This is an 1889 printing of
Edward Bellamy's best selling book, Looking Backward 2000-1887.
Looking Backward sold over 100,000 copies in American in its
first year of publication and went on to sell over a million copies
world wide, translated into over 20 languages. It was the 3rd best
selling fiction book of the 19th century, and had a significant impact
in popular society at the time.
Looking Backward is
effectively a story that presents an anti-Marxist/pro-socialist
commentary on American society of the time, and tells of a utopian
Christian-Socialist society which is to have developed in America by the
year 2000.
What is most interesting
about this book is how well it was received in its day, and how very far
off it was from predicting the social future of our country. In many
ways though Looking Backward provides a remarkable insight into
late 19th century American society, and it is even more remarkable to
read this book, now at the turn of the 21st century, and reflect on this
man's vision of what he thought our present could be like, essentially
what he wanted it to be like, especially knowing that many in his day
shared his vision.
Bellamy was not off in his
analysis of developing American society though, he merely presented what
he felt "could be a solution", but at the same time, he also presented
alternative visions of what the future would hold was well, for example:
The records of the
period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was
furious. Men believed that it threatened society with a form of
tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured. They believed that
the great corporations were preparing for them the yoke of a baser
servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to
men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable
greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at their desperation, for
certainly humanity was never confronted with a fate more sordid and
hideous than would have been the era of corporate tyranny which they
anticipated.
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