The Cat’s Meat Man

 

 

 

 As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called “cat’s meat men”. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honor, chaired by none other than Louis Wain.

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On January 10, 1901, twelve days before Queen Victoria did the unthinkable and died, 250 cat’s meat men sat down to a slap-up dinner at a restaurant in Holborn, on the edge of central London. A cat’s meat man was an itinerant vendor who pushed a cart of cheap offal and horsemeat around residential streets while calling out something that sounded like “CA-DOE-MEE!” Sometimes he stopped at a house and delivered a pre-ordered package of meat, often threaded onto a long skewer. At the same time, his shout was the signal for householders and domestics to come out onto the pavement and buy their pets’ food straight from the barrow. For all that cats were supposed to cater for themselves by catching kitchen pests, urban owners increasingly found the money from the household budget to supplement their board.

Within minutes of the cat’s meat man embarking on his circuit, the barrow would be surrounded by felines, some of whom had perfectly good homes to go to and others who did not but still hoped that a sliver of flesh might fall their way. Although there were plenty of grim jokes circulating about how cat’s meat men supplied the toughest meat they could get away with, the fact was that many of these rough diamonds were known for their tender hearts. It was not unusual to spot a cat’s meat man slipping scraps to the hopeful strays that wound around his ankles. He was their guardian, their special friend. Sometimes he could even bring about fairy-tale transformations: no less a lady than the Duchess of Bedford had recently adopted a stray that had been rescued by her local London cat’s meat man.

During the middle years of Victoria’s reign, the cat’s meat man, in his livery of blue apron, shiny black hat, and corduroy trousers, had become a gift to investigative journalists of an anthropological turn. In his London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew plunges deep into their visible yet still mysterious world. According to Mayhew, there were a thousand such traders in London, serving about 300,000 cats, one for every house (allowing for multiple cats in some homes, plus strays). This sounds lucrative, but when Mayhew pumps his informants for details, he finds a story of dogged hard work. One carrier told him that he seldom went less than thirty, and frequently forty miles, through the streets every day. 

 

 

The best districts were among the houses of tradesmen, mechanics, and labourers. The coachmen in the mews at the back of the squares were particularly good customers. “‘The work lays thicker there’, said my informant. ‘Old maids are bad, though very plentiful, customers. They cheapen the carriers down so, that they can scarcely live at the business. They will pay one halfpenny and owe another, and forget that after a day or two.’” Cat ladies, as ever, were to blame for imperilling capitalism and the men who served it.

Over the next two decades, as magazines increasingly included articles about cat’s meat men, further details emerged. While mostly respectable, they were well down the pecking order. Some were “born into the trade” but others went into it at the scrag end of their working lives. Two common scenarios were butchers who had failed in business and lost their shop, or carriage painters whose health had been broken by the noxious paints they had been inhaling for decades. By the end of the century, it was not unusual to see women, often widows, in charge of a round. Some used old prams from which to sell their wares.

Those cat’s meat men who could keep away from the pub had a decent chance of building up a nice little surplus that allowed them to lead stable lives. Some were even Sunday School teachers. There was a strict code about who “owned a walk”, and woe betide anyone who tried to muscle in. Very profitable rounds might be sold for a premium by means of a small ad in the local paper. Occupational hazards included being ambushed by hungry stray dogs or, on those occasions when a barrow accidentally overturned, watching helplessly as your stock was gulped down by your feline clientele who clearly had no intention of paying.

 

 

This nightmare scenario, in which domestic cats morphed into a pride of ravenous lions, touched on a whole line of macabre associations with the cat’s meat trade which never completely went away. The first and most crucial was this: were cat’s meat men selling meat made of cats or meat made for cats? The confusion was enough to keep Victorian children awake at night, fretting that stray cats and even much-loved pets might find their way onto the family dinner table, disguised as a Lancashire hotpot. Sensible parents and nursery maids soothed away these fears as best they could, but at the back of their minds they were pondering recent newspaper stories in which cats did indeed end up as human food.

The most notorious occasion had been in 1871, the very year in which Britain’s most pampered pusses were fluffing up their whiskers at the first Crystal Palace show. Just across the Channel, food supplies were running dangerously low, thanks to the German army’s siege of Paris in the desperate final months of the Franco-Prussian War. In need of new protein sources, beleaguered Parisian chefs started putting cat, dog, and rat regularly on the menu. On the night before the city finally capitulated, Mr Washbourne of the US embassy attended a smart restaurant and reported that the second course was a perfectly decent “ragout of cat”.

For right-minded Britons this was horrific although somehow expected. It was exactly the sort of practice that the French, with their filthy taste for horse and frog, might go in for. The only thing to do was to try and make it up to any cat that was lucky enough to have escaped to British soil. Just two years later, in 1873, the papers were full of a tabby that had recently been entered at Birmingham’s highly popular cat show. The hopeful contestant had a tearjerking backstory, which its owners may have hoped would win it the sympathy vote: the tabby’s mother had been eaten during the Siege of Paris. Unfortunately, this was not enough to melt the flinty hearts of the judges and the orphan failed to win any prizes.

 

It was, though, in Whitechapel — an area of London that so often stood in for the whole of the East End — where a gruesome reminder emerged about the fragile threshold between cat’s meat and human flesh. On September 8, 1888, Annie Chapman, a middle-aged alcoholic who subsisted on crochet work, flower-selling, and casual prostitution, was found murdered and disembowelled on the back-door steps of a terraced house in Hanbury Street. The front room of the ground floor of number 29 doubled as a cat’s meat shop. From these premises, fifty-one-year-old Harriet Hardiman sold horse flesh intended for those lucky pets whose owners could afford to buy it for them. Hardiman came from a family of cat’s meat men and she was busy bringing up her sixteen-year-old son to the trade. Every morning, young James Hardiman, who shared a room with his mother, loaded up a cart and set off on his round.

Annie Chapman is generally agreed to be the second of Jack the Ripper’s victims: her mutilation bore all the signs of his murderous work. At the inquest, it was revealed that she had been completely disembowelled, with a section of the flesh from her stomach being placed upon her left shoulder and another section of skin and flesh, plus her small intestines, being removed and placed above her right. The doctor giving evidence said that, while the injuries could have been done by the sort of knife a medical man used for postmortems, they were just as likely to be the result of one used by an animal slaughterman. This juxtaposition of Annie Chapman’s exposed viscera and a cat’s meat shop was enough to keep Victorian grown-ups, never mind the children, awake at night.

