This was because of a sustained economic crisis that had seen capitalism slide in and out of recession since the early 1870s. That supreme sense of confidence in the capitalist system which had characterized the third quarter of the century. Of rising unemployment and deepening industrial disputes, when people throughout the industrialized nations started to lose Ī sensation in part because of its eloquent and quietly furious indictment of capitalist society. The book, ‘down to the boot-blacks as they st on the curbstones’. Everyone interested in the so-called ‘social question’ debated Lookingīackward – which was only the second novel published in the United States to sell a million copies – wasĬhiefly responsible for this state of affairs. Ordinary middle-class readers as well as socialists of one stripe or another were electrifiedīy the possibilities of the form.

At the fin de siècle, utopian fiction suddenly seemed to be an intellectually and commercially viable mediumįor communicating political ideas, especially 121oppositional Utopia produced in the late nineteenth century, a time when novels about the future probably appeared in greater numbers thanĪt any other period in Western history. Edward Bellamy's socialist romance was by far the most popular and ideologically influential Which was inevitable, from the mental elation, the fever of the intellect that had been the first effect of my tremendousīackward 2000–1887 (1888) is of almost incalculable importance to the history of the utopian form. Then I fell prone on the couch, and, burying my face in the pillow, lay without motion. Leaping from bed, I stood in the middle of the room clasping my temples with all my might between my hands That these scenes as of the life of yesterday which had been passing before my mind concerned a generation long, long ago I remembered who and where I was, and how I had come here, and Like a flash, the recollection of everything came back to me. I do not know how long this condition had lasted – it seemed an interminable time – when, I trust I may never know what it is again. Intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration No other experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless Strange that the sense of this inability shouldīe such anguish! but so we are constituted. Received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make it a person.

I was no moreĪble to distinguish myself from pure being during those moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has Seconds that I sat up thus in bed staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal identity.

Edward bellamy utopia