The Edward Bellamy MEGAPACK ®. Edward Bellamy
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Название: The Edward Bellamy MEGAPACK ®

Автор: Edward Bellamy

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Научная фантастика

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isbn: 9781434446589

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Edward Bellamy was born in Chicopee, Massachusetts. His father was Rufus King Bellamy (1816–1886), a Baptist minister and a descendant of Joseph Bellamy. His mother, Maria Louisa Putnam Bellamy, was herself the daughter of a Baptist minister named Benjamin Putnam, a man forced to withdraw from the ministry in Salem, Massachusetts, following objections to his becoming a Freemason.

      Bellamy attended public school at Chicopee Falls before leaving for Union College of Schenectady, New York, where he studied for just two semesters. Upon leaving school, Bellamy made his way to Europe for a year, spending extensive time in Germany. Bellamy briefly studied law but abandoned that field without ever having practiced as a lawyer, instead entering the world of journalism. In this capacity Bellamy briefly served on the staff of the New York Post before returning to his native Massachusetts to take a position at the Springfield Union.

      At the age of 25, Bellamy developed tuberculosis, the disease that would ultimately kill him. He suffered with its effects throughout his entire adult life. In an effort to regain his health, Bellamy spent a year in the Hawaiian Islands (1877 to 1878). Returning to the United States, he decided to abandon the daily grind of journalism in favor of literary work, which put fewer demands upon his time and his health.

      Bellamy married Emma Augusta Sanderson in 1882. The couple had two children.

      Literary career

      Bellamy’s early novels, including Six to One (1877), Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880) [included in this Megapack], and Miss Ludington’s Sister (1884) [included in this Megapack] were unremarkable works, making use of standard psychological plots. A turn to utopian science fiction with Looking Backward, 2000–1887 [included in this Megapack], published in January 1888, captured the public imagination and catapulted Bellamy to literary fame. The publisher of the book could scarcely keep up with demand. Within a year the book had sold some 200,000 copies and by the end of the 19th century it had sold more copies than any other book published in America outside of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

      Although Bellamy claimed he did not write Looking Backward as a blueprint for political action, but rather sought to write “a literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity,” the book inspired legions of inspired readers to establish so-called Nationalist Clubs, beginning in Boston late in 1888. Bellamy’s vision of a country relieved of its social ills through abandonment of the principle of competition and establishment of state ownership of industry proved an appealing panacea to a generation of intellectuals alienated from the dark side of Gilded Age America. By 1891 it was reported that no fewer than 162 Nationalist Clubs were in existence.

      Bellamy himself came to actively participate in the political movement which emerged around his book, particularly after 1891 when he founded his own magazine, The New Nation, and began to promote united action between the various Nationalist Clubs and the emerging People’s Party. For the next three and a half years, Bellamy gave his all to politics, publishing his magazine, working to influence the platform of the People’s Party, and publicizing the Nationalist movement in the popular press. This phase of Bellamy’s life came to an end in 1894, when The New Nation was forced to suspend publication owing to financial difficulties.

      With the key activists of the Nationalist Clubs largely absorbed into the apparatus of the People’s Party, Bellamy abandoned politics for a return to literature. He set to work on a sequel to Looking Backward entitled Equality [included in this Megapack], attempting to deal with the ideal society of the post-revolutionary future in greater detail. The book saw print in 1898 and would prove to be Bellamy’s final creation.

      LOOKING BACKWARD

      From 2000 to 1887

      AUTHOR’S PREFACE

      Historical Section Shawmut College, Boston, December 26, 2000

      Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval! The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages!

      The object of this volume is to assist persons who, while desiring to gain a more definite idea of the social contrasts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are daunted by the formal aspect of the histories which treat the subject. Warned by a teacher’s experience that learning is accounted a weariness to the flesh, the author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative, which he would be glad to fancy not wholly devoid of interest on its own account.

      The reader, to whom modern social institutions and their underlying principles are matters of course, may at times find Dr. Leete’s explanations of them rather trite—but it must be remembered that to Dr. Leete’s guest they were not matters of course, and that this book is written for the express purpose of inducing the reader to forget for the nonce that they are so to him. One word more. The almost universal theme of the writers and orators who have celebrated this bimillennial epoch has been the future rather than the past, not the advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be made, ever onward and upward, till the race shall achieve its ineffable destiny. This is well, wholly well, but it seems to me that nowhere can we find more solid ground for daring anticipations of human development during the next one thousand years, than by “Looking Backward” upon the progress of the last one hundred.

      That this volume may be so fortunate as to find readers whose interest in the subject shall incline them to overlook the deficiencies of the treatment is the hope in which the author steps aside and leaves Mr. Julian West to speak for himself.

      CHAPTER 1

      I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say, “eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.

      These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated СКАЧАТЬ