Seventeen years after Mayhew’s prospecting operation of 1851, his friend Charles Dickens fleshed out the supply chain by which the cat’s meat men generally acquired their stock. In his weekly magazine All the Year Round, Dickens ran an account of a visit to a central London abattoir to watch the midnight ritual of horse slaughter. The article is anonymous, but there’s a good chance that the novelist himself wrote it: as a little boy he had been fascinated by the mythic shimmer of the cat’s meat man. 

 

On the night of the All the Year Round visit there were three dozen elderly or ailing nags waiting to be stunned, killed, stripped, rendered, and boiled. Legally this work should not have been done in the small hours, but as the cheery abattoir owner Mr Potler tells Dickens (or his stand-in): “the London tabbies are so dainty that they don’t like horse that’s been killed too long over-night”. After the flesh has been cut up into manageable chunks, it is piled into a light trap and at 6 a.m. Mr Potler sets off to deliver meat to the forty or so vendors who have put in their orders for “undred and a arf ” or “arf a undred . . . and three penn’orth”. The cat’s meat men then spend an hour or so threading the chunks onto wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha’penny snack to a three-penny feast. At 8 a.m., hand carts loaded, they rumble off on their rounds.

The dinner on 10 January 1901 in London was arranged in a spirit of cooperation, as a gesture of thanks to these rough Franciscans. An advertisement placed in the upmarket Morning Post explained that “anyone wishing to recommend a particular cat’s meat man will receive a ticket on forwarding the name and address with a donation of 2 shillings to the advertising secretary”. The official sponsor was Our Cats, the new weekly magazine dedicated to felines, and no less a person than Louis Wain — the commercial illustrator who, according to H. G. Wells, “invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world” — had agreed to give the address in his role as president of the committee of the National Cat Club (NCC). 

 

 

The event turned out to be wildly oversubscribed, with 400 benevolent members of the public competing for 250 tickets, each of which would buy a seat at the table for their local cat's meat man? The atmosphere on the night, according to the man from The Morning Post, was boisterous. Two hundred and fifty cat’s meat men, in their best bib and tucker, sat down at long tables and greeted “the appearance of the soup, the roast beef, and the boiled legs of mutton with prolonged cries of ‘Mee-att!’ in the familiar notes of the street”. At one point during the dinner, the Duchess of Bedford rendered invaluable assistance by passing round the sprouts. Her Grace also made a brief speech in which she urged the men to report and rescue any cats that they suspected were being ill-treated behind closed doors. Entertainment was provided by the classical musician Natalia Janotha, who turned up with both her cat and her fiddle.

After dinner Louis Wain rapped on the table with a soda bottle and said a few words. This gathering was “not a charity, but the guests were invited as cat lovers, and met as ‘pals’”. He particularly thanked them for the way they habitually sneaked titbits to starving strays. To emphasise just how socially elevated the whole business of being nice to cats had become, a letter from the Princess of Wales was read aloud expressing her disappointment at being unable to attend. To be fair, Princess Alexandra probably had more pressing matters on her mind. Within a fortnight she would become Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Empress of India.

The Cat’s Meat Man Feeding Felines in Victorian London. By Kathryn Hughes. The Public Domain Review, February 12, 2025

 

Excerpted and adapted from Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania © 2024 Kathryn Hughes. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kathryn Hughes is emerita professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and a literary critic for The Guardian. She is the author of Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, and George Eliot: The Last Victorian.

 

 

 

 

Feet on the ground and eyes on the stars, Edward Carpenter : Utopian, Gay Actvist and Socialist

 

Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis were pioneers of their day – though their legacy has been overshadowed by the Irish playwright

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Oscar Wilde always imposed. Meeting him in 1892, the French writer Jules Renard reported: “He offers you a cigarette, but selects it himself. He does not walk around a table: he moves the table out of the way … He is enormous, and carries an enormous cane.” The affectations of dress and manner; the extraordinary, magnetic talk; the flourished epigrams; the startling, needling essays, stories and plays – all these were impositions. They were how Wilde forced himself on the attention of the world, made himself notorious, and then famous. And in the ugliness and despair of his downfall – in 1895 he was found guilty of homosexual offences (acts of “gross indecency”) and sentenced to two years of hard labour – he imposed himself again: on the contemporary and historical imagination. But also on the lives of gay men, for 128 years and counting.

There is a well-known passage in EM Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913 but not published until 1971, after Forster’s death. Maurice, who has “failed to kill lust single-handed”, resolves to consult a doctor about his problem. “I am an unspeakable,” he confesses, “of the Oscar Wilde sort.” What is “unspeakable” is immediately revealed by the use of Wilde’s name: that Maurice is homosexual. To be an “Oscar Wilde sort” was to be gay – but was it to be anything like Oscar Wilde? This was the problem troubling men of Forster’s generation and after, at least until the legalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 (Scotland did not follow until 1981, Northern Ireland until 1982, Ireland until 1993). Wilde’s scandalous exposure created a set of public assumptions and prejudices that persisted for well over half a century, often twisting how gay people saw themselves. Among these was the belief that gay men, like Wilde, imposed themselves on the world by their difference: that they dressed differently, talked differently, were “theatrical”. That their relationships – as Wilde’s were alleged to have been – were crudely sexual, exploitative, mired in inequalities of age and class. That their susceptibility to blackmail brought them into contact with criminality, made them suspect. That they might always be one misstep away from tragedy. Maurice was an attempt to argue with these ideas, but the fact that Forster felt unable to publish it in his lifetime is a testament to their grip.
The grip has loosened. When the modern gay rights movement marched through the 1960s and 1970s, Wilde was celebrated as its founding martyr, the most notorious victim of homophobia in history. He was already being tentatively reclaimed for literature. Now he became a gay hero, and, ultimately, a pop icon. For new and happier reasons, Wilde imposed himself again. To be gay, still, is to reckon with him as a familiar ancestor: Oscar.
 
But does Wilde deserve all this? There is no doubt, of course, that he was a victim of homophobia. The Marquess of Queensberry, driven half mad by what he saw as Wilde’s corruption of his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card at Wilde’s club, on which was scrawled (the misspelling has become notorious) “somdomite”. But the trouble only really began when Wilde decided to sue for libel. What both Wilde and his friends knew, of course, was that Queensberry, however distastefully, was telling the truth. Wilde lost his suit against Queensberry, and the police arrested him on the basis of the evidence that had been presented in court. On 25 May he was sentenced. A moral panic ensued. Several months later, when he was being moved between prisons, Wilde was recognised on the platform at Clapham Junction station and spat at by a crowd.

