Bellamy, Edward

Average customer rating:

Good, but a bit boring
The world through rose-colored glasses
Soviet Style Propaganda at its Best
A Milquetoast Utopia
Is It Sci-Fi Or Political Wistfulness?

Looking Backward (Signet Classics)
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Fiction Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Herland
We
Utopia: Thomas More
Walden Two
Utopia (Penguin Classics)

ASIN: 0451527631

Book Description

Edward Bellamy's classic look at the future has been translated into over twenty languages and is the most widely read novel of its time. A young Boston gentleman is mysteriously transported from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century--from a world of war and want to one of peace and plenty. This brilliant vision became the blueprint of utopia that stimulated some of the greatest thinkers of our age.

Download Description

Edward Bellamy's utopian novel about a nineteenth-century Bostonian who awakes after a sleep of more than one hundred years to find himself in the year 2000 in a world of near-perfect cooperation, harmony, and prosperity. The novel had an enormous impact at the time of its publication, setting in motion a wave of reform activity and creating a vogue for utopian novels that continued over the next three decades.

Customer Reviews:

Good, but a bit boring.......2007-02-01

I enjoyed reading "Looking Backward." It speaks much about the problems facing America near the turn of the century; the problems that affected almost everyone in America every day. The problems of greedy monopolists is the most evident, but also others. The book is not as much as a story as it is the author laying out his groundwork for a perfect society with a story sort of, but not really, built around it. There is sort of a romace, but almost the entire book is characters telling the protagonist what the future is like. I do find it funny though. Back in the 19th century, authors GREATLY underestimated the technological progress of mankind. Just decades later, it was the opposite- and authors were greatly overestimating it.

The world through rose-colored glasses.......2007-01-20

Julian West is put to sleep by a mesmerizer (a quack) in 1887 and wakes up again in the year 2000. He encounters a Dr. Leete who explains to him in great detail how the world has changed - mainly how it has been transformed into a magnificent socialistic Utopia where everyone is the same. There is no war, no competition, and everyone lives in peace and harmony. Bellamy was a true believer in Marx and his theories and he wrote this book as a pleasing presentation of Socialism and, to him, its saving graces. When the government controlled everything and everyone, he believed everyone would be treated the same and there would be no class/economic differences and struggles. It's kind of laughable, in a way, because it depicts people in a way that seems contrary to human behavior. Bellamy also didn't have the benefit of the 20th century and the horrors inflicted by Stalin, Mao and others in the name of Marx to temper his overly optimistic views. It's a classic, though, of Utopian literature; one might even imagine it the last of its kind, but Utopia will always beckon a fevered imagination that sees great unhappiness in the world.

Soviet Style Propaganda at its Best.......2006-12-24

... and yes the rosebush of man was indeed transplanted into that fantastic utopia delineated by Bellamy, and that land was called Russia, where the rosebush of the bog, which had lived since the beginning of time, was thenceforth dead in a space of less than 75 years.

A Milquetoast Utopia.......2006-08-29

Of all the pictures fun to imagine for the student of socialisms and utopias, American and otherwise, is to visualize a young Aldous Huxley or George Orwell sitting down near their respective public school fire places, during a cold and clammy English afternoon, and reading Looking Backwards. It is very easy for the reader to see Huxley and Orwell, if they did in fact read Bellamy's rather quaint vision of utopia, reflecting to them selves as they wrote their dystopic masterpieces, A Brave New World and 1984, respectively, "Alright. But what if...?"

Just like Huxley's and Orwell's works, Edward Bellamy is reacting to the horrors of his age. Violent confrontations between labor and capital in every corner of the United States were all the rage, and strikes before the age of enforced collective bargaining or binding arbitration were no joke. Imperialist wars in every corner of the world were threatening a world wide war--seemingly every other year. There were rumblings of an international socialist movement that was yearly gaining strength in Europe in spite of serious legal restrictions--while Bellamy was in University in Germany, he would have had a difficult time avoiding knowledge of the imprisonment of SPD leaders August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht as well as the banning of the Party by von Bismarck's government. What most likely struck the most horror into Bellamy, though, was the absolute wretchedness of the slums that so many Americans were trying to survive in, and the inability of anyone to even try to create a way out of it that can not in some way be traced back to self-interest, greed or outright violence.

