It’s the kind of utopia in which strict rules and regulations have been introduced and which everyone unquestioningly follows.

The crux of Morris’s short review is a profound disagreement with Bellamy on a central issue.īellamy’s future society is profoundly regimented. Himself the author of a number of medievalising romances, Morris was, therefore, intellectually well-suited to sympathise with the aims and style of Bellamy’s book, and in 1889 he published a review of it in the SDF’s official magazine, The Commonweal. In 1883 Morris joined the newly-founded Social Democratic Federation, the first official socialist party in England, and spent the last years of his life writing pamphlets arguing for socialism, and travelling around the country, making passionate speeches to working class audiences. During the 1860s he became increasingly disgusted by the appalling exploitation of much of Britain’s working population by the class of factory owners, bankers and lawyers, and the poverty and misery which resulted.

William Morris was born in 1834 and, despite his privileged upbringing at private school and Oxford, and his lifelong interest in arts and crafts, he became a deeply political figure.

explain very systematically how a centrally planned socialist economy – which has abolished money, gives everyone the same education, requires everyone to work but assigns them jobs best suited to their abilities, and pays everyone the same monthly amount of ‘credits’ – has eliminated the economic chaos, gross waste, and revolting inequality of the society of his day.

highlight the appalling inequality and inefficiency of the runaway capitalism of his own day.

It tells the story of an upper-class citizen of Boston who falls into a deep sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the same city, one hundred and thirteen years later, in 2000.īellamy was a socialist and uses the Perfect Society he describes as existing in 2000 to:

In 1888 the American author Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel, Looking Backward.

Edward bellamy books