Looking Backward, 2000-1887
Glossary
B
- Boston, 1887 vs. 2000
- The novel's dual setting: the smoke, slums, and labor unrest of Julian's own Gilded Age Boston, contrasted point by point against the same city in the year 2000 — its wide public buildings, absence of shops and banks, and reorganized social life — with the contrast doing most of the novel's persuasive work.
- Related: Julian West, The Great Trust
C
- Central Warehouse and Sample Stores
- The retail system of the year 2000: goods are examined at local sample stores and ordered via credit card, then delivered directly from central warehouses, eliminating the private shopkeeper, redundant competing stores, and the labor of comparison shopping across many merchants.
- Related: The Credit Card, Edith Leete
D
- Decoration Day
- The 1887 national holiday, observed on the day Julian's story begins, honoring the Union dead of the Civil War with cemetery visits and processions — Bellamy's precise historical anchor for the world Julian leaves behind.
- Related: Julian West
- Dr. Leete
- The Boston physician who discovers Julian in the excavated chamber beneath his old house and takes him in, serving as Julian's host and the novel's chief explainer of the twentieth century's economic and social order.
- Related: Edith Leete, Mrs. Leete
- Dr. Pillsbury
- The mesmerist Julian regularly summoned to induce artificial sleep for his chronic insomnia. His absence in New Orleans on the night of the fire is why no one thought to search for Julian in the buried chamber, explaining his forgotten sleep of over a century.
- Related: Mesmeric Trance, Julian West
E
- Edith Bartlett
- Julian West's fiancée in 1887, whose locket-portrait is found on his chest when he is discovered in the buried chamber, allowing the Leetes to identify him. Edith Leete is her direct descendant and namesake, and comes to believe her own life has been shaped by that inherited connection.
- Related: Edith Leete, Julian West
- Edith Leete
- Dr. Leete's daughter, who becomes Julian's guide to shopping, music, and daily life in the new Boston, and whose romance with Julian carries a secret connection to his own century that is revealed only late in the novel.
- Related: Edith Bartlett, Dr. Leete
- Edward Bellamy
- American author (1850–1898) who published Looking Backward, 2000–1887 in 1888. The novel's vision of a cooperative, moneyless socialist society inspired a real political movement of "Nationalist Clubs" across the United States in the years following publication.
- Related: Julian West, The Industrial Army
- Equality of Income
- The principle underlying the credit-card economy: every citizen receives an identical annual allotment regardless of their occupation's difficulty or prestige, on the reasoning that the nation owes an equal living to every worker who contributes their full effort.
- Related: The Credit Card, The Industrial Army
I
- International Emigration Indemnity
- The arrangement Dr. Leete describes by which nations compensate each other for citizens who permanently emigrate, since every nation's industrial army depends on a fixed, planned labor force — Bellamy's answer to how a fully planned economy handles international movement.
- Related: The Industrial Army
J
- Julian West
- The novel's narrator, a wealthy, idle Bostonian born in 1857 who suffers from chronic insomnia and is put into a mesmeric trance in his private underground sleeping chamber in 1887 — waking, unaged, in the year 2000 to a transformed Boston.
- Related: The Underground Chamber, Mesmeric Trance, Dr. Pillsbury
- Julian's Nightmare Return
- A dream sequence late in the novel in which Julian finds himself abruptly back in the poverty and inequality of 1887 Boston, now unbearable to him after his months in the year 2000 — dramatizing how completely his sense of what is normal has shifted.
- Related: Julian West, Parable of the Coach
M
- Mesmeric Trance
- The artificially induced deep sleep, performed by Dr. Pillsbury through mesmerism, that Julian used to combat insomnia — and which, through the accident of the house fire and everyone's death or absence, leaves him asleep and forgotten for 113 years.
- Related: Dr. Pillsbury, The Underground Chamber
- Mr. Barton's Sermon
- A Sunday sermon Julian hears delivered over the musical telephone, reflecting from the year 2000's vantage point on how suddenly and completely the nineteenth-century economic order gave way to the new one — a set-piece late in the novel that reinforces Bellamy's argument in a preacher's voice rather than Dr. Leete's.
- Related: Musical Telephone, Dr. Leete
- Mrs. Leete
- Dr. Leete's wife, who along with her husband and daughter helps orient Julian to the customs, technology, and social manners of the year 2000, and who guesses the significance of the locket before her husband does.
- Related: Dr. Leete, Edith Leete
- Musical Telephone
- A household device, demonstrated to Julian in his bedroom, that pipes live orchestral and vocal music into homes at an adjustable volume — Bellamy's imagined technology for on-demand entertainment, later also used to broadcast Mr. Barton's Sunday sermon.
- Related: Mr. Barton's Sermon
N
- Nationalism (Bellamy's Usage)
- Bellamy's own term, voiced through Dr. Leete, for the economic system replacing private capitalism — nationalized ownership and management of all production and distribution, distinct from the later, unrelated political sense of "nationalism" as ethnic or patriotic ideology.
- Related: The Great Trust, The Industrial Army
R
- Retirement at Forty-Five
- The mandatory age at which citizens complete their term of labor in the industrial army and enter a life of full leisure with unchanged income, part of Bellamy's vision of a society that treats old age as an earned reward rather than an economic burden.
- Related: The Industrial Army
S
- Sawyer
- Julian's faithful servant in 1887, the only person besides Dr. Pillsbury who knew of the underground sleeping chamber. Presumed to have died in the fire that destroyed Julian's house the night he fell asleep, leaving no one alive who knew where to find him.
- Related: Dr. Pillsbury, The Underground Chamber
T
- The Credit Card
- The annual allotment issued equally to every citizen regardless of occupation, redeemable at public sample stores and central warehouses — Bellamy's replacement for money, wages, and private commerce.
- Related: Central Warehouse, The Industrial Army
- The Great Trust / Consolidation of Monopolies
- Dr. Leete's account of how nineteenth-century capitalism, unchecked, drove ever-larger business consolidation until individual enterprise became impossible without vast capital — the historical process Bellamy imagines culminating in the nation itself becoming the sole employer and trust.
- Related: The Industrial Army, Dr. Leete
- The Industrial Army
- Bellamy's mechanism for organizing all labor in the year 2000: every citizen serves from age twenty-one to forty-five in a nationally administered workforce, with hazardous or unpleasant jobs requiring shorter hours and duller ones offset by other means, replacing private employment entirely.
- Related: Retirement at Forty-Five, The Credit Card
- The Locket
- The small portrait of Edith Bartlett found on Julian's chest when he is carried into the Leete household — the physical clue that first identifies the sleeper as Julian West and sets in motion the novel's central romantic revelation.
- Related: Edith Bartlett, Edith Leete
- The Parable of the Coach
- Julian's opening extended metaphor for nineteenth-century society: humanity as passengers riding atop a coach dragged by starving, straining workers along a difficult road, while the comfortable few atop worry chiefly about keeping their seats.
- Related: Julian West
- The Underground Chamber
- The soundproofed sleeping room Julian built beneath the foundations of his house to escape Boston's nighttime noise — the site of his 113-year mesmeric sleep, later excavated by Dr. Leete while building a laboratory on the same land.
- Related: Julian West, Mesmeric Trance
W
- Waterproofed Streets
- A small but telling piece of Bellamy's future Boston: continuous waterproof coverings can be extended over the streets during storms, letting citizens go out to public dining halls without umbrellas — an example of collective provision replacing individual improvisation.
- Related: Central Warehouse