[4][5] Bradford Peck (1853–1935) has been compared to King Gillette as a successful businessman of the Gilded Age who nonetheless advocated views that were, to some degree, anti-capitalist and pro-socialist.
[6] Peck followed the Horatio Alger pattern in American life,[7] rising from want to commercial success; a native of Lewiston, Maine, he built the largest department store in the state in its time.
His goal was to link producers with consumers as directly as possible, eliminating all expenses of "middle-men", bankers and interest payments, and advertising costs, and so creating a far more efficient and economical business model than the one dominant in America in his generation.
By his own admission, Peck was an admirer of Edward Bellamy and his famous novel Looking Backward (1888); he was also influenced by Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) and Charles Sheldon's In His Steps (1896).
The opening chapters introduce two young men, George Wilkinson and Harry Childs, and their girlfriends, Mabel Clay and Alice Furbush.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Through co-operation, humanity has formed itself "into a practical Christian organization...."[13] 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.
[14] Peck was not an experienced writer, and made no pretensions to literary quality in his work; his book has been criticized for its "inept and pretentious style.