SOURCE: Gardiner, Jane. “Form and Reform in Looking Backward.” American Transcendental Quarterly New Series 2, no. 1 (March 1988): 69-82.

In the following essay, Gardiner contends that the form and structure of Looking Backward were perhaps more instrumental in generating a movement toward social reform than was the implied comparison between nineteenth-century Boston and Boston in the year 2000.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (2000-1887), published in 1888, sold more copies during the nineteenth century than any previous American book with the sole exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a circumstance surely attributable, in some measure, to the casting of Bellamy's reformist tract, like Stowe's before it, in the form of a novel (Shurter xiv-xv). One hundred years after its publication, however, the literary form of Looking Backward has still received far less serious attention than its philosophical content. When Tom H. Towers complains of critics “dismissing the narrative, characters, setting, and language as irrelevant...