'That you should be startled by what I shall tell you is to be expected,' Dr Leete tells Julian West as he stirs from his slumbers. 'Your appearance is that of a young man of barely thirty, and your bodily condition seems not too greatly different from that of one just roused from a somewhat long and profound sleep, and yet this is the tenth day of September in the year 2000, and you have slept exactly 113 years, three months and 11 days.' Thus the sleeper awakes, and begins - in the words of Edward Bellamy's title - 'looking backward'. Julian West had fallen asleep in the Boston of 1887, a city riven with poverty and industrial strife. He was now in a new Boston of peace and harmony, which was ticking away like well-oiled clockwork.

LRB 19 May 1988 | PDF Download