SOURCE: Halewood, W. H. “Catching Up with Edward Bellamy.” University of Toronto Quarterly 63, no. 3 (spring 1994): 451-61.

In the following essay, Halewood charges that the same characteristics of Looking Backward that made it popular with nineteenth-century readers would render the novel unappealing to a twentieth-century audience.

Looking Backward, 2000-1887 is a ‘canon’ problem only in its absence from the canon. It is an almost vanished work, interesting to consider as the date draws near that might have validated its prophecies only to take note of the different route we have come—not just our failure to achieve its utopia, but our rejection of it—and our rejection, also, of its kind as a possible kind for serious fiction. Clearly, the contributors to Edward Bellamy Abroad (1962), who hoped that their work would ‘promote a reassessment of Bellamy in the literary histories of the United States,’ misjudged the depth and firmness...