Looking Backward is an attempt to imagine a world where poverty and ignorance are abolished in the sentimental tradition of Charles Dickens--hero of Bellamy and the novel's protagonist Julian West--coupled with a truly novel bureaucratic technocracy. It was at least in part the influence of Bellamy's idealism that Leon Trotsky found most loathsome in American socialism, whether he knew it or not, when he unforgettably called the New York Socialist Party leader, Morris Hillquit "the ideal Socialist leader for successful dentists." Marx would likely have written off Bellamy using the language that Julian West uses to describe the Mesmerist, Dr. Pillsbury, who puts him into a one hundred thirteen year catatonic--a mere quack. What both Trotsky and Marx would have grudgingly realized on reading this book is that Bellamy was one of the few people in America in 1887--aside from a handful of socialists, anarchists, and union-syndicalists--who was openly hoping for a day when human beings would leave the realm of necessity and enter the realm of freedom.

The world which Julian West enters at the close of the twentieth century, when entreated by Dr. Leete to rouse him self, is a radically altered one. As Rip Van Winkle woke up in the Catskills to find that he no longer owed his allegiance to a King and at first finds that this is a truly bewildering situation, West finds a world even more bewildering to a Boston Brahmin. Complete and total state ownership of all means of production had been achieved during his long sleep, but even more shocking was that the United States was no longer a country suffering from any social ills. Cooperation reigned in the place of the pecuniary interests of individuals. The mentality of dog eat dog, which bred both ridiculous ostentation and indefensible poverty, had simply vanished leaving in its place a world of light labor, high culture, and nearly universal contentment. The state is run by disinterested pensioners--yes, Bellamy believes such a political animal would exist--in such a way as to ensure that the profit motive does not exist, and all that men, and women, truly compete for is glory. All work to the benefit of this cooperative commonwealth to the best of their ability and equality in the most literal terms. This is not Julian West's Boston.

What becomes apparent to the reader traveling with Julian in this new world is that in many ways Julian has not left the close of the nineteenth century. Boston at the close of the twentieth century, in spite of the technological revolutions and complete reordering of the state and economy, is very much the same for Julian West. He enjoys the highest of high culture through the intricate wall card telephone system of his acoustically treated room; drinks fine wine and smokes great cigars; at communal kitchens all eat cuisine that only the leisured rich could have afforded a century before. The blessings of civilization are enjoyed by all alike to the point that where, affectively, all have become members of a universally leisured single class. The impoverished and the working classes of America, seemingly, had nothing to lose but their poverty, ignorance, and despair. The truly leisured class had, seemingly, only their haughtiness and arrogance to lose. This is where some of my troubles with Edward Bellamy begin, and where some of his own prejudices become apparent.

Bellamy identifies the world in his Boston as having been broken down into truly distinct peoples. As he puts it at the opening of his work, America was organized upon "the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant." The ignorance and poverty that so horrified Bellamy was not the only thing about the poor that seems to have been truly their own seems to have died with them.

In a truly disturbing way, any notion of how Boston, and America, changed between 1850 and 1887, escapes Bellamy's consciousness. The "labor question" has been solved through nationalization and making all people work, in one capacity or other, if they want to have anything other than bread, water and a prison cell. What have happened to the Babel of ethnics, the massive networks of parochial organizations, ethnic clubs and sport organizations that were the wellsprings of life for so many Irish and Irish Americans? There is no evidence in the improved Boston of the late twentieth century of anything other type of respectability than Bourgeoisie Protestant respectability. The people of this appallingly genteel world may very have only the variety of one of their singular stores, which have absolutely no variety in products. The twenty-first century reader is left with the truly weird possibility that Julian West and Dr. Leete, after having exhausted the topic of how much better the present is than the past, will have nothing left to talk about but yachting and literature--what with conflict being abolished.

