SOURCE: Forbes, Allyn B. Review of Looking Backward, 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy, with an introduction by Heywood Broun. New England Quarterly 4, no. 4 (October 1931): 804-06.

In the following review of the 1931 edition of Looking Backward, Forbes disagrees with the ideas expressed in Heywood Broun's introduction to the edition, and states that the importance of Looking Backward should not be found in its accurate predictions, but in the fact that the utopian idealist novel, a form of escapist literature at the time, was part of a large movement resulting from the social and economic problems of the last two decades of the 1800s.

It is perhaps the inevitable fate of most prophecies that they pass away leaving no trace of their burden of wisdom, lucky indeed if they have caught the ear of even a handful of people at the time they were uttered. Some few, however, have the questionable...