Looking Backward
You are riding on a coach, you don't know what your destination is but the days are long and overcast, the road rough and pitted. None of this is helped by the unwieldiness of the coach itself, an open topped monstrosity of iron and timber with uncounted passengers jostling for the limited seats, the passengers only outnumbered by the masses pulling the coach forward.
Every so often the coach will hit a particularly big rut and throw a passenger or two to the ground. Those fallen are forced to take up a rope and haul. Sometimes, not so often, a man will find the opportunity to scrabble up the side of the carriage and find a seat. No one's seat is guaranteed and all are in perpetual danger of joining the team up front, but no one will think of a way to better the situation for fear he'll only lose his place.
Such is Bellamy's metaphor of post-industrial society that opens 'Looking Backward', and it is a powerful one at that. There is little doubt that this novel was meant as a vehicle to carry the author's socialist ideology to wider audience, but there is a solid story beneath the rhetoric. Julian West is a man thrown out of his depth into a future he can barely understand and it's hard not to feel sympathy for him. The other characters of note are the pedantic bore Dr. Leete, who insists on explaining the minutiae of how society operates in the year 2000, and his lovely daughter Edith, who provides West with a real connection to his new present.
There are a few other minor characters, including Mrs. Leete who makes several polite remarks and suggests a novel to our hero, but for the most part it is an insular world that Bellamy presents us with. Everything has been nationalized, conscription involves employment over deployment and everyone, man, woman or child, receive the same amount of income from the government in exchange for their service to the industry of their own choice.
Everything has been nationalized, all "shops" have the same inventory, meaning no trip need be longer than 5 minutes from home. Entertainment comes not from the theater, which seems to have ceased to exist, or concert halls, because for a small share of their allotment every family can have music via telephone lines in their homes. Church services are mostly listened to in this manner as well. Most telling of all, food is centrally produced/cooked rather than in the home, to save labor and cost, so almost everyone always dines out. Dining out, of course, involves going to a private dining room in the civic center.
There is much to admire in Bellamy's vision of Utopia, but what I found most prescient was not the prediction of "credit cards" but the self-imposed isolation of the greater part of society in the name of convenience. No shopping trips, no theater or concerts, no congregation.
Much of that sense of isolation has to do with the protection the Leetes offered West until he adapts to modern life, but it is still odd how West did not once seek out or talk to anyone else in the future and there's the apparent lack of curiosity on the part of the public.
Being part political tract 'Looking Backwards' suffers a little from the exposition of Dr. Leete, but it is the personal revelations of West towards his own society, and Edith's complicated relationship with him, that are at the core of the story and made this a runaway bestseller in its day.
Bellamy wrote during the height of America's "gilded age" when industry and political corruptness were reaching their peak, and more wealth then before imagined was in fewer and fewer hands. Sounds familiar doesn't it? There are enough parallels that can be drawn between our age and the late Victorians that makes Bellamy's explication of its problems and ideas of solution relevant and thought-provoking to us moderns.
