Bellamy Edward. Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887

Webster’s Thesaurus Edition for PSAT, SAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, and AP English Test Preparation.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