SOURCE: “Looking Inward: Edward Bellamy's Spiritual Crisis,” in American Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 5, December, 1973, pp. 538-57.

In the essay that follows, Sancton examines Bellamy's religious and philosophical views as they are expressed in Looking Backward.

It is a mistake to say of Edward Bellamy, as many have done, that he lived by the religious philosophy expressed in his essay, The Religion of Solidarity; that this was the definitive expression of his faith; and that his utopian novel Looking Backward was the logical working out of those beliefs in a social context. Such a generalization assumes that at the age of 24 Bellamy solved the eternal riddles of the universe to his satisfaction and spent the rest of his life writing stories and novels to illustrate his “philosophy.”¹ As convenient as this analysis may be, it ignores Bellamy's spiritual and intellectual complexity. The Edward Bellamy who emerges from the pages...