So great was the outpouring of venom, so horrible Wilde’s fate, that it has obscured for well over a century the fact that the early 1890s actually saw the birth of Britain’s first gay rights movement. After Wilde had been sent to prison another gay man, Edward Carpenter, wrote to a sympathetic friend: “There is [a] long campaign to fight.” That word “campaign” is revealing. Wilde was never involved in any campaign for what we would now call gay rights – he specialised in veiled references – but others were. A few years earlier, Carpenter had assisted with collecting the personal testimonies of more than 30 gay men for a book called Sexual Inversion, written by John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis (whose collaboration provides the historical inspiration for my novel, The New Life). Sexual Inversion was intended, partly by documenting the life experiences of so-called “inverts”, to demonstrate that homosexuality was not a sin or a degeneracy, but a harmless human quirk, and that the law under which Wilde was later sentenced was unsound, unjust and should be abolished. (It also included the testimonies of six gay women; though there was no law that affected lesbians, social prejudice was strong and the book recognised that women, too, needed to be rescued from stigma.) Carpenter had also written his own defence of homosexuality, titled Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, intending it to be published in 1894.

         
The commitments of Carpenter, Symonds and Ellis were rooted in their personal experiences. Carpenter had met the man who would be his partner for life, George Merrill, in 1891; Symonds had emerged from a self-torturing youth to embrace his sexuality in middle age; Ellis, though straight, was married to a lesbian, Edith Lees, and had his own kink (he was aroused by women urinating), which meant that he also knew what it was like to have a stigmatised sexual desire. The inspiration for these men’s pioneering work came partly from Europe. French and German researchers had begun to reconceptualise homosexuality as a medical rather than a social or legal issue. It was already legal to be gay in France and in Italy (where the relevant legislation had been passed in 1889) – making it seem not implausible that the same might be achieved in Britain.       

A different kind of inspiration came from the US: Carpenter, Symonds and Ellis were united by a love of Walt Whitman’s poetry (Wilde was also a fan). They understood Whitman to be valorising love between men as a world-improving good, epitomised by the ideal of democratic, cross-class “comradeship”. It’s not surprising that many socialists warmly endorsed Whitman – Carpenter, Symonds and Ellis would all have considered themselves socialists of a sort (again, so would Wilde). It should also not be a surprise – considering the links between the LGBTQ+ movement and feminism today – that if you were a supporter of the homosexual cause, you were also likely to support rights for women. So: the burgeoning gay rights movement in Britain was connected to wider late-Victorian movements for reform, part of a larger impulse to find new and better ways of living in the modern world.
 
This was the intellectual nexus that was smashed by the Wilde trials. Carpenter’s pamphlet, Homogenic Love, was rejected by his publisher, who also removed Carpenter’s Whitmanesque poem Towards Democracy from his list for good measure. Symonds had died aged only 52 in 1893; Ellis dithered over the publication of Sexual Inversion, and only dared bring it forward in 1897. The first edition was destroyed after Symonds’s literary executor intervened on behalf of his family. Ellis persisted, bringing the book out solely under his own name – only for it to be swept up by the police and prosecuted as obscene. A judge agreed, and the book was destroyed all over again.

And yet it was not the end. Wilde may have become a cultural bogeyman, but subterranean streams of influence extended into the 20th century. Carpenter lived until 1929 and befriended the young Forster – it was a pat on the backside from Carpenter’s partner Merrill that inspired Maurice. “It seemed to go straight through the small of my back,” Forster remembered, “into my ideas.” Carpenter also inspired that rather noisier sexual radical, DH Lawrence. Ellis lived until 1939 and became a world-famous sexologist, a byword for the illicit knowledge that could be gained by curious young people if they took down one of the volumes of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (published in the US to avoid censorship) from a high shelf in the library. Sexual Inversion took its place as the first of these. Even Symonds had an energetic afterlife. He, too, inspired Forster, who read his sexually frank autobiography in the London Library, where it was locked up until 1984. Symonds’s homosexuality was finally made public in 1964 by a young biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, whose book was widely reviewed. It was a contribution to the changing mood that finally led to legalisation three years later.

When we celebrate the progress of gay rights, these stories should be given a brighter spot in history, alongside Oscar Wilde. There is not only tragedy and injustice in the past. There is also inspiration and glimpses of a world to come.

 The New Life by Tom Crewe is published by Vintage.

Beyond Oscar Wilde: the unsung literary heroes of the early gay rights movement. By Tom Crewe. The Guardian, February 10, 2024.

Chalk it up to perversity: In the midst of a horrifying anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, amid a wave of state legislative violence against trans people specifically and our self-expression broadly, all I can think about is queer utopia. If that phrase brings to mind something like the meme of a glassy, futuristic cityscape dotted with pristine green spaces and flying cars—maybe with more rainbow decals—it’s more abstract than that. These days, when I wax utopian, I’m picturing the flourishing of a certain outsider perspective that tests, reimagines, and improves the received normal for everyone. I’m looking ahead to a world that values our difference, that recognizes, grudgingly or enthusiastically, that it’s better off with us than without us.

A decade ago, it was the other way around. During the relatively summery Obama years, as we rode wins for marriage equality from Iowa to New York to the U.S. Supreme Court, as we secured unprecedented federal backing for workplace protections, housing, and health care, I didn’t trust the optimism. I volunteered with the New York City Anti-Violence Project, a nonprofit tracking violence against LGBTQ+ and HIV-affected communities, and we were the gay killjoys braced for the counter-swing. It’s well documented how bias-motivated violence increases alongside advancements in LGBTQ+ rights. Our teeth-gritting may not have fit the moment, but triumphalism spooked me. Love demonstrably doesn’t always win.

Now, after the Pulse and Club Q shootings in 2016 and 2022, in the midst of a concerted anti-trans panic from the right and the cowardly ambivalence of center-left institutions, with armed posses marshalling to intimidate drag queens reading storybooks, and state governments siding against the queens and the books, pessimism is in. And yet it is at this moment that I am most persuaded that LGBTQ+ people are poised to bring about a better world. That it is our perversity exactly, our ill-fittedness within a society that can’t quite accept us, that holds the most value.

That conviction drives my new book Uranians, a collection of short speculative fiction about queer difference. I started writing these stories after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and Brazil’s election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, when it was clear things were going to get much worse—for the gays, for the planet, for everything. And naturally, there are plenty of contemporary anxieties running around the stories, from climate change to hypercapitalist artificial intelligence. But there’s also a weird, unnerving optimism building over the course of them—I didn’t know where it came from—that culminates in the title story, a piece of full-throated, operatic queer utopianism.

