IV
Looking backward into the future: that was the paradox by which a young New England romancer, Edward Bellamy, concerned like Thoreau and Emerson and the rest of the great Concord school with the well-being of his community, descended from literature to sociology; and stirred the minds of thousands of people in America in much the same fashion that Theodor Hertzka, writing at the same time, stirred his European contemporaries. Having begun to romanticize about reality, Bellamy during the decade that followed the publication of Looking Backward, devoted himself to realizing his romance. In a later work, Equality, he set forth his picture of the New Society of the year 2000 in much greater detail; just as if the popularity of his first work committed him to take up seriously the tasks of the economist and the statesman.
The chief pleasure, nowadays, in both of these books is the familiar one of recognition; for if Bellamy did not portray a better future he at any rate, like Mr. H. G. Wells, in his early romances, outlined many ports of a future that has for us, in the twentieth century, become an actuality; a fact which makes us realize very poignantly the limitations of his utopia. In spite of a thin-lipped style, Bellamy handles his story in a neat, workmanlike way, with a certain plausibility and familiarity which doubtless explains the fact that it can still be found, without any difficulty, on the fiction shelves of our circulating public libraries.
The preface to Looking Backward is dated: “Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston, December 26, 2000.” In that preface the work is presented as an avowed romance which will enable the readers of 2000 to realize the gaps that separate them from their ancestors, and to value the prodigious “moral and material” transformation that has taken place in a few generations. Julius West is a person whom our Shawmut historian invents, to bridge the gap between the two eras, Julius West, a young man of wealth, sensitive to the ignominy of his position, and feeling that, as a “rich man living among the poor, an educated man among the uneducated,” he “was like one living in isolation among a jealous and alien race.” In order to overcome his insomnia West sleeps in a vaulted room in the foundations of his house, and gets put to sleep by a hypnotist; and so by a dramatic oversight he hibernates for 113 years, and awakens among strange faces. Needless to say, West has a love affair in the old world which is carried on in the new, through a descendant of the girl he meant to marry; and it is equally needless to observe that he reawakens to the world of 1887 as soon as the institutions of 2000 have been described and the love affair has been resolved.
Let us take West’s muzziness, his amazement, and his sense of isolation for granted, and follow him as he explores his new environment.