifests itself. The “anguish” felt by West on his arrival in the twentieth century is purely personal (he characterizes it as an “eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void” [141]), and his mental disintegration is arrested when Edith Leete appears and assures him that

the only feeling you will have after a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in that age was so strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this.

(145)

The anguish he felt on his “return” to the nineteenth century, however, was not due to his own dislocation, but to the horrors he saw there and to his inability to convince his companions of the need for reform. In other words, the twentieth-century episode of “anguish” was not, in fact, a criticism of the twentieth century, whereas the nineteenth-century episode which mirrors it is Bellamy's final, and strongest, indictment of the nineteenth century. It is also incomplete, for, when Edith Leete again rescues West from his nightmare, as she did from his twentieth-century one, the cause remains uncured. The novel ends with the salvation of Julian West at the hands of Edith in her garden in the year 2000; but the subtle shift in the image again tells the readers that, for them, West's nineteenth-century contemporaries, the salvation offered still depends upon their choice: heaven or hell; life or death.

In the dialogue between utopia and destruction that the structure of the novel represents, perhaps the most salient feature is the sunken room. This room appears at the beginning of the novel, at the end (in the dream), and occupies a strategic position between the first and second sections of utopian discussion. West had constructed this sound-proof chamber in the nineteenth century as the only place in which he could escape the noise and torment of the city of Boston and the nightmarish society in which he lived. Only in this room could he sleep—and then only after being put into a hypnotic trance. West refers to the chamber as having “the silence of the tomb” (105), and in entering it for his last sleep of the nineteenth century he was, indeed, burying his life in that century. Suggestions of death and burial abound. We are told that the mesmerizing process carried “a risk … that it might become too profound and pass beyond the mesmerizer's power to break, ending in death” (106). When Dr. Leete and his workmen discovered West in the room, in the year 2000, “that he was dead and must have been dead a century was of course … taken for granted,” an assumption supported by “a layer of ashes and charcoal on top of the vault” (113). Clearly the Julian West of the nineteenth century is dead, as is the civilization he was born into—dead, burned to ashes and buried.

The same vault, however, in another of Bellamy's distorted reflections, may also be seen as a womb into which West retreats when he can no longer tolerate the pressures of nineteenth-century life. The room, while being “hermetically sealed,” has an umbilical cord; a “small pipe … insured the renewal of air” (105) enabling him to live while he remains in his deep trance. From this womb, in the year 2000, West is reborn, rather than awakened—the excavators think him dead, not merely mesmerized. The implications of this duality in the image of the underground room are two-fold. On the one hand the “room as tomb” represents the “living death” that was nineteenth-century “civilization,” as well as the death of that civilization and its replacement, upon the ashes of the old, by the new, twentieth-century, utopian civilization. On the other hand, the use of the vault as womb provides hope—nineteenth-century man can move from death to life, and from an infernal society to a heavenly one. The attainability, the essential closeness of this paradise to Bellamy's nineteenth-century readers is reinforced by a curious occurrence when Dr. Leete finishes his explanation of the manner of West's “death” and “rebirth.” West immediately stands up, approaches a mirror on the wall, and examines his reflection in it.

The face I saw was the face to a line and not a day older than the one I had looked at as I tied my cravat before going to Edith [Bartlett] that Decoration Day.

(114)

Thus, the nineteenth century-in-mourning becomes, through the sunken room and through the mirror, the twentieth century brought to life.²

Another function of the sunken room is that of a transitional device. In structural terms this means that the vault acts as hinges on the mirror, simultaneously dividing and connecting the different sections of the novel. Thus, the vault connects the nineteenth century in chapters 1 and 2 with the twentieth century in chapter 3; it connects the twentieth century in chapter 27 with the nineteenth century in chapter 28; and it appears also in the middle of the novel—for its appearance in chapter 20 really marks the formal center of the novel—creating a break between the long first section of utopian dialogue and the second, shorter part. By this point in the book the reader has been subjected to so much utopian lecturing that a change of pace is welcome. More importantly, however, the vault has the task of holding the images of the nineteenth century up to the images of the twentieth century, thus reflecting the form of Leete's comparisons of old and new in his conversations with Julian.