That title comes from Edward Carpenter, a pioneer of gay rights in Victorian England. In his remarkable 1908 book, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women, he proposes the “Uranian”—his term for gay men and women—as not only worthy of compassion and tolerance, but also full of radical, utopian potential, even “the natural leaders of mankind.” It was an audacious thesis for the time, and of course not all of it holds up. But even so, it is precisely now that Carpenter’s earnest, almost cringey utopianism strikes me as utterly compelling. However dangerous, exhausting, and evil the current anti-LGBTQ+ wave is, it clarifies why such powerful interests mark us as a threat: because, as Carpenter saw, we really can change the world.

 

Carpenter’s queer journey catalyzed in the spring of 1891, when the distinguished lecturer, poet, and socialist got cruised at a Derbyshire train station. He had noticed the 24-year-old George Merrill in the train car and clocked his “somewhat free style of dress”; the two men exchanged a look of recognition. When he descended from the train in rural Sheffield, Carpenter greeted some friends on the platform who had come to visit him and set off walking toward his cottage in Millthorpe, about four miles over low pastureland. Merrill, ditching his own friends, followed at a distance. After a mile, Carpenter improvised to fall behind his guests and talk to Merrill, who suggested they turn back to town “and so forth.”

At 46, Edward Carpenter cut a strikingly handsome figure, with dark, high-arched brows, a full, silver beard, and an intensity to his features belied by the sheer earnestness of his idealism. An early British socialist, Carpenter organized and wrote polemics advocating for unions, animal welfare, vegetarianism, and anti-pollution measures. He was an early adopter of a certain rural, “simplified” lifestyle movement that George Orwell would later deride as “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Orwell here definitely had Carpenter in mind, and only the fourth charge (“sex-maniac”) was unfair. Carpenter was, if anything, too careful, a bit hopeless even, his enthusiasm for men more often unconsummated and unrequited, directed at younger, working-class socialists with at best ambivalent sexualities. Carpenter did not take up Merrill’s invitation and abandon his guests. But he did get the young man’s name and address.

George Merrill came from the slums of Sheffield, with the proletarian bona fides Carpenter romanticized in his pamphlets and pined after privately; he was sexually confident, experienced, foul-mouthed, flirtatious. In drifting between industrial and service jobs around England, Merrill had racked up several affairs with upper-class men, whose gifts he’d sent home to his father to be pawned. Nothing went unconsummated between him and Carpenter.

Merrill’s sexual audacity had a famous galvanizing effect on others. When E.M. Forster first visited the couple at the cottage in Millthorpe, in 1913—more than 30 years after their first encounter—the novelist was self-conscious and too much in awe of Carpenter, until Merrill came up beside Forster and gently palmed the crest of his ass. “The sensation,” Forster wrote, “was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought.”

Forster went home and wrote his great gay novel Maurice, its cross-class lovers modeled on Carpenter and Merrill. He sent it to Carpenter the next August, though it would not see publication until 1971, after Forster’s death.

For Carpenter, the influence of his happy affair with Merrill showed in his invigorated interest in liberal sexual politics, and, in particular, his criticism of Britain’s “gross indecency” laws, which had recently expanded the criminalization of homosexual acts. From 1893 to 1894, he wrote four progressive tracts on sexuality: Woman and her Place in a Free Society, Marriage in a Free Society, Sex-Love and its Place in a Free Society, and finally, Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society.

 Homogenic Love kicks off with erudite citations of same-sex “Comradeship” in works of Homer, Sappho, Hafiz, Tennyson, and Whitman—as well as an inexpert, though well-meaning, argument that similar bonds appear across African, Polynesian, and other non-Western cultures. It then insists that this form of love, though not to be reduced to “a sexual act of the crudest and grossest kind,” still “demands some kind of physical expression.” Summarizing still-untranslated work by early sexologists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Homogenic Love places homosexuality and heterosexuality on equal footing spiritually, sociologically, and scientifically, with either liable to descend into “morbid,” neurotic forms or inspire great virtue in lovers. Carpenter’s argument is scholarly, reasonable, inescapably defensive—a polite polemic meant to win persuadable allies from out of a skeptical public.

In 1895, just as the four pamphlets were set to be printed, the disaster of Oscar Wilde’s three trials hit London. The trials are remembered now for Wilde’s eloquence and occasional courage in the witness box but, at the time, were dominated by lurid sensationalism, speculation, and open vilification of homosexuality. Public discourse revolved around Wilde’s decadence, his glib amorality, his retinue of teenage sex workers and blackmailers. Wilde’s scandal—and his sentence of two years’ hard labor—engendered a poisonous moral panic and a corresponding timidity by institutions that might have been receptive to Homogenic Love. Wilde’s diabolical example also gave the lie to Carpenter’s high-minded defenses of comradeship—and threw his own tastes for younger, working-class men into sordid relief. The pamphlet’s printer pulled the contract, Carpenter’s socialist friends condemned Wilde, and public opinion on homosexuality entered a dark and diffident period.

Still, Carpenter continued to write cultural surveys and defenses of homosexuality through the decade after the Wilde trials, growing ever bolder in his optimism. In 1908’s The Intermediate Sex, Carpenter comes out swinging. Here, not only is homosexual love not worse than its more familiar counterparts—maybe it’s better. Maybe the increased public attention to homosexuals indicates a “new type of humankind may be emerging,” for whom an “immense capacity of emotional love represents … a great driving force.”

This “Uranian”—taking up a term from Ulrichs, inspired by Plato—“puts Love before everything else … postponing to it the other motives like money-making, business success, fame, which occupy so much space in most people’s careers.” These new, “intermediate” sexes pursue their relationships “beneath the surface of society,” at the risk of disgrace, prosecution, and ruin. (Here, Carpenter’s early stabs at gender theory are limited, but still interesting, invoking a stereotypical binary to position queer people as healthy, helpful intermediaries.) Though copping to Uranians’ fair share of “a poor and frivolous sort,” generally, Carpenter says, “the experience of the Uranian world forming itself freely and not subject to outside laws and institutions comes as a guide—and really a hopeful guide—towards the future.” In short, if we’re trying to create a socialist utopia, one driven by open, democratic principles instead of greed and narrow thinking, who better to lead this transformation than the Uranians?

