by Laura Miller
EDWARD BELLAMY
LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000–1887 (1888)
The most influential nineteenth-century “utopia” and a book with a political vision that inspired a network of “Bellamy Clubs” and, ultimately, a political party.
In Edward Bellamy’s (1850–98) story, Julian West, a well-bred Bostonian, is a blessed man. He has great wealth, high intellect, and, in Edith Bartlett, a beautiful fiancée. There are two flies in Julian’s ointment. One is his vague unease regarding the huge, unfair divisions between rich and poor in 1887. The other is an “insomnia,” worse even than Macbeth’s. Julian is a happy man, yes, but a worried man.
Street noise is particularly troublesome to Julian. He constructs a secret, soundproof room under his house, known only to his servant, where, after being mesmerized by a friend (in the 1880s, “mesmerization,” or hypnosis, was all the rage,) Julian hopes to fall into a deep slumber. It is not to be. So successful is the mesmerization that Julian wakes on September 10, 2000—113 years into the future. He discovers that a fire destroyed his house soon after he fell asleep and killed the servant who alone knew his master’s location. No one could discover what had happened to Julian West and, after all this time, no one cares.
Bellamy was very excited about what he called “the rate of change” in his world, and appended a postscript on the subject to his fable. His vision of the future was, however, rather too accelerated; Looking Backward’s “Year 2000” is very different from that we actually experienced (the fate of many utopias—was 1984 at all like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?)
Bellamy’s 2000 is literally “millennial,” the perfect world at the end of time. Julian discovers a perfect society, which has solved the problems of industrialization by abolishing laissez-faire capitalism in favor of socialism (though Bellamy was careful to avoid this word, freighted with negative associations for his readership). Wealth is equally distributed and private property abolished. Everyone receives a college education and lifelong care from a benevolent state. Work is light and rewarding and the retirement age is forty-five—life expectancy is now much higher and social ills including crime, corruption, and poverty have vanished.
Unable to return to his “present” (mesmerism offers no return tickets—only H. G. Wells’s time machine could do that, see here) Julian is happy to be transported permanently into the future and, in fact, has a truly nightmarish moment when he thinks that this voyage to 2000 is all a fantasy. He falls in love with Edith Leete, the great-granddaughter of his first and former love, Edith Bartlett, and Bellamy ends the story with the following, uplifting declaration:
The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
All thoughtful men agree that the present aspect of society is portentous of great changes. The only question is, whether they will be for the better or the worse. Those who believe in man’s essential nobleness lean to the former view, those who believe in his essential baseness to the latter. For my part, I hold to the former opinion. Looking Backward was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us, and is not far away.
Bellamy’s book itself had a fairly immediate impact, becoming a national best-seller in the year after its initial release. It has stayed in print continually since first publication and spawned a huge number of sequels, as well as literary “responses” (not consistently positive), including William Morris’s utopian News From Nowhere (1890). In the immediate aftermath of its release, hundreds of “Nationalist” (or “Bellamy”) clubs sprang up across the U.S.—forums in which the novel’s ideas, and their potential for realization, were earnestly discussed. Bellamy joined the increasingly politicized movement in the early 1890s and even ran his own, short-lived magazine, The New Nation (previously The Nationalist), to disseminate the group’s ideas. Financial difficulties and the increasing popularity of the People’s Party (which itself later merged with the Democratic party) saw the Nationalist movement wane in the mid-1890s, but Bellamy’s book—which he had, at one point, described as a “literary fantasy, a fairy tale”—had already made its mark.
MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS)
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT (1889)
This satirical story imagines a very different Camelot as nineteenth-century American citizen Hank Morgan is transported to medieval England following a blow to the head.
“I am not an American. I am the American,” is a pronouncement often misattributed to celebrated writer and humorist Mark Twain (he was, in fact, quoting his friend Frank Fuller), and it is easy to see why, since, among American writers, he has the firmest grasp of the national voice. But what, this most American of American writers wondered, was it to be American?
The core question, as Twain saw it, was the new country’s (America) relationship with the old country (England). There was conflict as well as inheritance in the American mix. It was this contradiction that Twain set his imagination to probe in his major work of fiction, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a number of writers became fascinated by the idea of time travel as a fictional device, but most, such as H. G. Wells, were happier with travel into the future than into the past. After all, if you alter the past, how can you preserve the present you have just left? Twain rode roughshod over the possible paradoxes. A Connecticut Yankee opens with Twain meeting a stranger who has an amazing tale to tell. Hank Morgan has returned from Camelot—King Arthur’s court. This was the place where the ideals of British nobility, gentlemanliness, and chivalry had been formed. It was the starting point of English civilization.