The transplanting of Victorian notions of how the world should be run is nowhere more apparent, and more disturbing for its implications, than when West and Leete speak about what portions of the world are organized on the system that America is organized upon. As Dr. Leete explains to West how international relations work in this era, he states:

"[T]he great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico and parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States, which was the pioneer of the evolution. The peaceful relations of these nations are assured by a loose form of federal union of world-wide extent. An international council regulates the mutual intercourse commerce of the members of the union and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions."

The white man's burden and civilizing mission does not go the way of the self-interest in idyllic Boston of the future, and an idealist as deeply committed to social justice as Bellamy could not conceive, even in fiction, of any group outside of the boundaries of western society having achieved the level of sophistication that they could live in a classless society. One has to wonder what the old Confederate states would finally have looked like, and whether old rebels and unionists shook hands across a bloody chasm while educating American blacks up to civilization. Whatever, Bellamy thinks about race in America, and how West would have thought about it--the only black we see in this book is the faithful body servant of West in the nineteenth century, one Sawyer, and nothing of consequence comes out of his mouth--we can easily surmise that his utopia was close to being for whites only.

Though Bellamy's idealism reads as totally genuine, Looking Backward has some very vital imagination lacking in it. Bellamy has his cooperative commonwealth based upon the principle that all work which serves the common good is equally important, but Bellamy finds it necessary to have West paling around with Leete, a retired physician. In a world where leisure and not labor is the rule, and where the masses are washed and wholly civilized by the exacting standards of an upper class education lasting until at least the twenty-first year, why was it necessary to have Leete be a someone that would be a portrait bourgeoisie respectability? The laboring intellectual, of astute and subtle brilliance with the gnarled hands of a quarter century of hard labor, is the glorious possibility of this world which Bellamy creates for the reader but never actually realizes. Though slightly saddening, this fact probably made the book more readable to the members of America's upper class, and possibly even more plausible to them.

From the vantage of the twenty-first century, Bellamy has an ability to appear hopelessly ridiculous. He could not have known how collectivism would lead to mass murder on a colossal scale in Europe and Asia in the Twentieth century--though he would not have been surprised how much of it was done by men and women who looked on the red flag as their own. Nor could he have foreseen how the "backwards races" of the world would struggle for their own freedom in the second half the twentieth century, and have several become great powers in their own right by its close. Radio, motion pictures, television, digitized recording devices, the internet, air travel and the hydrogen bomb attached to an intercontinental ballistic missile probably never entered his imagination. He should not, though, be faulted for this. His future was one infinitely brighter than the one the world suffered through, as the nations of the world gorged themselves on the most murderous wars and massacres in mankind's history. For all the novels faults and short comings, it is a profound piece of republican idealism, premised on the very American belief that people coming together can actually change lives.

Is It Sci-Fi Or Political Wistfulness?.......2006-01-14

Although this novel lies nearly forgotten today, when it was first released in the late 19th century, its impact on society and the imagination (and expectations) of that society were so immense as to be immeasurable. This book did more than strike a chord of hope in a population craving better times and trusting in humankind's capacity to make things right, it created a sensation. Clubs were formed in dozens of cities, which hailed Bellamy as a hero and prophet, and Looking Backward was quite simply embraced by millions as prophecy and a blueprint for what was certain to come. It all sounded so good, didn't it? The year 2000 would arrive upon a world at peace, where everyone had sufficient food, had dignity, where crime was heeled, where equality was a reality. It was, in short, both a utopia and a realization of the fantasies of Karl Marx. In fact, today this book seems both impossibly naïve and touchingly---humanistically---idealistic. Communism was tried in the decades after Bellamy's death and the 20th century result was nothing like what the 19th century Bellamy suggested it would be. Instead of equality and liberation, it brought a new species of class stratification and suffocating enslavement to nearly a quarter of the globe. Looking Backward is neither a great novel nor a bad one. In retrospect it lacks the importance which in its early years it seemed destined to have. Today Looking Backward is an interesting read, especially when the context of its creation is considered, and we with perfect hindsight can know how flawed its fantasy of an Eden-like worker's tomorrow was.

