Looking Backward, Going Forward

Perhaps Edward Bellamy anticipated the retrospective examinations that would mark our country's culture in this bi-millennial year. Bellamy, long famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1887, regarded the year 2000, traditionally enough, as "the closing year of the twentieth century," the ending of the millennium--not, like current political leaders, as the first year of the twenty-first century and the new millennium. In most other respects, however, this nineteenth-century social critic was far more innovative in making his predictions of the twentieth century's material and moral advances. He placed the dateline "Historical Section, Shawmut College, Boston, December 26, 2000" on his novel in 1887, and with the passage of the actual date, we can appraise the accuracy of the vision with which Bellamy himself putatively "looked backward" on it--much as the arrival of 1984 marked the occasion for numerous assessments of George Orwell's anti-utopian novel.

The hero of Bellamy's utopian novel, Julian West, awakes in the Boston of 2000 from a Rip Van Winkle-like sleep of 113 years. He gazes out upon an urban landscape and can scarcely recognize it as the same city in which he went to sleep, when he sees the new Boston's size and grandeur:

At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures...along which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late-afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before.... [Then] I looked east--Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not one of its green islets missing.

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