Looking Backward

In Looking Backward, well-to-do Julian West of Boston falls asleep for 113 years and awakes to find the world of 2000 fundamentally changed. An old man and his daughter care for him and take him on a tour of the new world. In the new society, a single nationalized corporation-state under a single political party guarantees work, comfort, and luxury to everyone in the “industrial army.” Looking Backward is a watershed utopian novel following in the path laid by books like Thomas More’s Utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s The Year 2440. Looking Backward was received with great excitement and quickly became the second-bestselling novel in 19th-century America (after Uncle Tom’s Cabin), inspiring political reformers, “Bellamy clubs,” and a direct response by William Morris in his anti-industrial utopian novel News from Nowhere. Bellamy himself wrote a sequel in 1897, Equality, which sold well initially but met with less success overall.