Chapters One-Two

The first two chapters of Looking Backward are used to introduce the main character and narrator, Julian West. Although he addresses the audience in the year 2000, he reveals that he was born in 1857. He follows that announcement with an explanation of the culture of the late nineteenth century, using an analogy in which he compares the social structure to that of a coach being pulled by the masses while certain people sit on top. He admits that, as a member of the privileged class of Boston society, he was one of those riding instead of pulling the coach. His story begins in 1887 when he is thirty years old and planning to marry a wealthy woman named Edith Bartlett. Their wedding is delayed because multiple labor strikes impede construction of their new house. A chronic insomniac distressed by these circumstances, West calls upon a mesmerist to induce...