Money and Art in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

In Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Julian West goes to sleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000. Written in the first-person, West explains to his twenty-first century audience how their world compares to his own and provides a rich description of how life at the dawn of the twenty-first century compares to life in the Gilded Age. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was the most popular American novel of the nineteenth century. Bellamy used fiction to explain how a truly egalitarian society might come into being, a society in which economic equality was as natural and agreeable as political equality. Bellamy marked a path for social reform. And, initially at least, he succeeded. Dozens of Bellamy societies formed to promote the ideas of the novel. In 1935, American historian Charles Beard and philosopher John Dewey each ranked Looking Backwards, along with Das Kapital and the Golden Bough, as one of the most important books of the previous half century. Utopian fictions commonly present worlds in which art flourishes, money disappears, and laws are unnecessary. But, given his commitment to showing that his utopia was possible, Bellamy could not resort to hand-waving. He had to provide a convincing explanation for how such a society might work, and it is in trying to explain how art comes into being where he encounters trouble. Focusing on Bellamy’s vision of art, money, and law simultaneously reveals the thin thread that holds his utopian vision together.