Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy

951 Words4 Pages
Edward Bellamys’, Looking Backward describes the late nineteenth century and all of its major problems by creating a character that time travels to the twentieth century to find that the problems no longer exist. The story begins with an aristocrat named Julian West who lives in the late nineteenth century Boston. Julian has a good life with some wealth and a lovely bride to be named Edith Bartlett. Due to Mr. West’s’ sleeping disorder he regularly has a doctor visit him at night to help him get to sleep using meditation. As the book continues we find out that Julian has been in a trance for nearly one hundred years and it is now the year 2000. The strange people in the bedchamber with him when he wakes are Dr. Leete, Edith Leete, and Dr. Leete’s wife. While Julian West is getting acquainted with twentieth century Boston he finds himself involved in basic, but very in depth conversations with Dr. Leete about how the structure of America has changed since his time. West finds out that overall life in his day was a dog eat dog world, but due to a massive overhaul of morals and the government, twentieth century life is now a place of convenience, love for one another and economic equality. The book ends with West falling in love with Edith Leete and remaining in the twentieth century. This book when it was written must have been a total fantasy to the readers of the late nineteenth century. It is amazing how Bellamy describes Boston of 2000 and how he picks and chose’s the problems of the nineteenth century to solve in the twentieth century. While reading this book it was clear to me that Bellamy was trying to say that the world could be such a better place if we all put our main problems together and solve them together as a whole. He described a twentieth century full of people who did not want to ruin each other’s livelihood for the benefit of ones
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