The World A Department Store - The Book

The Book

The plot of the novel begins on April 7, 1925. The opening chapters introduce two young men, George Wilkinson and Harry Childs, and their girlfriends, Mabel Clay and Alice Furbush. The young men are roommates, as are the young women; they all work for various functions of Coöperative City. They are struck and fascinated by the story of Percy Brantford, which they read in that morning's newspaper.

Brantford had been a successful businessman of the late nineteenth century — though like many men of that type he suffered from the intense stresses, anxieties, and uncertainties of the commercial world. He used a sleeping potion to combat his insomnia. On the night of December 31, 1899 (in popular reckoning, the last day of the century), Brantford took a double dose of his sleeping powder; he lapsed into a coma and slept for 25 years. The young people read the news story that recounts Brantford's sudden awakening in a local nursing home.

The committee that runs the City appoints Childs and Wilkinson to be Brantford's guides in his adjustment to the new social and economic reality. Brantford is amazed to learn that the co-operative movement has transformed the Lewiston he knew into Coöperative City, which is run on a vastly different and improved system. Most of the book is devoted to explanations of the workings of the Coǒperative Association of America, and how it has come to dominate the former Lewiston and spread to New York City, Chicago, and other major cities. Wilkinson and Childs detail all major aspects of the new system, to Brantford's wondering admiration. The new system has eliminated poverty, tenements, slums, litter, and other evil aspects of the old economy.

Some of the details of Peck's plan are effective forecasts of later developments. The members of the C.A.A. use "coupon checks" instead of the "old-style microbe-breeding currency." Photo IDs are used. Both men and women pursue physical fitness, and work out in gymnasiums. The public school system monitors the schoolchildren's nutritional needs.

Brantford, for his part, reminisces about the bad old days of Gilded-Age capitalism; he recalls a system so irrational and rapacious that every man in business necessarily had a "dishonest career...." He recalls brokers on the stock exchanges as "a lot of maniacs, running wild...," and makes similar remarks on the conditions of the earlier age.

The plot retains at least a vestigial human-interest story line. The young people have a neighbor named Helen Brown; she and Percy Brantford develop a romance, and in the end the three couples join in a triple wedding.

Throughout his book, Peck stresses that the new economic and social system has moral and ethical and even religious implications. The regime of Coöperative City and the C.A.A. empowers a "true coöperative Christian existence" instead of frustrating people's normal drives to neighborliness and virtue. Through co-operation, humanity has formed itself "into a practical Christian organization...." The book begins with a Preface and Prospectus written by a clergyman; Peck closes his novel with a chapter on the religious, ethical, and social implications of his plan.

As a result, Peck's novel has been termed a Social Gospel book.