The book Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy is a book about the ideas of the 19th century and how much the opinion of the 19th century American was different form the 21st century American. The Author is writing in the 19th century to a 19th century audience. He has very different ideas from others in is time period, and is viewed as very radical by the general population. The book starts out by taking place in 1887. The main character Julian West is an average 19th century citizen. It is a point in time where there is a small population of the world that has all of the wealth, and he Julian is part of that population. Others in his social class feel that they are superior to the rest of the world and deserve to be treated as so. He is married to Edith Bartlett who comes from an aristocrat family out of Boston. They were going to get married as soon as the house they were building was complete. It had been delayed a lot because of all the strikes going on at the time. They were very common, mostly about employees wanting more from their up-tight bosses. Julian suffered from insomnia and slept in a chamber deep underground his house. He also took medication that was prescribed to him by a doctor so that he could fall into a deep sleep.
One day his servant did not wake him. He later wakes up in a very strange house in an unfamiliar setting, with voices and faces of people he had never met before. After some discussion he is informed that it is September 10th of the year 2000. One day he awakes in an unfamiliar place with faces and voices he had never seen before. It was still the same place where he had fallen asleep, but everything was different. It turns out that he had been asleep for a very long, and was in the year 2000. At first he doesn't believe it and thinks that his friends are playing a joke on him. But the owner of house, Doctor Leete, informs him otherwise. It turns out that Julian's house burned down May, 30 of 1887 but he was protected by his underground chamber that he slept in.