Looking Backward 2000-1887

**A Sleeper Wakes in the Socialist America of the Year 2000**

**The Utopian Novel That Became a Political Movement**

**One Conversation Reimagines Work, Money, and Social Duty**

**The Forgotten Bestseller Behind the Bellamy Clubs**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came Looking Backward: 2000-1887: an early work in which Edward Bellamy's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

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Looking Backward: 2000-1887 entered literary history as a work once visible enough to shape popular taste, yet now often remembered only at the edges of the canon.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian time travel science fiction novel by the American journalist and writer Edward Bellamy first published in 1888. The book was translated into several languages, and in short order "sold a million copies." According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, "In the 19th-century United States, only Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies in its first years" than Bellamy's book.

Bellamy's novel is set Boston, Massachusetts, and tells the story of a young American man named Julian West who, in 1887, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself at the same location but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000, and while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia. The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving the future. The major themes include problems associated with capitalism, a proposed socialist solution of a nationalization of all industry, and the use of an "industrial army" to organize production and distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under such conditions. The young man is awoken to a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him around and explains all the advances of this new age, including drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and almost instantaneous, internet-like delivery of goods. Everyone retires with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens (realized as factory-kitchens in the 1920s-30s in the USSR). The productive capacity of the United States is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with 19th-century society.

The decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873-1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath. Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms-monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts-began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate. The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.

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*“ According to historian Daniel Immerwahr, ”*

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**Why Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Still Matters**

Read today, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how Looking Backward: 2000-1887 first opened the path ahead.*