Hank is bashed on the head with a crowbar and finds himself transported from 1879 Hartford, Connecticut, to a field just outside Camelot, England, in 528. Our hero’s first reaction, on being told by a passer-by where he has landed, is despair: “I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered: ‘I shall never see my friends again—never, never again. They will not be born for more than thirteen hundred years yet.’” Despair gives way to terror when a passing knight picks on him for a bit of lance-practice.
Hank is a true American, however. He introduces himself and takes a tour of that England and is both amused and disgusted by what he sees. Merlin turns out to be fake—no more skillful than a third-rate circus magician—and England is riddled with a corrupt class system. To a freeborn Connecticut Yankee it is confusing and horrifying. Hank takes charge. What the sixth century needs, he perceives, is some good old (that’s to say “new”) American knowhow. Technology, industry, factories, steam power, telephones, bicycles, guns. In no time at all, wheels have replaced hooves. In no time at all he is the most important man in the country, more important indeed than the king. He assumes a title—Sir Boss.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
The plot, thereafter, becomes complicated. Hank marries and has a baby. He sets up (secretly) a military training institution, based on West Point. His men are trained in modern warfare, with modern weaponry. They are few in number but formidable. Civil War breaks out and Hank’s tiny force defeats the Church’s attempted coup with electric fences and machine guns, but at the moment of his triumph, Hank is wounded. Merlin, in disguise, poisons him.
How should we read this world? Twain’s American contemporaries saw the tale as a wholly patriotic fable—its satire on the filth, servitude, and superstition of “old England” made their new country shine all the brighter. Twain himself seems partly to have supported this view. But, like all great works of imagination, A Connecticut Yankee can be read more than one way. The tale does not fit Twain’s own too-neat description of a moral lesson benevolently given by an American teacher to the English people. Hank represents progress—but it is the progress of blood, iron, and mass murder. In his passages of Gatling guns spitting death at the unarmed opponents, Twain is surely thinking of the American Civil War. Extraordinarily, wit
h that strange foresight that great artists have, Twain seems to have been vouchsafed a vision of the carnage to come in 1914. It’s terrible—but funny too—and very Twain.
H. G. WELLS
THE TIME MACHINE (1895)
Popularizing the concept of machinery as a means of time travel, Wells’s enduring fantasy depicts a distant future populated by frail, simple humanoids and dark, twisted cannibals.
Who is the Shakespeare of imaginative fiction? For many it’s a debate between H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Yet, the hallmark Vernian and Wellsian narratives are different. The Frenchman’s specialism was the voyage imaginaire—spectacular tourism into the unexplored—conducting his travelers 20,000 leagues under the sea (see here), to the center of and around Earth (in a timetable-defying eighty days), and even to the moon. Wells’s preferred style was what he called “scientific romances”—works of the imagination plausibly anchored in the most recent discoveries of science. Imagination, for Wells, went hand in hand with authentication, and his eye for the fictional possibilities in scientific advancements was uncanny. The Invisible Man was produced barely months after Wilhelm Roentgen demonstrated the power of the X-ray to see through flesh, The War of the Worlds took off from W. H. Pickering’s observations of suspiciously active “canals” on the surface of Mars, and The War in the Air followed two years after the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.
Where did this brilliantly imaginative popularizer of the latest science come from? H. G. Wells sprang from a generation and class liberated from traditional servitudes by the 1870 Universal Education Act. His father was a professional cricketer who, after injury, turned small—and unsuccessful—shopkeeper. The family broke up when Wells was thirteen, and his mother went to work in a large country house, where he was allowed the run of the library. On leaving school, the young Wells served an apprenticeship in a draper’s “emporium,” which he loathed (the experience is immortalized in his comedy Kipps).
Sharp as a tack, at eighteen he won a government scholarship to the Normal School of Science where he was heavily influenced by T. H. Huxley, the evolutionary advocate known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” The Origin of Species (published seven years before Wells was born) became the young author’s bible, and his belief in its infallibility would be unshaken until his death. Huxley had introduced into the creed the notion of “survival of the fittest”—something ensured by eternal struggle within and between the species. It, too, became an article of faith for the young man.
Wells did not excel in his classes. He was too preoccupied with writing in the student journal: notably on an early version of The Time Machine—a short story called “The Chronic Argonauts.” Had he worked on his lessons, Wells might have become a middlingly successful scientist. But his genius lay in absorbing new scientific discoveries and imaginatively repackaging them for the unscientific masses. What form should that package take? Wells was initially unsure. The Time Machine began as a series of rather plodding explanatory essays. But he soon realized that audiences prefer stories to lectures. Thus his career, and its hundred books, began.
The Time Machine was Wells’s first published scientific romance, and was more voyage imaginaire than even Verne could have devised. He wrote the story in the chance of finding a market for it. Completed at a low point in his early life, Wells remembers—in Experiment in Autobiography—working on it late one summer night by an open window in a meager lodgings in Kent, England, while a disagreeable landlady grumbled at him in the darkness outside because of the excessive use of her lamp.
