Diary

Paul Barker

‘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.

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Vol. 10 No. 10 · 19 May 1988 » Paul Barker » Diary (print version)
page 25 | 2648 words

Letters

From Peter Faulkner

Paul Barker was right to conclude his Diary discussion of Edward Bellamy’s Looking backward with the observation that ‘we shouldn’t sneer too much at an old vision till we’ve found a new one’ (LRB, 19 May). It seems all the more regrettable that he should have dismissed William Morris’s vision of a future society in News from Nowhere as ‘stained-glass revivalism’. Morris’s suggestion of a human world marked by equal social relationships, creative fulfilment and concern for the enviroment can surely be seen as a powerful criticism of the dangerous possibilities inherent in Bellamy’s statism. Incidentally, I don’t think Raymond Williams – any more than Morris – saw ecological concerns as seperable from his hopes for socialism.

Peter Faulkner
University of Exeter

From Hilda Snowden

Points to be made about Paul Barker’s Diary. GUM in Moscow is not ‘grim’. It is an exciting place, composed of tiny booths all selling something different – like Aladdin’s caves; many different floors with bridges across a central hall – mirrored ceilings reflecting brilliant colours and bright lights – where one can buy easily by pointing, being given a piece of paper on which is written the payment, going to the cashier (where one admires her dexterity on an abacus) and returning with the receipt to be handed one’s goods already wrapped. GUM is a relic of Tsarist days. It is a bazaar, with myriads of different types of people milling around – a fascinating spectacle; sitting-out places in which to sit and eat the delicious Russian ice-cream, or where one may lunch on a sticky bun and real fruit juices. A place, also, where we were able to talk to many Russian people – surprising how many (especially children) spoke a little English. When I was buying some peasant pottery, one woman pointed out a snip in one of the cups and instructed the assistant to find me another one. I also bought some exquisite hand embroidery and some of the characteristic raspberry glass – treasured souvenirs. Admittedly, this was many years ago, before the advent of packaged tours, but GUM will certainly not have changed, except possibly for the better. More goods, perhaps. Paul Barker’s conclusion, ‘we should not sneer,’ is something of a shock, rather than the logical conclusion of of his article, where everything said about Bellamy’s ‘vision’ is tinged with a faint sneer. In 1988 we are back with 1888 – due to an abandonment of any utopion vision? In 1988 a visit from Mother Theresa can shame us in front of the whole world. Maybe we don’t need a new vision, only the old one really tried. Like Christianity, it may never have been tried.

Hilda Snowden
Bradford