Bringing the City Back In: Space and Place
in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era

James Connolly
Ball State University

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward sought to understand the social consequences of industrialization by looking at a city. One of the Gilded Age's best-selling books, the utopian novel magically transported lead character Julian West to a futuristic Boston set in the year 2000 and contrasted that ideal, cooperative world with the harsh reality of individualism-drenched, industrial Boston in 1887. Bellamy's vision of a twenty-first-century city was prescient about technology: it included automation, mass communication, and swift transportation. His social predictions proved less successful. Boston in the year 2000 was populated by Victorian ladies and gentlemen and lacked the cultural variety we associate with contemporary city life.	1
Bellamy's portrait of the late nineteenth-century city was a bit more sophisticated. In a scene near the end of the story, West returned to 1887 Boston in a dream. He wandered through the Washington Street shopping district ("Stores! stores! stores! Miles of stores!") to South Boston's manufacturing district, where he contemplated the inefficient multiplicity of manufacturing operations and spoke briefly with striking and unemployed workers. Toward evening he moved through the maze of financial institutions on State Street amidst the flurry of activity they generated. By dark West had entered the "squalor and degradation" of the South Cove tenement district, a place he had been before but which now seemed so horrible that he fled in disgust, returning to the "magnificent home" of his well-to-do fiancee in the upper-crust Back Bay.1	2
Yet for all its specificity regarding time and place, Bellamy's novel displayed little sensitivity to Boston's distinctiveness. He understood the spatial segmentation of a Gilded Age city but the setting he described was remarkably generic. None of the stores, factories, or banks that West observed had names, nor did Bellamy develop any sense of the ethnic multiplicity or cultural uniqueness of Boston. West does not meet individuals, he encounters "workers," "clerks," "storekeepers," and "hopeless-faced women." The anonymity was intentional. Bellamy was exploring the waste, inefficiency, and inequality of an industrializing America wedded to individualism. The city was merely the setting where the social changes he deplored took place. Boston, he implied, was no different from any other large city. Bellamy was generally conscious of the spatial patterns that defined a late nineteenth-century city, but had little interest in the particular experiences that gave the city its distinctive character.	3
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