LOOKING BACKWARD FROM 2000-1887

Chapter 1

I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. "What!"
you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen
fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was
about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after
Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east
wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period
marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present
year of grace, 2000.

These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add
that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no
person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises
to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly
assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake,
if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If
I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the
assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will
go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part
of the nineteenth century the civilization of to-day, or anything like
it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were
already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the
immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as
they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were
far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and
the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also
educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness
enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and
occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of
life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others,
rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grand-parents
had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had
any, would enjoy a like easy existence.