Summary Of Bellamy's Looking Backward

In the book Looking Backward, written by Edward Bellamy, Bellamy tells the story of a high-born man named Julian West who was mesmerized in 1887 and awaken over a hundred years later. In the late nineteenth century, whether the gaps between the rich and the poor or the differences between the educated and the ignorant seemed greater than ever. There was no easy and short-term cure for this chronic problem. Julian West was the rich and educated, and also lived a life by exploiting the labor of working class who lived in desperate conditions. He was put into deep sleep by Dr. Pillsbury in the subterranean sleeping chamber he had built for the purpose of blocking out noises and not awaken until September 2000. During the 100 years he was asleep, …show more content…
He was so used to the thought of being superior to manual labor whom, to him, meant related to “a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people” and suffer from irremediable “natural dullness or make up for original mental deficiencies” (Bellamy 106). Especially when Dr. Leete tried to explain to him the importance of equal opportunities of culture and access to higher education at an affordable cost, he insisted on arguing with what he thought of working class. His thought, as epitome of the upper class, implies what people like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller would have thought about educational equality. Bellamy critiqued not only the phenomenon of wealth concentration, but also capitalists failed to take care of labor and improve the working and living condition (Bellamy …show more content…
It was the time when people noticed how capitalism could influence people’s daily life, such as unhealthy relations between employees and employers. It was believed that “the concentration of wealth [is] inevitable, natural and justified by progress.” Therefore, the division of wealth could not be equal as capital, like money, did not go to the hard-working labor, but went to those who owned or had access to capital. Rich people got richer and richer, while poor working class remained the same. Thus the wealth gap grew wider and there would no doubt lead to more class conflicts. According to Foner (2012), the discussion of “respectable classes” and “dangerous classes” was popular among the public during the gilded age. In the case of capitalism, it is often a small number of people in control of most of the social resources while the rest share very little