Bellamy, Edward

Bellamy, Edward
(1850–1898)
American novelist, author of Looking Backward, a Utopia offered to the public as a serious proposal.
Looking Backward, 2000–1887—to give it its full title—was the indirect inspiration of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, as a hostile retort by a writer of very different outlook, who reacted against it. Bellamy’s book is not exactly a prophecy itself or even a prediction; it is a social program in fictional disguise. He means it. He originally put his Utopia in the year 3000, then changed the date to 2000, on a more optimistic assessment of the time that would be needed to realize it.
He presents it through an imagined character, Julian West, a Bostonian who wakes from a trance in the year 2000 and learns that the United States has been transformed by adopting a Religion of Solidarity, with sweeping practical results. The Nation is now absolute and supreme. In its economic aspect, it is a single colossal corporation that owns everything and employs everybody. Its citizens, male and female, are compulsorily enrolled to do all the work in an “industrial army” under military discipline, from which the government itself is recruited; the president, elected on a restricted franchise, is the general-in-chief.
Each year, the gross national product is added up, a surplus is calculated, and everybody receives a share of it. These shares are all equal, an arrangement that is justified by the assumption that the workers do their best, and “doing one’s best” is the same for all and allows no gradations. (Those who don’t are put in jail.) It follows that there are no financial incentives and no financial inequalities.
This, however, means very little because there is no money. Shopping is done by filling out a form in a “sample-store” where goods are on view and paying with a credit card on which one’s national share is debited by the value of the purchase. The goods are promptly delivered from a warehouse to the purchaser’s home through electric “tubes”; Bellamy has great faith in technology. The whole annual allowance must be spent. Anything left over at the end of the year is confiscated by the Nation. So there is no incentive to save, but, then, nobody wants to save when the Nation provides housing, universal education, and complete social security.
Public kitchens and laundries take care of cooking and washing, and everybody eats at communal dining houses. Cultural needs are satisfied by such measures as playing music over the telephone. West, the observer from the past, comments revealingly that this is “the limit of human felicity.”
At the time, many found Bellamy’s Utopia attractive, probably in reaction against the uglier aspects of unbridled capitalism. It had some influence on economic thinking, and in the United States, it inspired short-lived political initiatives. Though Bellamy was contemptuous of left-wing labor organization, some Socialists approved. After a century’s experience of totalitarianism in practice, his program may be less alluring.

See also
Morris, William


Further Reading
Carey, John, ed. The Faber Book of Utopias. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.