Paralleling this function, the vault is also a “time capsule.” Julian West, on his return visit to the vault in the middle of the novel says: “The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote” (233). It is the vault that moves the protagonist from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century at the beginning of the novel; that moves him back to the nineteenth century at the end; and that allows a brief return visit to the nineteenth century in the middle. There is little question that West's visit to the vault is a descent into, and return from, the nineteenth century, for he asks Edith Leete to accompany him in order “to keep the ghosts off” (232). On entering the room, he finds that “everything was just as I had beheld it on that last evening one hundred and thirteen years previous” (232); it is a room fixed in the nineteenth century. While they are down in the vault, West inexplicably shows Edith Leete a picture of his nineteenth-century fiancee, Edith Bartlett. (Having it around his neck, he could, presumably, have confronted the twentieth-century Edith with the image of her nineteenth-century namesake elsewhere—but he didn't.) Finally, West looks at “the great iron safe,” with its nineteenth-century fortune in gold and securities, saying, “here I wake up to find myself among a people of whom a cartload of gold will not buy a loaf of bread.” With Edith's response—“why in the world should it” (235)—ending the chapter, as her initiation of the visit began it, we are, once more, back in the twentieth century. We, as well as the protagonist, have visited the nineteenth century, looked at it in light of the twentieth century, found it wanting, and returned, out of the vault, into the garden of paradise once more.

The last time the vault appears in the novel it acts as a time capsule for West's dream-return to the nineteenth century, the reversal of its original function. On the night preceding the dream, West has returned to the underground room, depressed with his anachronistic existence and the apparent hopelessness of his love for Edith Leete. His purpose in descending into the vault is made clear when in his misery he finds himself reviving “the past and summoning up the forms and faces that were about me in my former life” (287). He fails—“the past was dead, crushed beneath a century's weight”—but, sitting there in the vault, he also feels that, “from the present I was shut out” (288). At that point Edith Leete appears to rescue him. The time capsule has failed to return the traveller to his original time; instead, by his betrothal to Edith Leete, it returns him to the twentieth century. But the journey is not over, for as a result of this excitement—and just as the reader assumes that the protagonist is safe, forever, in paradise—West, lying sleepless until dawn, dreams of his return to the nineteenth century and “awakes” to the ministrations of his servant. He is in the underground room. The vault has delivered him back to nineteenth-century Boston.³

The reader is now able to contrast the mood of the “time traveller” in lying down to take leave of the nineteenth century in chapter 2 with waking into it in chapter 28. The reader is forced to experience a shock and disappointment equal to Julian West's. Here, the use of the vault as time capsule is particularly effective because it remains in place, built into nineteenth-century Boston where Bellamy's readers must also begin—and end—their journey to utopia. For, while Julian West will be ejected from his dream and returned to the paradise of the twentieth century, his readers must endure the disappointment of recognizing that no such precipitous salvation is possible for them; they have only the vision. Thus, the “time capsule” delivers the readers back to their own time and to the choice that it and the whole form of the novel have, with increasing clarity and urgency, been presenting to them: accept the nightmare of the present, or work for the paradise to come. By the thousands they chose paradise. Denied the use of a time capsule, they joined Nationalist clubs to journey to utopia.

Caroline Ticknor (whose father was Bellamy's publisher) remembered, in 1922, that

in May, 1889, [Bellamy] spoke in Tremont Temple, Boston, on ‘Plutocracy and Nationalism,’ expressing his belief that one, or the other, must be the choice of the American people at the end of ten years' time.

(117)⁴

In Looking Backward “choice” (and the urgency of that choice) is the dominant theme, to which the contrast between the alternatives is actually secondary. This urgency of choice is what differentiates the utopian-propaganda novel from the more traditional utopian novel, in which the contrasts are intended to co-exist in the mind of the reader—and only in the mind.⁵

Bellamy was operating, not in the context of abstract philosophy, but in that of practical reform—both religious and secular—which had historically flourished in the New World. When a younger Edward Bellamy observed in his notebook

We stroll along side by side gaily disporting, gravely plodding in fine apparel and find spun refinement of companionship. Yet we cannot see where we put down our feet. We know there will come a step—it may well be the very next—beyond which we shall take no other but of a sudden drop eternal fathoms deep.

