The Project Gutenberg EBook of Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy

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Title: Looking Backward
2000-1887

Author: Edward Bellamy

Release Date: May 12, 2008 [EBook #25439]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE
Riverside Library

* * * * *

Looking Backward

2000-1887

By

EDWARD BELLAMY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY TICKNOR AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY EDWARD BELLAMY

COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1915, AND 1917, BY EMMA S. BELLAMY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

INTRODUCTION

BY HEYWOOD BROUN

A good many of my radical friends express a certain kindly
condescension when they speak of Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward."

"Of course you know," they say, "that it really isn't first-rate
economics."

And yet in further conversation I have known a very large number of
these same somewhat scornful Socialists to admit, "You know, the first
thing that got me started to thinking about Socialism was Bellamy's
'Looking Backward.'"

From the beginning it has been a highly provocative book. It is now.
Many of the questions both of mood and technique are even more
pertinent in the year 1931 than they were in 1887. A critic of the
_Boston Transcript_ said, when the novel first appeared, that the new
State imagined by Bellamy was all very well, but that the author lost
much of his effectiveness by putting his Utopia a scant fifty years
ahead, and that he might much better have made it seventy-five
centuries.

It is true that the fifty years assigned for changing the world
utterly are almost gone by now. Not everything which was predicted in
"Looking Backward" has come to pass. But the laugh is not against
Bellamy, but against his critic. Some of the things which must have
seemed most improbable of all to the _Transcript_ man of 1887 are now
actually in be