SOURCE: Filler, Louis. “Edward Bellamy and the Spiritual Unrest.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 8, no. 3 (April 1949): 239-49.

In the following essay, Filler examines the social and religious unrest in the late 1800s and maintains that Looking Backward may have been a catalyst of political reform by which a unification of the social and economic classes was achieved.

Edward Bellamy's name almost inevitably conjures up memory of his utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887; it rarely suggests more, and this is a pity. For Bellamy wrote other tales, and essays, too, which are worth the attention of the student of post-Civil War America. It should be better recalled than it has been that before Looking Backward made him famous, Bellamy had already achieved a substantial reputation as a teller of fanciful stories. William Dean Howells suggested that he had inherited the mantle of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne was also...