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Looking Forward: A Profile of Edward Bellamy
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18655 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1999 |
1,703 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
Still in print today, in many editions, Looking Backward is profitable rereading. Responding to the economic, social, and political problems at the turn of the century, Bellamy set his novel in the year 2000, when, as he saw it, those problems would be solved happily, and American society would have evolved into a kinder, gentler, more equitable place. Contemporary readers saw the novel as a reflection of their own world; as we step into the year that Bellamy could only imagine, Looking Backward serves, still, as a mirror of our times.
Edward Bellamy was born on March 26, 1850, in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, where his father was a liberal minded, often outspoken Baptist minister. The Chicopee River provided the power for gristmills, sawmills, and cotton mills that had turned the village into a thriving industrial town by the middle of the nineteenth century. Like most industrial centers, this one showed clear class divisions: Industrialists had money and power; workers had neither. As Bellamy grew up, he saw the effects of this class division in many labor strikes, in the faces of poor children trudging to work in the factories, and in the squalor of the workers' homes and lives. At his family's dinner table, his father and his unusually well-educated mother (unlike other women in Chicopee Falls, she read Latin and Greek) instilled in him the virtues of humanitarian service and good works.
Quiet and somewhat shy, Bellamy spent much of his childhood reading--biographies and adventure novels were among his favorites--and imagining his future as a military hero. But his frail health prevented him from attending college; he accompanied his brother to Union College for one year but only sat in on one literature course. After an obligatory
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