By 1892, William Dean Howells had already published the novels that would ensure his literary legacy — The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indian Summer and A Hazard of New Fortunes among them. He had moved from Cambridge to New York City to become editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Although he had been actively involved in Republican politics, even writing a biography of Rutherford B. Hayes, he had over the previous decade become increasingly disenchanted with the GOP and more interested in the progressive politics of the era. In a letter to his father in November of 1892 he noted that the Republican party was “a lie in defamation of its past. It promises nothing in the way of economic or social reform, and it is only less corrupt than the scoundrelly democracy. The only live and honest party is the People’s Party.”

That fall he started writing a series of articles in Cosmopolitan that later was published as the novel, A Traveler from Altruria. This utopian novel was in the vein of dozens of novels published in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the end of the century. (The most popular of these novels, probably the only one remembered by most readers, was Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.)

Howells’ novel is a slim allegory about a visit to the United States by Mr. Homos of the island country Altruria, which exists somewhere across the Atlantic in a place that isn’t Europe or Asia or Africa. His host, and also narrator of the book, is Mr. Twelvemough, a popular novelist (a thinly veiled stand-in for Howells himself).

Mr. Homos comes to the U.S. curious as to how the promises of liberty and equality laid out in the country’s founding documents are carried out amidst the tremendous wealth enjoyed by a few in the period dubbed ”The Gilded Age” by Howells’ good friend Mark Twain. As the novel unfolds, the disconnect between what Homos experiences in the U.S. and what we gradually learn about Altrurian society, forms most of the literary tension.

The beginning of the book is set at a hotel somewhere in the northeast during the summer. Early on, Homos shocks Twelvemough by stopping to help a porter with a load of suitcases and a hotel waitress with a heavy platter. Homos can’t quite comprehend when Twelvemough tries to explain how the “gentry” in the U.S. generally don’t stop to help members of the service classes. Homos describes a recent trip to England, where he enjoyed the people he met but couldn’t get over the inequalities among the classes.

[Twelvemough said] “Yes, there is something terrible, something shocking, in the frank brutality with which Englishmen affirm the essential inequality of men. The affirmation of the essential equality of men was the first point of departure with us, when we separated from them.”

“I know,” said the Altrurian. “How grandly it is expressed in your glorious Declaration.”

“Ah, you have read our Declaration of Independence then?”

“Every Altrurian has read that,” answered my friend.

“Well,” I went on smoothly, and I hoped to render what I was going to say the means of enlightening him without offence concerning the little mistake he had just made with the waitress “of course we don’t take that in its closest literality.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said.

“Why, you know it was rather the political than the social tradition of England that we broke with, in the revolution.”

Homos and Twelvemough engage in a series of conversations like this, sometimes joined by other characters usually identified just by their profession — the preacher, the manufacturer, the professor — who provide narrow insights into American society from the confines of their profession. Mrs. Makely, the wife of a wealthy industrialist, and Mr. Bullion, a banker, get both names and a larger share of the conversation. At one point, Mr. Bullion notes, “I don’t know . . . how the notion of our social equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality. As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West, and among the gold-hunters of California.”

Later, Homos says, “I always think of you politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these other facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the aristocratic countries of Europe in theory or practice. It is very puzzling.” To which the novelist Twelvemough replies, “I don’t believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are a very good thing.”

Twelvemough and the banker and the others, of course, can see only one part of the social spectrum — the part that exerts the greatest control over the creation and spending of money, which, in their world, is really the only thing that matters. They don’t think much about how the service classes or the farmers or the unemployed live in this type of society. As the novelist says, “We all like to recognize the facts, so long as we are not expected to do anything about them; then, we deny them.”

To Twelvemough, the U.S. society of the 1890s, even with all the social inequality, is a perfect society. “If a few hundred thousand favored Americans enjoyed the privilege of socially contemning all the rest, it was as clearly right and just that they should do so, as that 4000 American millionaires should be richer than all the other Americans put together. Such a status, growing out of our political equality and our material prosperity must evince a divine purpose to anyone intimate with the designs of providence, and it seemed a kind of impiety to doubt its perfection.”

But this notion of perfection is put to the test when Homos and his genteel friends travel to the countryside away from the hotel. There they discover the stark reality of economic inequality: abandoned farms, unemployed people, families living on worthless farmland that is so heavily mortgaged there is no expectation they can ever pay back the banks. Homos notes that some in the country are looking to a political solution to the inequality, through the creation of the Populist Party. Twelvemough notes, “Oh, that is a lot of crazy Hayseeds who don’t want to pay back the money they have borrowed, or who find themselves unable to meet their interest. It will soon blow over. We are always having those political flurries. A good crop will make it all right with them.”

In the countryside, Homos meets one of the poor farmers, Reuben Camp, who is not as eager to embrace the clear vision of the country held by the genteel.  When Mrs. Makely says, “in spite of our divisions and class, we are all Americans, and if we haven’t the same opinions and ideas on minor matters, we all have the same country,” Camp is quick to disagree.

“I don’t believe we all have the same country. America is one thing to you, and it’s quite another thing for us. America means ease, and comfort, and amusement for you, year in and year out, and if it means work, it’s work that you wish to do. For us, America means work that we have to do, and hard work, all the time, if we’re going to make both ends meet. It means liberty for you; but what liberty has a man got who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from?

Throughout the book, Homos drops only hints at what life is really like in Altruria. Toward the end, Mrs. Makely organizes a speech for him, charging a dollar a person with the expectation of entertaining the guests of the hotel. It turns out that hundreds of hoi polloi are interested to hear from the curious man from the foreign land, and more than five hundred service workers, laborers, farmers, and unemployed join the bemused hotel guest on the hotel’s grounds. As Mr. Homos starts talking it becomes clear to all that the land of Altruria once resembled the U.S. — a nation run by monopolies, called “The Accumulation,” and where the legislatures and the courts held little power.

Any attempt by working people to thwart the will of the Accumulation, such as organizing into unions or attempting to call strikes, was held to be insurrection and beaten down. There was one flaw in the Acculmulation’s strategy, however; it ignored the power of the vote.

Homos said, “The ballot because it had been so easy to annul its effect, had been left in the people’s hands; and when, at last, the leaders of the proletariate ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of resistance to the Accumulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insurrection against the government, and began to urge them to attack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Accumulation out of existence came trickling and creeping over the land.”

The society that replaced the Accumulation was one where the people worked for each other, not for themselves. The real effect, according to Homos, was that people worked shorter hours at a greater variety of tasks, and still had more time left over to engage in activities relating to the arts or community. Cities emptied as people chose to live in smaller communities. The pace of life slowed, even as contentment rose. Utopia, indeed. “We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life. There is still a chance that a man will be tall or short in Altruria, that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or unhappy in love, but none that he will be rich or poor, busy or idle, live splendidly or meanly.” In the end, Homos says, “Our ideal is not rights, but duties.”

Looking back from the 21st century, one similarity between the two eras of the United States is clear — we still have great disparities in income between the wealthiest and the poorest. But there are clear differences. In the 1890s, none of the public safety net that now exists, tattered though it may be, was in place. Also, in the 1890s, the labor unions were seen as being among the leaders of progressive social change, if not at the ballot box then on the shop floor. Labor is likely never to see that sort of influence again.

The utopian society that Howells lays out is appealing in many ways, although for this reader, that last statement — “our ideal is not rights, but duties” — is a little scary to think about, given the history of totalitarian governments we have witnessed in the years since Howells published his book. Dreaming of — and planning for — utopia, however, will probably always be part of the American fabric.