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Experience and Utopia: The Making of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

R. Jackson Wilson
R. Jackson Wilson
Affiliation:
Smith College
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Extract

Shortly after Julian West awakened to Edward Bellamy's utopian Boston of the year 2000, he was given his first look at the city by his host, Dr. Leete. West nearly fainted at the “ prodigious thing which had befallen me.” Still in a daze, he was asked by Dr. Leete what surprised him most about the new Boston. “ I really think,” West responded, “ that the complete absence of chimneys and their smoke is the detail that first impressed me.” The city, as Bellamy went on to describe it, was an affair of fine buildings set in “ inclosures.” There were “ large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed.” Julian West could see the Charles River, a “ blue ribbon winding away to the sunset,” and to the east was the harbor, “ not one of its green islets missing.” West's initial notice of the absence of smokestacks, coupled with Bellamy's first (and almost his only) physical description of the city, pointed up one of the most striking facts about Boston in the year 2000. The new city was park-like, even pastoral, in character. The entire apparatus of industrialism was kept sedulously out of sight, and the landscape, both physical and social, had come to look quite pre-industrial.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 1977 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, ed. Thomas, John L. (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 114–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Bellamy, Edward, Equality (New York, 1897), pp. 270–304Google Scholar.

3 On this point, see Marshall, Peter, “A British Sensation,” in Edward Bellamy Abroad, an American Prophet's Influence, ed. Bowman, Sylvia (New York, 1962), pp. 90–94Google Scholar. The assumption that Bellamy and other intellectuals made that there was no viable working-class culture in the United States was obviously an outcome not of experience and observation but of prejudice and plain fear. Herbert Gutman, among others, has begun to understand just how dense and usable was the culture of urban workers in the nineteenth-century United States. See, in particular, his brilliant essay on “Class, Status and the Gilded Age Radical,” in Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976), pp. 260–92Google Scholar.

4 The restaurant, the retail store and the wholesale warehouse are in Looking Backward, pp 157–61, 192–97, 211. The national bank and the factory are in Equality, pp. 29–34, 54.

5 Equality, pp. 55–61.

6 Ibid., pp. 206–11, 362–64.

7 Bellamy's conventional aversion to the industrial city, and to the way it reduced individual life to a “cipher existence” was the theme of a large number of newspaper editorials he wrote for the Springfield Union in the 1870s, and for the Daily News in the 1880s. See particularly “Rents and Ownership,” Springfield Union, 25 sept. 1875; “Children in Factories,” ibid., 25 July 1872, and “The Flow of Population Cityward,” ibid., 7 Sept. 1875. Similarly, he often wrote on his concern for the rural landscape: “Forest Culture,” ibid., 30 Aug. 1873; “The Destruction of American Forests,” ibid., 2 Jan. 1875, and “Concerning Mountains,” ibid., 9 Aug. 1876. His distaste for the city is given passing and quite mysterious notice in Morton, and White, Lucia's The Intellectual Versus the City, from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 108–9Google Scholar. The same question is explored more deftly and in greater detail in Thomas, John L., “Utopia for an Urban Age: Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy,” in Perspectives in American History, 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 135–63Google Scholar; but despite his own occasional fine insights, Thomas ends by characterizing Bellamy's Utopia as essentially “urban” in nature and intention.

8 In some ways, it might make sense to call Bellamy's social fantasy “post-industrial” rather than “pre” or “non-industrial,” following the usage of Bell, Daniel, The Reforming of General Education (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, and of Kahn, Herman and Wiener, Anthony J., The year 2000 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. But given the explanation of Bellamy's mentality that I am proposing here, the term “pre-industrial” seems the more useful. It is probably illegitimate to call whole societies “pre-industrial,” since that would merely define them by reference to something they were not. But an individual living in an industrial society may certainly be said to have a pre-industrial cast of mind.

9 Bellamy's own perception of the relationship between his biography and the nature of Looking Backward was extremely confused and contradictory, an object lesson in the fact that writers' discussions of their own lives and letters are among the least reliable sources, dense with traps for the unwary. Bellamy, Edward, “How I Came to Write ‘Looking Backward,’” The Nationalist, 1 (05 1889), 1Google Scholar, and “How I Wrote ‘Looking Backward,’” Ladies' Home Journal (04 1894)Google Scholar, reprinted in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again (Kansas City, 1937), p. 217Google Scholar.

10 The standard biography of Bellamy, who cries out for a more sophisticated treatment, is Morgan, Arthur E., Edward Bellamy (New York, 1944)Google Scholar. In some ways, Bowman, Sylvia E.'s The Year 2000, a Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (New York, 1958)Google Scholar, is better on her subject's youth. Best of all, despite its hopelessly worshipful attitudes, is Mason Green's unpublished life, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The best brief treatment of Bellamy's life is still to be found in Aaron, Daniel's Men of Good Hope (New York, 1951)Google Scholar.

11 Bellamy told the story of his first law case to Mason Green some 20 years after the fact. It is repeated, on no stronger evidence, in Bowman, , The Year 2000, p. 37Google Scholar; and by Thomas in his edition of Looking Backward, p. 4. See Green, unpublished biography, p. 28.

12 Notebook No. 1, Sept. 1871, Houghton Library, Harvard. All manuscripts citations are to Houghton's Bellamy collection. Mrs. Rufus King Bellamy to Bellamy, 30 Dec. 1871, and 6 may 1872; Rufus King Bellamy to Frederick Bellamy, 12 Jan. 1872.

13 Notebook No. 1, Feb. 1872, June 1872; Notebook No. 2, undated entry, but probably Winter 1871–72.

14 Bellamy to Mason Green, 28 January 1894, quoted in the unpublished Green biography, p. 99.

15 Notebook No. 1, 1 Jan. 1873, and May 1873.

16 Bowman, , The Year 2000, pp. 39–42Google Scholar; Morgan, , Edward Bellamy, pp. 57–65Google Scholar; Looking Backward, ed. Thomas, , pp. 4–5Google Scholar.

17 The essay was first published, under the title The Religion of Solidarity, ed. Morgan, Arthur E. (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1940)Google Scholar.

18 I have explored the themes of this paragraph and the next at much greater length in In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States, 1860–1920 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

19 The Religion of Solidarity, esp. 11–12.

20 Notebooks Nos. 3 and 7, and the “Eliot Carson Notebook.” Bellamy did not date these notebooks, but it is clear on internal and circumstantial evidence that most of his work on the Eliot Carson story was done in the years just before he wrote Looking Backward. One brief section, describing Carson's “conversion” to social reform, was obviously written after the completion of Looking Backward, or perhaps during its composition. But it has very much the character of a somewhat lame afterthought. A detailed but rambling account of the Eliot Carson story is in Morgan, , Edward Bellamy, 73 ffGoogle Scholar.

21 Notebook No. 3.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.; Looking Backward, pp. 96–99.

24 It is important to notice that this second conversion was sketched out by Bellamy only after (or while) he wrote Looking Backward. It can not have, therefore, the relevance to other, earlier versions of the story attributed to it in Thomas' interesting introduction to Looking Backward, p. 49. Thomas' discussion of Bellamy's other pre-Looking Backward fiction is excellent.