The idea is painfully beautiful, especially with the Wilde trials and the kiboshing of Homogenic Love in mind—that it is precisely because of our exclusion from polite society that we are able to better it. In 1923, an 11-year-old Harry Hay, a future founder of the Mattachine Society and Radical Faeries, discovered a copy of The Intermediate Sex in a library and was inspired.

At almost the same time, the Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen came across Carpenter’s books, which, he wrote, “threw a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural. I loved myself in it.”

Now, in another historically bleak moment for queer acceptance, it’s vital to remember that optimism of Carpenter’s, that our friction with majorities isn’t the problem: It’s our singular gift.

Carpenter’s argument in The Intermediate Sex reminds me—and here I’m being truly perverse—of the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton’s argument in his book Orthodoxy, which positions the Christian as a kind of utopian fanatic, “who hates [the world] enough to change it, and yet loves it enough to think it worth changing,” struggling for a vision of the world that should be over more rational appeals to incremental progress. Both Chesterton’s Christianity and Carpenter’s Uranian Love stand ready to overthrow systems of reasonableness (class, capital, polite religiosity) for an ideal experienced pre-rationally, even libidinally. Both accommodate a broken world, however; neither conditions one’s happiness on any final victory over injustice. Rather, they equip their utopians with ways to conceptualize lives of personal integrity within a hostile environment.

It’s a risky, thrilling political position, rooted in a self-assured zeal that’s hard to nurture, impossible to justify. My collection Uranians is in many ways a set of experiments testing this politic against our massive systemic challenges like climate change and inequality. And, to be honest, I’m not sure it works all that consistently. For every Marsha P. Johnson, a George Santos. In the era of Pride parades brought to you by J.P. Morgan Chase, queerness’s anti-capitalist potential often seems more conspicuous in its failure than its fruition. But success is hardly a fair measure for utopias—they all bomb at scale, that’s their whole vibe. It may be that Carpenter’s queer utopianism works best as one more lifestyle movement, inhabited instead of evangelized.

Take climate change. Fossil fuel interests may have abused the notion of individual carbon footprints, but it’s still important to confront how mass consumption drives demand. And in the U.S., at least, when we look at the sectors responsible for most of our emissions, it’s hard not to see the connection between, on the one hand, emissions from transportation, power generation, land use, agriculture and the meat industry, etc., and on the other hand, a pattern of consumption tied up with a certain image of American middle-class prosperity. You know the one: single-family suburban home, the crowded commute, college funds for the kids, and the high-earning jobs that pay for this lifestyle—which tend to be jobs aligned, indirectly or not, with our fossil-fueled status quo. As one of my characters in Uranians puts it, “Maybe feeling like you have to have two kids, two cars, a grass lawn all winter, and a steak dinner every night to be happy is what got Earth into such a bad state.” And, more than unsustainable, the dream is precarious, so that any attempt to swap out its props and set dressings gets treated as a threat to happiness itself.

Queer people aren’t exempt from this way of thinking—oh my God, we are not—though for a long time, this particular American dream was actively hostile to us. More fundamentally, we are all equipped with some experience of breaking out of vigorously defended social narratives, of letting go of precarious, unhealthy self-conceptions, of doing the painful work of figuring out our own thriving in an adverse environment. That’s real strength, and it’s strength the rest of our country needs to see—especially in the rough times ahead. Happiness doesn’t have to look like whatever you’ve been sold. Trust us. This is the “experience of the Uranian world forming itself freely” that Carpenter proposed as a “hopeful guide” for the future, and I think he’s still right—at least, he could be.

 If that’s optimism, then I admit, it’s a more sobered, wind-bitten kind than what we usually like that word to mean. Not an assurance that things will turn out all right, but an opportunity to make a breaking world a little more livable. Not that gleaming futuristic city on a hill, but a home that only we can build.

Times Are Dark for LGBTQ+ People. But Edward Carpenter’s Queer Utopianism Offers a Glimmer of Hope. By Theodore McCombs. Slate , May 24, 2023. 

Edward Carpenter was one of the early socialists in Britain. In 1883, Henry Hyndman, the founder of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) took him to a basement meeting of revolutionaries on Westminster Bridge Road, where he met William Morris. They were one of several fervent clusters. Things had been moving fast — according to the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, only two years before, when Hyndman had called a “Socialist Congress,” it had been so tiny that most of the delegates could assemble in the Hyndmans’ home.

 Edward Carpenter was not an obvious recruit to the class struggle. Born in 1844, he had been brought up in an upper-class Brighton family and graduated from Cambridge, becoming first an Anglican curate and then a lecturer in University Extension, an adult education movement. His lectures took Carpenter to the North of England where he met both middle-class feminists like Isabella Ford and working-class students. Uncomfortably alienated from his own background, he settled in a gray stone house, Millthorpe, in the Cordwell Valley outside Sheffield. His new friends were local people, farmers, laborers, and a razor grinder called George Hukin, with whom Carpenter fell in love.

In his autobiography, My Days and Dreams (1916), Carpenter expresses his loathing of commercialism in public life, class division, the subordination of women, “the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs.” Opposed to capitalism, he adopted a do-it-yourself alternative, the simple life, and with this went an early critique of the devastation of the environment by industrialization. He helped to build the independent Sheffield Socialist Society, propagandizing around Britain.

Through the 1890s, Carpenter sat in a wooden shed in his Millthorpe garden writing away about his visions for a better society. In his account of a long trip to India and Sri Lanka, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892), he poked fun at the portentous representatives of the Raj and described how, guided by Ponnambalam Arunachalam, his friend from Cambridge, he learned from the Gnani Ramaswamy.

Between 1893 and 1895, he produced three pamphlets on sex in which he contested both male supremacy and the prevailing secrecy about sexual relationships. The novelist Edith Ellis, who was married to the early sex psychologist Havelock Ellis but attracted to women, looked forward to his “sex-bombs.” They were indeed explosive, especially the third, Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, which was printed only for private circulation, because same-sex love was not just regarded as indecent — it was illegal.

In Love’s Coming of Age (1896), Carpenter hails the new women, intellectually restless and sexually rebellious, who he observed travelling unaccompanied on buses and trains or riding their bicycles. This forceful minority were strenuously resisting the confinement of the Victorian era, in contrast, Carpenter notes with amusement, to the upper-class “man, the ungrown,” blithely pelting along with his hobby or his career, until falling in love, whereupon he “struggles like a fly in treacle.”

Carpenter himself had fallen in love with a young man called George Merrill from a poor Sheffield family. Attracted from their first glance in 1891 on a train to Totley, the two men were to become lifelong companions. Sexual taboos were not boundaries to skirt for Merrill; he was simply oblivious of their existence. E. M. Forster would later relate how, on a visit to Millthorpe in 1914, Merrill had touched his “backside” and released in him the capacity to write his novel Maurice.

