Bellamy, Edward (1850–1898)

EDWARD BELLAMY WAS born on March 26, 1850, in Chicope, Massachusetts. His father was a Baptist minister and his mother was the daughter of a minister. Both parents could trace their families to 17th-century New England roots. Bellamy appears to have had a relatively comfortable childhood, although his youth was overshadowed by the American Civil War.

In 1867, he attempted to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, only to be rejected. After this disappointment, he studied literature for a year at Union College in Schenectady, New York, before making a trip to Europe. There, he studied the prosperous state china works in Dresden, Germany, and contrasted the conditions of its workers with the squalor experienced by England's working poor. Appalled by life in the English urban slums, he called the lot of factory workers “English serfdom.” He became determined to make changes in society to better the lives of the poor but did not know how to go about it.

In 1869, Bellamy returned to the United States and studied law in a Springfield, Massachusetts, law firm, following the custom common at the time of “reading the law” under an experienced lawyer rather than studying at a law school. In June 1871, Bellamy was admitted to the bar and opened his law office, but after taking a single case he abandoned the legal profession and turned his hand to journalism. Bellamy took a position at the New York Evening Post, then went back to Springfield to write book reviews and editorials for the Springfield Daily Union. He also wrote short stories and began placing them in various magazines and began writing novels, although his first four novels were undistinguished and known only to specialists. The first, Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), was notable only in its use of symbols, which was reminiscent of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorn. The second, Mrs. Ludington's Sister (1884), was a romance about psychic phenomena.

By 1887, Bellamy left journalism to pursue a literary career full-time. This was no small move for a man who had married in 1882 and had his first child in 1884. Perhaps driven by the need to support his family by his writing, in 1888 he produced the one novel by which he has entered the history books.

On the surface, Looking Backward is a rather simplistic romance of a young man of the time who falls into a hypnotic sleep similar to suspended animation. When the protagonist awakens in the year 2000, he discovers a utopian society in which all social problems have been eliminated and everyone is healthy, happy, and well educated. The exploration of this society's workings in meticulous detail is the real meat of the novel, and the admittedly thin plot merely serves as a vehicle for presenting Bellamy's political ideas. The vision propounded in Looking Backward inspired the founding of [Page 44]more than 150 Bellamy clubs. These groups were dedicated to the realization of Bellamy's ideals through social reform legislation and the presentation of his work to others. Bellamy called his movement “Nationalist,” since it involved the nationalization of all real estate and the use of the resulting rents to create a social-welfare fund, but it had very little to do with the usual meaning of the term nationalist. Rather, it was a form of socialism, although distinct from communism (Marxist socialism). From 1891 to 1894, Bellamy used his journalistic experience to edit a weekly paper, the New Nation, for the movement.

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