He lived in the 1800s and wrote the utopia of life in the 2000s. What do you think, from the 1800s, what a view of the 2000s he might have seen?
(1850-1898) American journalist and writer. He is one of the most important utopians at the end of the 19th century. He was born on March 26, 1850, in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. He studied literature for a year at Union University in Schenectady in 1867. Later he toured Germany and England. Returning to the USA in 1869, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1871. However, after looking at a single case, he left his profession as a lawyer and started journalism. After working for the New York Evening Post and Springfield Daily Union, he started writing novels.
Edward Bellamy (March 26, 1850 – May 22, 1898) was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of his political ideas.
Published in 1880 by Dr. The Heidenhofps Process novel was a Hawthorne-influenced book loaded with Gothic and fantasy elements. Bellamy's masterpiece, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, was published in 1888, and the utopian vision he articulated pioneered a semi-socialist utopian movement in the United States. Equality (“Equality”), a sequel to Looking Backward, was published in 1897 but did not receive much attention. Constipated from a young age, Bellamy died a year later, in 1898.
Looking Backward predates the work of utopians such as Morris and Wells at the end of the 19th century and is regarded as the forerunner of the "evolutionary utopia". Bellamy's utopia takes place in the future, not on a distant island that no one knows, like classical utopias. The protagonist of Utopia is Boston native Julian West, who "falls asleep" in 1887 and wakes up in 2000. The Boston of 2000, depicted in the novel, is a city where the means of production are wholly nationalized and the state is in the hands of a well-meaning and wise elite. The most striking element of Bellamy's utopianism is the complete mechanization of production, the fact that people are almost freed from the burden of physical labor in this mechanized world. Rejecting Bellamy's approach, the British Marxist utopian William Morris, in his utopia called News From Nowhere, published in 1890, proposes a society oriented towards a rural and natural lifestyle as opposed to Bellamy's mechanized society. The Bellamy-Morris debate is the first expression in the literature of the question of what the role of technology will be in the future of humanity that will develop in the 20th century.
Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Summary of the novel
Suffering from insomnia, Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in Boston in 1887 and woke up in 2000. The United States has become a democratic and equal society in which everything is governed by a brand new state order. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward takes the reader from the late 19th century under capitalism to the socialist ideal of the 21st century.
Looking Backward is in many ways a romantic utopia peculiar to the 19th century. From another angle, it is a complex examination of the possibilities that await humanity in the light of conversations between narrator and time traveler Julian West and his 21st-century guide and mentor, Dr. Leete.
Bellamy informs the reader about social problems and troubles from the middle to the end of the 19th century; it also offers a utopian vision for the millennium. Bellamy's detailed visions of the political and economic conditions of 2000 are hidden in Dr. Leete's and his family's accounts.