All through the 1870s Bellamy kept notebooks in which he considered a variety of utopian schemes, but he concluded that such schemes were not practical. When he began to think about
Looking Backward, he told us later, it was not with the idea of making a serious contribution to social reform but merely as “a literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity” (245). But as he realized the potential of the idea of universal military service his plan for the book changed, and “instead of a mere fairy tale of social perfection, it became the vehicle of a definite scheme of industrial reorganization”(247). He had married Emma Sanderson in 1882, and the birth of their two children in 1884 and 1886 hastened Bellamy’s wish to improve the world they would grow up in. He began the writing…
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Citation: Macdonald, Alex. "Looking Backward: 2000-1887". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 August 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3876, accessed 25 November 2024.]