In the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Carpenter’s home was visited by troupes of rebels and reformers, nature conservers, garden city designers, trade unionists, Clarion socialist cyclists, feminists, birth control advocates, vegetarians, and radical Christians like the young Fenner Brockway, who was a member of the Independent Labour Party. Brockway would later describe how ILP-ers like himself avidly read Carpenter’s long Whitmanite poem, Towards Democracy, “in those moments when we wanted to retire from the excitement of our socialist work, and in quietude seek the calm and power that alone gives sustaining strength.”

Carpenter’s Bristol socialist friend Robert Gilliard reflected that there was a “bread and cheese side of socialism and . . . a much deeper and broader side.” The latter assumed various manifestations, from Brockway’s humanitarian ethics to a fusion of spirituality and creative revolution around the avant-garde magazine New Age. When a shy Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson enquired of Carpenter how he fused his interest in human experience, mysticism, and socialism, he “replied that he liked to hang out his red flag from the ground floor and then go up above to see how it looked.”

Carpenter continued to write until the late 1920s, acquiring an international following and extending his range into anthropology, pagan religions, land reform, and industrial democracy. He advocated workers’ control not simply in the mines and railways but in the army and the police as well. After his death his influence waned, though he continued to be remembered by local people in the countryside near Millthorpe, by older socialists, and by some of the gay men who began organizing in the 1960s and ’70s.

I came across him when I was sixteen in a biography about Havelock Ellis. A few years later, through the historian E. P. Thompson, I learned that the Leeds New Unionist organizer and poet Tom Maguire had been influenced by Carpenter. In the mid-1960s, I read Carpenter’s papers in Sheffield Library and was hooked, writing about him in Socialism and the New Life with Jeffrey Weeks (1977) and eventually writing a biography of him. I was drawn to his dry humor and cautious courage and inspired by his version of utopianism — feet on the ground and eyes on the stars.

Remembering Edward Carpenter, a Victorian Socialist and Gay Rights Advocate. By Sheila Rowbotham. Jacobin, February 24,  2022. 

Dublin Pride is tomorrow, and for this Pride season we note the 90th anniversary of the death of Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), a man who in the most repressive of times against homosexuality in Britain was out and proud. As a small homage to one of Sheffield’s great socialist bohemians, below is a quick once-over of his life, followed by a beautiful obituary produced for Freedom.

A poet and philosopher, Carpenter was born into a wealthy household in Hove, Sussex, the son of a school governor who had made a mint on the stock market. Educated at his father’s school, the independent Brighton College, he went to university at Trinity College Cambridge, where he realised both that he was gay and that his family wealth was built on the immiseration of working people.

Initially he began a career with the Church of England as a curate, before turning against it and instead moving to first Leeds and later Sheffield to work as a lecturer. While there he was heavily involved in pushing socialism forward in the city, representing the Social Democratic Federation there in 1883 and later joining the Socialist League alongside William Morris.

In Sheffield he found both connections to working-class people and explored his sexuality through encounters with “railway-men, porters, clerks, signalmen, ironworkers”. Over time he patched together a political philosophy mixing spiritualism and socialism in a Tolstoyan manner, which infuriated many especially when he opened the doors of his co-operative farm Millthorpe to a sexually liberated group of men.

Carpenter’s openness with his homosexuality, spiritual inclinations, proto-beatnik lifestyle and strident anti-imperialism led to repeated censure from elsewhere in the movement, with George Orwell memorably excoriating him as  “the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light.” His philosophical and political writings were nevertheless among some of the most influential of his era, and Carpenter went on to become one of the founding figures of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.

He was however a great ally to the anarchists, and quite clear about his inclinations towards anarchist-communism. He worked with Peter Kropotkin in his research on small industry and defended anarchism in the courts. Carpenter received the warmest of obituaries upon his death from his friend Bessie Ward in the Freedom Bulletin of that year, reproduced below:

With the death of Edward Carpenter there passes one of the finest spirits of the early days of the socialist movement, His work was, and, for those who care to read it, still is, a force and an inspiration. We who in our youth were influenced by his message must feel grateful that he never swerved from the goal of high attainment. Once having seen the truth, having realised the shams and ruthless brutalities of the terrible system of profit-making, Edward Carpenter devoted the rest of his life to the destruction of the Moloch called Capitalism.

His first step, after turning his back on his life of a university lecturer, was to get us close to nature as possible. Eventually he built his own cottage in a garden with a stream running at the foot. Here in his little stone house, wearing his soft tweeds, he seemed like a jewel in its proper setting. To this small home of the poet came a constant procession of admirers, Like pilgrims to a shrine, they came from all parts of the world. Those who were fortunate enough to be frequent visitors would meet travellers from the remotest and least expected corners of the globe, Men and women who had heard the “ voice singing the song of deliverance ” and were impelled to travel far in order to take him by the hand.

Though every one of Carpenter’s works is written with one object, the greater understanding and emancipation of mankind, the whole covers a wide field, Civilisation! Its Cause and Cure influenced very largely indeed the thought of the 1890s, while England’s Ideal was almost as great an intellectual force, Love’s Coming of Age,  that-beautiful and delicately written book on the relationship of the sexes, and The Intermediate Sex are two aspects of a subject which it took some considerable courage to oven admit existed in those late Victorian days. Angels’ Wings with its frank acceptance of a coming change in art standards and a belief that art would once again become a part of life itself, left its mark on the lover of beauty seeking a basis for his own standards.

But of all Carpenter’s works Towards Democracy is the most completely satisfying. In this the poet and prophet, the great lover of mankind, has poured himself. It contains all that Edward Carpenter ever was. In its pages “this man rises from his mould of dust, ranges his life and looks upon the Sun.” There are moments of pure ecstasy, prophetic pictures of the greater freedom coming to mankind, and a yearning pity for its present pain and repression.

In his teaching and in his life Carpenter was always the foe of authority and officialdom. Always. In fact, more anarchist than socialist, though he never cared to label himself. Feeling, as so many of us do, that labels restrict, he preferred to keep himself free to help all movements which made for that true liberty for which, in his. own words, “the heroes and lovers of all ages have laid down their lives; and nations like tigers have fought, knowing well that life was a mere empty blob without freedom.”

