![]() ![]() ![]() During a student trip to Europe he perceived, he wrote later, “the inferno of poverty beneath our civilization.” Apprenticing in a law office in nearby Springfield, he qualified to be a lawyer, and with his education and his angular handsomeness might have become a public figure, but he quit the law after one case, saying he would not be a “public blood hound.” Denied entrance to West Point, Edward enrolled for special studies at Union College in Schenectady, reading, at his option, literature, political science, history, and political geography. At 14, after a religious epiphany, Edward joined his father’s congregation. ![]() In 1850 in Chicopee Falls, a village on the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts that was becoming a mill town, Edward Bellamy was born to a devout Calvinist woman and the pastor at the town’s Central Baptist Church. Clement Attlee told Bellamy’s son that the socialist government in England was “a child of the Bellamy idea.” In 1934 John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Edward Weeks all listed Bellamy’s novel second only to Das Kapital as the most important book published after 1885. ![]() In Russia, Tolstoy called Looking Backward “exceedingly remarkable,” heavily marking his copy, Lenin’s future wife read the book, Gorky claimed that every student was acquainted with Bellamy’s ideas, and 50,000 copies were sold before 1917. Bellamy clubs formed in America and other countries. The novel is nearly forgotten today, but by 1897 about 400,000 copies of Looking Backward had sold in the United States. ![]()
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