(Quoted by Thomas 5)

He was not only presaging the vanity in the face of destruction, and the refusal to choose to avoid it, exhibited by the nineteenth-century Bostonians in Julian West's dream-return; he was also paraphrasing Jonathan Edwards' exhortation to “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” a century and a half earlier:

… their foot shall slide. … God will not hold them up in these slippery places any longer … they shall fall into destruction; as he that stands on such slippery declining ground on the edge of a pit, he cannot stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost.

(6:51)⁶

Indeed, from John Winthrop's “citty on a Hill” through the Shaker communities, Brisbane's “Fourierist” phalanxes, utopia (or “paradise”) was, in America, a practical proposition and one dominated by the urgency of the choice between heaven and hell on Earth. It is into this tradition that Looking Backwards falls.

One hundred and fifty years after Jonathan Edwards' celebrated sermon, however, the novel had emerged as the propaganda vehicle of choice. The sermon form gave way, in Bellamy's exhortation, to the utopian form—but a utopian form adapted to the need to persuade its readers, not only of the alternatives confronting them, but also of the necessity and the urgency of their choice. Thus, the form of Looking Backward—with its reflections and refractions, its superimposed images of death and rebirth, and its juxtaposition of scenes of attainable harmony with increasingly chaotic nightmare—led a “revival” which was, in its own fashion, as impressive as the one supported by Jonathan Edwards.

Notes

1. Exceptions are Towers, who says that “critical preoccupation with Bellamy's overt philosophy tends to distort the very ideas it seeks to illuminate” (52); Pfaelzer: “Bellamy divides his personal version of socialism between two narrative modes, the fable and the manifesto” (28); Lokke: “the utopians seem dedicated to the destruction of not only imaginative literature but in effect all art” (142).

2. This view of Looking Backward first appeared in Gardiner 52-56.

3. Julian West's neuroses have formed the basis of many different interpretations of the novel; see, for example, Towers, Pfaelzer, Thomas, and Saxton.

4. This description must surely apply to the Tremont Temple speech which was in December, not May, although “ten years” seems to have been Ticknor's own addition to the argument.

5. The urgency of the “choice,” of course, presents a paradox for Bellamy: while insisting upon “evolution” of reform, Dr. Leete also says that “the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government” (127).

6. Edward Bellamy's great-great-grandfather, Joseph Bellamy, was the pupil and long-time friend of Jonathan Edwards, and was also active for a time in the “New Light” revivalist movement. When Joseph Bellamy died in 1790, Ezra Stiles, then President of Yale, noted in his diary, “his numerous noisy Writings have blazed their day & one Generation more will put them to sleep” (quoted in Morgan 15)—a prognosis startlingly similar (saving the venomous tone) to Howells's on the future of Edward Bellamy's writings.

Works Cited

Bellamy, Edward. “How I came to Write Looking Backward”. The Nationalist 1 (1889): 253-256.

———. Looking Backward (2000-1887). Ed. John L. Thomas. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967.

———. “Nationalism—Principles and Purposes; Address at Tremont Temple, Boston, on the Nationalist Club Anniversary, Dec. 19, 1889.” The Nationalist 2 (1890): 174-180.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Works of President Edwards. 1817; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968.

Frye, Northrop. “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” Daedalus 94 (1965): 323-347.

Gardiner, Jane. American Utopian Fiction 1865-1914: The Influence of Science and Technology. Diss. University of Houston, 1978.

Howells, William Dean. “Edward Bellamy.” Atlantic Monthly 82 (1898): 253-256.

Lokke, Virgil L. “The American Utopian Anti-Novel.” Ed. Ray B. Browne, et al. Frontiers of American Culture. Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Studies, 1968. 123-153.

Morgan, Arthur E. Edward Bellamy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.

Muirhead, James Fullerton. The Land of Contrasts: A Briton's View of His American Kin. London and New York: The Bodley Head, 1900.

Peebles, H. P. “The Utopias of the Past Compared with the Theories of Bellamy.” Overland Monthly 15 (1890): 574.

Pfaelzer, Jean. The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.

Saxton, Alexander. “Caesar's Column: The Dialogue of Utopia and Catastrophe.” American Quarterly 19 (1967): 224-238.

Shurter, Robert L. “Introduction”: Looking Backward (2000-1887), by Edward Bellamy. New York: Modern Library, 1951.

Ticknor, Caroline. Glimpses of Authors. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1922.

Towers, Tom H. “The Insomnia of Julian West.” American Literature 47 (1975): 52-63.