Bellamy and payment cards
scanned page from Chapter X of a later reprint of Bellamy’s novel, showing the passage about exchanging credit cards for foreign travel. It is not represented as the 1888 first-edition page. Public-domain text/scan source; rendered from page 130 of the digitized volume; no content edits.
In *Looking Backward*, published in 1888, Edward Bellamy imagined a society where people used credit cards instead of cash. In his fictional world, a card could be exchanged for another country’s credit so its holder could pay abroad. Sixty-two calendar years after publication, in 1950, Diners Club launched a multipurpose payment card, but it was made of paper; plastic cards came later. This is an early literary parallel, not a description of a modern bank card.