Average customer rating:

Looking Backward
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Signet New American Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000BRSCPW

The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of Ben Jonson

Average customer rating:

The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of Ben Jonson
Edward Bellamy Partridge
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press Reprint
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Average customer rating:

Classic

Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Digireads.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915 (The Everyday Life in America Series, Vol. 4)
Herland
Walden Two

ASIN: 1420925709

Customer Reviews:

Classic.......2006-11-10

This is one of the best books ever written. Timeless. I purchase copies to give to friends.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Cork Hill Classics)

Average customer rating:

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (Cork Hill Classics)
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Cork Hill Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

Alternate History | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 1594082618

Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (Broadview Literary Texts)

Average customer rating:

Classic Victorian fantasy
Edward Bellamy's classic utopian novel and other writings

Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (Broadview Literary Texts)
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Broadview Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Democracy | Government | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

A Modern Utopia (Penguin Classics)
Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (Penguin Classics)
American Utopias (American Classics)
Herland, The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics)
News from Nowhere

ASIN: 1551114062

Book Description

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find that the era of competitive capitalism is long over, replaced by an era of co-operation. Wealth is produced by an "industrial army" and every citizen receives the same wage.

This edition contains a rich selection of appendices, including: excerpts from Bellamy's Equality and other writings; contemporary responses (by William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others); excerpts from utopian works by Morris and William Dean Howells; and an excerpt from Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

Customer Reviews:

Classic Victorian fantasy.......2006-02-28

Written during the era of the worst excesses of the "gilded age" and some of America's worst early labor upheavals including the Great Strike of 1877 and Haymarket and just prior to the Pullman and Homestead strikes. Looking Backward is an expression of Bellamy's faith that the industrial age and industrial cities could be made to work for all, not just the few. The book, a top seller of its time, above all shows that our ancestors believed they could reach the future without perishing.

Edward Bellamy's classic utopian novel and other writings.......2003-11-09

Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward 2000-1887" remains the most successful and influential utopian novel written by an American writer mainly because the competition consists mostly of dystopian works, from Jack London's "The Iron Heel" to Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," or science fiction works like Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed." Still, I do not mean to give the impression that Bellamy's 1888 novel gets this honor by default. Magazine covers in 1984 were devoted to judging the track record of George Orwell's dystopian classic and I would argue that Bellamy deserves the same sort of consideration now that we have reached the 21st century. I certainly intend to use him to that end in my upcoming Utopian Images class.

At the end of the 19th century Bellamy creates a picture of a wonderful future society. Bellamy's protagonist is Julian West, a young aristocratic Bostonian who falls into a deep sleep while under a hypnotic trance in 1887 and ends up waking up in the year 2000 (hence the novel's sub-title). Finding himself a century in the future in the home of Doctor Leete, West is introduced to an amazing society, which is consistently contrasted with the time from which he has come. As much as this is a prediction of a future utopia, it is also a scathing attack on the ills of American life heading into the previous turn of the century. Bellamy's sympathies are clearly with the progressives of that period.

"Looking Backward" does not have a narrative structure per se. Instead West is shown the wonders of Boston in the year 2000, with his hosts explaining the rationale behind the grand civic improvements. For example, he discovers that every body is happy and no one is either rich or poor, all because equality has been achieved. Industry has been nationalized, which has increased efficiency because it has eliminated wasteful competition. This is a world with no need of money, but every citizen has a sort of credit card that allows them to make individual purchases, although everyone has the same montly allowance. In Bellamy's world is so ideal that it does not have any police, a military, any lawyers, or, best of all, any salesmen. Education is so valued that it continues until students reach the age of 21, at which point all citizens enter the work force, where they will stay until the age of 45. Men and women are compensated equally, but there are some distinctions between job on the basis of gender, and pregnancy and motherhood are taken into account.