It was a dear privilege to know him. One of my most cherished memories is of weekends, after periods of sordid money-changing, spent in the little house removed just beyond the smoke and grime of Sheffield, with the man who still remains a source of inspiration to think upon. I met many choice spirits there, but none so gracious, so tender, so truly beautiful as our teacher-host,

“Do not hurry; have faith.” is one of his choicest messages. This attitude towards life gave him a quiet dignity that created a sense of rest to all who came under his spell.

He ate no animal food nor hurt any of Earth’s creatures for his clothing. He lived simply and beautifully, writing his books, lecturing on the rare occasions when he allowed himself a spell in towns, and towards the end, preparing to pass out in calm and happy trance “into that other land where the great voices sound and visions dwell.”

 

Pioneers of British anarchism: Edward Carpenter. Freedom, June 28, 2019.

 

 

This is the first full-length biography of the most rivetingly interesting figure in late 19th-century radical politics. Edward Carpenter, alias the Saint in Sandals, the Noble Savage and, more recently, "gay godfather of the British left", was a writer, philosopher and charismatic propagandist for a multitude of causes, including anti-pollution, women's liberation, naturism, vegetarianism, animal rights, smallholdings, recycling. You name it, Carpenter espoused it from the start.

His demands for more rational dress encompassed footwear, the freeing of the feet from "the tyranny of shoe leather". It was Carpenter who introduced the British to the Indian-style sandals that are still the sign and symbol of left-leaning politics. His most far-reaching campaign was for liberalising attitudes to homosexuality, at that time illegal. Carpenter the reformed gentleman lived with his working-class lover, George Merrill, in an early and controversial example of an openly gay relationship.

Like William Morris, his contemporary and fellow socialist, Carpenter came from a comfortable background. The Carpenters were a naval family with a substantial income from property and shares. Early on he rejected the stifling atmosphere of their lavish house in fashionable Brighton. He despised the socially divisive capitalist system that allowed the ruling classes to live off the labour of the poor, "consuming much, creating next to nothing". Things did not have to be so complex. Determinedly and bravely, he reached his own solution. Carpenter was the inventor of that fascinating late-Victorian phenomenon we call "the simple life".

Even as a child Carpenter had been aware of a strong attraction towards his own sex. Rowbotham makes links between Carpenter's sexual orientation and his visions for total social transformation, a new world in which men and women of all classes could live creatively together in love, beauty and freedom. Rejecting the emotional sterility of Cambridge, where Carpenter, by then ordained, held a clerical fellowship, he made his way north to live in Leeds and then in Sheffield.

He had had his St Paul moment, a lightning flash of revelation felt as "a vibration" through his whole body, that he had to go and make his life with "the mass of the people and the manual workers", swarthy northern railway men and coach-builders, muscular and grimy riveters and grinders. If this sounds Whitmanesque, we should not be surprised. Carpenter was a disciple of Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass, with its eroticisation of young working men, had "filter'd and fibred" his blood. Carpenter travelled twice to visit Whitman in New Jersey. Did he, as has been suggested, sleep with "the old god"? Rowbotham's researches have not been conclusive but there were at least "erotic frissons", and a sometimes startlingly frank correspondence between Carpenter and Whitman went on for many years.

Sheffield in the 1870s was an "environmental disaster", as Rowbotham describes it, an industrial landscape of ugliness and squalor created by the rapid expansion of the steelworks and the cutlery trades. Carpenter countered this by retreating to the country, establishing small agricultural communities first at Bradway, then at Millthorpe in Derbyshire. He settled in a lovely tract of country - green fields, streams and wooded valleys beside the open moors.

It was an active, rugged life of self-sufficiency. Carpenter had absorbed John Ruskin's views on the damage done to society by separating brain work, the province of the gentleman, from manual labour, lowly activity of the so-called working classes. In the new simplified life there had to be a balance. On his seven-acre site in Derbyshire, Carpenter himself dug the drains and hoed the land, planted fruit trees, fed the fowls and grew the crops, taking his own produce to market, where his fellow stallholders were evidently puzzled by his still unmistakably patrician tones. In his little wooden writing hut beside the stream, he poured out the pamphlets and treatises which argued that the moneyed classes could opt out of the capitalist system by paring down their wants to basic necessities and supplying their own simple communal needs.

Most radically, Carpenter at Millthorpe lived alongside and had sex with local working-class men. He was crossing class barriers and sexual boundaries simultaneously. In researching this book Rowbotham has drawn on the Carpenter collection now in Sheffield city archive, a tremendously rich vein revealing a whole homosexual subculture in 19th-century industrial England. She uncovers an altogether different milieu from the more familiar metropolitan gay underworld of Oscar Wilde.

It was a period in which same-sex love was still "uncertain, tentative, experimental". Rowbotham's own origins in the floating world of 1960s communes, graphically described in her memoir of her youth, Promise of a Dream, gives her a special sympathy for the many emotional tensions in Carpenter's sexually experimental households. Some of his male lovers were married or about to be. When the love of his life, the razor grinder George Hukin, announced his engagement, Carpenter, somewhat provocatively, gave the couple a marriage bed. Hukin wrote back anxiously: "I do wish you could sleep with us sometimes Ted, but I don't know whether Fannie would quite like it yet." This book brings us tender insights into real human stories, poignant renegotiations of emotional and sexual territories played out against a background of Victorian political turmoil, bitter socialist infighting and anarchist trials.

Millthorpe became a mecca for progressives. Architects and writers, Norfolk-jacketed schoolmasters and eager young lady Fabians piled into the long, low, ivy-covered cottage to watch simple life in action. William Morris was delighted by the uncluttered interior, precursor of 20th-century minimalist decor. Once the volatile and humorous Merrill was installed as Carpenter's live-in lover in 1898, the menage at Millthorpe became a demonstration of what might be possible for homosexual men. It was Merrill who, in a famous episode, laid a gentle finger on EM Forster's backside, just above the buttocks, directly inspiring the writing of Maurice. Forster's explicitly homosexual novel went unpublished until 1971.

 

Carpenter was operating in a danger zone. His ceaseless propaganda for "that special attachment which we sometimes call by the name of comradeship" made him many enemies. Bernard Shaw accused him of "Carpenterings and illusions". Homogenic Love, his rationally argued pro-homosexual treatise, could only be privately circulated when it was completed in 1893. His Whitman-influenced long tone-poem "Towards Democracy" was passed from hand to hand by those who understood its hidden homosexual message. It was furtively referred to as "the little green book".

