SOURCE: “Recent American Fiction.” Atlantic Monthly 61, no. 368 (June 1888): 845-48.

In the following excerpt, the critic discusses the perceived inadequacies of Bellamy's comparison of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries through an analysis of the characters and plot, suggesting that the main flaw in the socialist utopia is that Bellamy ignores the factor of human nature.

In a strict classification, we should hesitate to place Mr. Bellamy's Looking Backward¹ under the head of Fiction. The story element is more subordinate, even, than it need be, and the reader who is in search of entertainment soon discovers that the author is too much in earnest to take any advantage of the opportunities which his whimsy afford him for diverting nonsense. The book is, in truth, a contribution to social and economic philosophy under the guise of an imaginary retrospect, taken a century and more hence by a man who is able...