Bellamy was living during the start of the Industrial Revolution, and like Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella who wrote during the height of the Age of Reason, he sees science and human ingenuity as being what will solve all of humanity's problems. He does not get into too many details regarding the comforts of modern living in the future, but there are several telling predictions (e.g., something very much like radio). However, it is clear that Bellamy is writing primarily to talk about economics and sociology, especially because he always compares his idealized future with the problems of his own time.

Obviously Bellamy's critique of the late 19th century will be of less interest to today's students that his various predictions on the both the future and an ideal world, unless they are specifically studying the American industrial revolution. But the latter two are enough to make "Looking Backward" deserve to be included in a current curriculum and I am looking foward to how well my students think Bellamy predicted the world in which we now find ourselves living. This particular edition, while not a Norton Critical Edition, does have a nice selection of additional readings in the back consisting of some of Bellamy's other writings as well as contemporary works by writers of other utopias and social commentaries such as William Morris, Charlotte Perkins, Henry Lloyd George, and William Dean Howells. All of these appendices provide a context for Bellamy's novel in terms of late 19th-century utopianism.

Apparitions of Things to Come: Edward Bellamy's Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Average customer rating:

Definitely apparitions...

Apparitions of Things to Come: Edward Bellamy's Tales of Mystery & Imagination
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Charles H Kerr Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Historical | Fantasy | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
Alternate History | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 0882861646

Product Description

Collected in this volume are nine of Bellamy's finest tales of mystery and imagination. Defying conventional genres, his speculative fiction is far-ranging in mode and theme. In 'To Whom This May Come' we find ourselves on a South Sea Island inhabited entirely by mindreaders; there's the bizarre humor of 'With The Eyes Shut', a disquieting satire on technology gone mad; 'Two Days Solitary Imprisonment' has all of the brooding atmosphere of a modern whodunit. Franklin Rosemount's provocative introduction explores the continuity between these early tales and Bellamy's later utopia, and argues that "the changes Bellamy made in his utopia during the last ten years of his life - the withering away of authoritarian features that had marred 'Looking Backward', and the expansion of its libertarian, working class, feminist and ecological dimensions in his last great work, 'Equality' - not only reflected the author's basically positive response to his anarchist, Marxist and feminist critics, but also brought his vision of the future into line with key elements of his own earlier fiction." Illustrated with the collages of Hal Rammel.

Customer Reviews:

Definitely apparitions..........2005-01-24

I was intrigued with Bellamy's "Looking Backward" and, besides the utopian philosophy, was fascinated by his technological visions. This book contains nine (9) short stories and an appendix with "Plots for Stories." According to the introduction, "each tale challenges the conventional, reified notions of reality, behavior, society or human nature." I'm not sure about that. Five of the stories seem to fit that bill, while the other four seemed merely Victorian in nature. Either way, the introduction was definitely detailed and informative.

The title, "Apparitions of Things to Come," is not really accurate either. There didn't seem to be many visionary tales. There was only one tale which definitely fit in the technological vision category. But, I would have bought a used version just to have read it.

Average customer rating:

Looking Backward 2000-1887
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Modern Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000M8AS4S

Average customer rating:

Looking Backward From 2000 To 1887
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Kessinger Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 1419131168

Book Description

"If I am going to explain our way of shopping to you," said my companion, as we walked along the street, "you must explain your way to me. I have never been able to understand it from all I have read on the subject. For example, when you had such a vast number of shops, each with its different assortment, how could a lady ever settle.

Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Riverside Editions)

Average customer rating:

Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (Riverside Editions)
Edward Bellamy
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin (Academic)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 0395051940

Authors:

Authors

Authors