Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date."
Browning.
The great poet's lines express Edward Bellamy's aim in writing his famous book. That aim would realize in our country's daily being the Great Declaration that gave us national existence; would, in equality of opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and thereby—the race for the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon the use of its God-given possibilities—achieve a progress unexampled and marvelous.
It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward' changed one of the most brilliant of the younger American authors into an impassioned social reformer whose work was destined to have momentous effect upon the movement of his age. His quality had hitherto been manifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's Process' and 'Miss Ludington's Sister,' and in many short stories exquisite in their imaginative texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly original development of psychical themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and 'To Whom This May Come' will long linger in the memory of magazine readers of the past twenty years.
'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study of uncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the lineal intellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in America any lack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction of style which mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there was a strong dominant note prophetic of the author's future activity. That note was a steadfast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature, a sense of the meaning of love in its true and universal sense. 'Looking Backward,' though ostensibly a romance, is universally recognized as a great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise it could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, are instances of the art of the trained novelist which make the work unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had not the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready and waiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little more than a decade has followed its publication, and the world is filled with the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction to economic thought and shape to political action.
Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,—almost exactly in the middle of the century whose closing years he was destined so notably to affect. His home has always been in his native village of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of the group of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps responsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternal grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionary days, a friend of Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr. He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But this inherited trait marked his social views with a strongly anti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated his ideas, and he held that a merely material prosperity would not be worth the working for as a social ideal. An equality in material well-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true spiritual development of the race.
Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not graduated. After a year in Germany he studied law and entered the bar, but never practiced. A literary career appealed to him more strongly, and journalism seemed the more available gateway thereto. His first newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York 'Evening Post,' and from that journal he went to the Springfield 'Union.' Besides his European trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a return across the continent gave a considerable geographical range to his knowledge of the world at large.