Bellamy, Edward (1850-1898)

 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Edward Bellamy was born in Chicopee (now part of greater Springfield) in western Massachusetts, on 26 March 1850 to a well-established Protestant family. Suffering from the tuberculosis that would eventually cause his early death on 22 May 1898, Bellamy spent some time travelling in Europe before joining the staff of the Evening Post of New York, which he left in 1872 to return to his family home as an assistant editor on the Springfield Union. He ended his career in journalism in 1876 to devote his time to the writing of fiction but, in an efffort to regain his health, spent the years 1877 to 1878 in the Hawaiian islands. For most of his life, Bellamy lived in the family house in Chicopee, now known as the Edward Bellamy House.

While Bellamy was not veg*n and the fictional worlds created in his novels and shorter narratives mirror contemporary practices of animal exploitation and consumption, a striking characteristic of the utopian world constructed in Looking Backwards (1888) and the sequel Equality (1897) is precisely Bellamy's imagining of the end of carnism. His vision of a world governed by the principles of socialism (or, his preferred term, "nationalism") spoke to the radical economic disparities of the Gilded Age that were experienced by his readers. Looking Backwards was among the best-selling US novels of the nineteenth century and it gave rise to the establishment of Nationalist Clubs that were supported by Bellamy's magazine, The New Nation (1891-1894). In Equality he extended his utopian imaginings to embrace feminism, reproductive rights, and environmentalism, as well as the rights of nonhuman animals.

 

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