Along with this new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) were concerned with technological and biological developments. Industrialization, Darwin's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject of wide debate. Bellamy's Looking Backward became the second best-selling book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.See Scott Donaldson and Ann Massa American Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (David & Charles, 1978), p. 205.Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852–2002 (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007). Such works led to the development of a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century approached.