The Time Machine opens with a vivid paragraph, designed to hook the casually skimming reader of the magazine The New Review in which it was first serialized:
The Time Traveler (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses.
In “The Chronic Argonauts” the traveler was given a name: Dr. Nebogipfel (it translates from German as “foggy mountain peak”). In this later incantation, rendering the traveler and his audience anonymous at their regular Thursday evening gatherings was a fine touch. His identity must, of course, be kept secret to preserve the secrecy of the time machine.
To his friends (an all-male company, of course) the traveler explains two things. First, the nature of the fourth dimension; second, the fact that he has invented a time machine to navigate it. His audience is gathered to witness his first experimental voyage, from which he will return the following Thursday. He duly returns and reports on his three journeys into the future.
The first is to the year 802,701. He discovers that evolution has gone into reverse—human kind has devolved into two contrary species: the effete Eloi, who spend their lives in a kind of Garden of Eden, doing nothing but play; and the cannibalistic Morlocks, slaving in a subterranean factory world, emerging only at night, to feast on their captors.
The Eloi live their pretty and pointless lives under a gigantic decayed Sphinx, recalling Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” and the fall of civilization. The Eloi are themselves versions of the late-nineteenth-century decadents, notably Oscar Wilde and his followers. After battling the Morlocks the traveler makes two further trips forward, witnessing the heat-death of the solar system in the sun’s dying days, with nothing living in it but fungus and sinister crablike things. With this, he takes off again, never to return.
Time travel had been a favorite motif of imaginative literature long before Wells’s chronic fantasies. The weak point in the scenario, however, was how you actually got into the future, or the past. A popular technique was that of Bunyan, in The Pilgrim’s Progress:
As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream.
Two imaginative works that influenced The Time Machine use this device: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889, here) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Both have protagonists who fall asleep and, like Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle, mysteriously wake up in the far future. But is it the real future, or a dream future? Morris and Bellamy were proto-socialists, and congenial to young Wells, but there was something fundamentally lame in the dream-vision gimmick. While another early title for his story was “The Time Traveller,” Wells finally settled on The Time Machine—for him, the mechanics of the story were all-important.
But what, precisely, is the machine? Wells does not give a detailed description, other than it has a saddle and a triangular frame, and some mysterious crystals propelling it. Clearly, it is a version of the bicycle—the machine that liberated the late-Victorian slaving masses, cooped up in the urban centers of late industrial England (the next novel Wells wrote, The Wheels of Chance [1896] was on just this theme.) A bicycle capable of whizzing along the fourth dimension is implausible. But Wells’s bejeweled roadster makes the point that, if we ever do cross the time-barrier, technology will get us there.
One direct inspiration for The Time Machine was an article by Simon Newcomb published in Nature in 1894, which the traveler mentions in his initial exposition to his friends. Newcomb, one of the country’s leading mathematicians, argued that, “as a perfectly legitimate exercise of thought” we should admit the possibility of objects existing in a fourth dimension—time. Wells undertook just such an exercise.
The other scientific validation of his story for Wells was a lecture by his mentor T. H. Huxley in 1894, who made the supremely pessimistic point that, “our globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is gradually cooling down… the time will come when evolution will mean an adaptation to universal winter, and all forms of life will die out… if for millions of years our globe has taken the upward road, yet some time the summit will be reached and the downward road will b
e commenced.” Mathematical speculation and cosmic gloom aside, The Time Machine is a fun adventure and reads as freshly today as it did in 1895.
Class conflict was another topic. Was society in the 1890s polarizing rather than coming together? Would the working class, like the Morlocks—the exploited “many” as Shelley called them—revenge themselves at some point in the future on the privileged “few”? How should a socialist deal with that? Was there a solution? (The formation of the Independent Labor Party, a couple of years before was one; and one of which Wells approved.)
However, one of the problems of scientific romance is that the basic science can be demonstrably wrong. Wells’s fellow novelist Israel Zangwill pointed out that the traveler, hurtling forward through time, would pass the date of his own death. Moreover, over the millennia, the steel frame of the time machine would rust. All that would arrive in 802,701 would be some bones, metal fragments, and a few dulled crystals.
The science, which seemed plausible in 1895, is now not so. Humankind currently lives in an interglacial period, between ice ages. In ten thousand years or so, the elliptical orbit of the earth will bring with it another ice age—Wells saw a continuous climatic line from 1895 to 802,701, with no intervening ice ages. Nor will the sun gradually cool, as Huxley predicted, like some gigantic radiator. When its nuclear fuel is used up, it will explode into a vast fireball, not ending cosmically frozen, but fried.