Carpenter became an Edwardian guru figure, famous for the strength of his handclasp and the penetration of his gaze. He reminds us that the British labour movement always had its mystic side. When asked how he reconciled mysticism with socialism, Carpenter replied that he liked to hang out his red flag from the ground floor and then go up above to see how it looked. In search of secret harmonies, as well as "good-looking chaps of the peasant class", he travelled to Ceylon and then India. Trust Carpenter to find there a mysterious English nudist colony known as "the Fellowship of the Naked Trust".

He retired to suburban Guildford, of all places. A heartbreaking photograph shows "the Complete Anarchist", the sage with all the answers, reduced to a baffled old man in a wheelchair. But by the time he died, in 1926, many of his ideas had been absorbed into the mainstream of our culture. Garden cities. Progressive schools such as Abbotsholme and Bedales. Craft communities including CR Ashbee's in the Cotswolds and Eric Gill's in Ditchling, living out the Carpenterian dream of making things by hand in idyllic rural settings. There were echoes of Carpenter in 1960s hippiedom and flower power, and in the memorable slogans of the period: "The personal is political"; "Make love not war".

Carpenter campaigned doggedly for a higher level of emotional awareness. He set himself to challenge conventions and taboos that led to "the starving of the human heart". He was an essential force in the relatively recent changing of our attitudes to sex, and especially to same-sex relationships. His great hopes for the decriminalisation of homosexuality were finally achieved in 1967 with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act.

Rowbotham has written a very good biography, exhaustively researched and resonant in detail. It is a splendid reassessment of a man who was both typical of his own time and light years ahead of it.

Edward Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham. By Fiona MacCarthy. The Guardian, November 1, 2008. 

Edward Carpenter was the Victorian Morrissey, the English Walt Whitman – and the original vegetarian, sandal-wearing socialist. So why is this gloriously eccentric figure almost forgotten today?

On his 80th birthday in 1924, five years before his death, the socialist Utopian poet, mystic, activist, homophile, feminist, nudist and environmentalist Edward Carpenter received an album signed by every member of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Cabinet. Glowing tributes appeared in the socialist papers as well as in the Manchester Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard and even the Egyptian Gazette.
 
In the early 20th century, Carpenter was a celebrity. Hordes of men and women – but mostly young men – had beaten a path to his rural retreat in Millthorpe, near Sheffield, to sit at his vegetarian, be-sandalled feet, or to take part in his morning sun-baths and sponge downs in his back garden.
 
After his death, however, his charismatic reputation faded faster than a Yorkshire tan. By the middle of the century he was regarded as a crank. When that Eton-educated proletarian George Orwell decried the left's habit of attracting "every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England", everyone knew who he was dissing.
 
Today, despite the brief renaissance of his works with the gay left after the emergence of gay lib in the 1960s and 1970s, and this worthy yet fascinating new biography by the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham, it sometimes seems as though there's almost nothing left of Ted save his beard and sandals (he seems to have introduced sandal-wearing to these shores). He's become the Cheshire cat of fin-de-siècle English Utopianism. One could argue, and I will, that the main thing that connects most of us with Carpenter today is EM Forster's bottom.
 
George Merrill, Carpenter's uninhibited working-class partner, touched Forster's repressed Cambridge backside during a visit to Millthorpe in 1912, "... gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people's. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought."
 
Inspired, Forster went home, sat down on his probably still-tingling buttocks and wrote the first "gay" novel, Maurice. Though it wasn't to be published until after timid Forster's death, DH Lawrence saw the manuscript and was himself touched: Lady Chatterley's Lover is in many ways a heterosexualised Maurice. When Maurice was made into a film in the 1980s, its stars James Wilby and Rupert Graves made millions of rumps, male and female, tingle at a time when homosexuality, as a result of Section 28 and Aids, had become a cultural battleground.
 
Carpenter became a kind of English Whitman figure, though more outspoken on the subject of toleration of same-sex love than Whitman ever dared to be in the US. Alas, he was not nearly as fine a poet (another reason why his work hasn't endured).
 
Merrill and Edward Carpenter's relationship lasted nearly 40 years, and was an inspiration to many. Carpenter described Merrill as his "simple nature child", his "rose in winter", his "ruby embedded in marl and clay", and delighted in Merrill's lack of guilt about the "seamy side of life". Raised in the Sheffield slums and without any formal education, Merrill was almost untouched by Christianity. On hearing that Jesus had spent his last night on Gethsemane, Merrill's response was: "Who with?"
 
Carpenter was born into an upright upper- middle class family in Hove, Brighton (a sizeable inheritance financed his purchase of Millthorpe and his comradely life in the North). He was drawn to the working classes because he saw them as rescuing him from himself – as much as he was rescuing them.
 
"Eros is a great leveller," Carpenter wrote in The Intermediate Sex. "Perhaps the true democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society." He noted that many "Uranians" "of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way".
 
It's worth pointing out that Wilde and Bosie's relationship, which was to cause Forster and many other homosexuals at that time such grief, was based on their mutual enjoyment of rent boys. Carpenter disapproved of such exploitation, but you can imagine Wilde jesting that people like Carpenter were socialists only because they didn't want to pay for their trade.

 
Rowbotham, to her credit, doesn't shrink from pointing out the limits of Carpenter's socialism: "Carpenter never queried his own tacit presumption that the lower classes and subordinated races were to be defended when vulnerable and abject but treated with contempt when they sought individual advancement." To this, it could be added that if Carpenter succeeded in abolishing class, then with it would be abolished the interest in the working classes of men like Carpenter. Each man kills the thing he loves.
 
One young lover wrote of Carpenter: "You feel inclined to get hold of him as a boy would his mate" and talked of his "Handsome appearance – his erect, lithe body, trim and bearded face, penetrating eyes and beautiful voice". Carpenter was to continue attracting young working-class men to his door well into silver-haired old age.
 
Carpenter saw those exclusively attracted to their own sex as harbingers of a new age, the cultural advance guard of socialism in which a Utopian androgyny would be the norm. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for a future world of Carpenters. George Bernard Shaw was enraged by the idea that "intermediacy" should be recommended to "the normal" as the desired way to be.
 
EM Forster described Carpenter's mysticism as the usual contradiction of wanting to "merge with the cosmos and retain identity" at the same time. This described pretty much everything, from Ted's attitude towards comradeship and homosexuality, class and socialism, and even Millthorpe, where he would write standing in a sentry box in the garden while his "retreat" was overrun by guests.
 
His championing of androgyny and female emancipation held contradictions. Rowbotham describes his horror and disgust at the androgyny of a Siva statue he witnessed on a mystical visit to India as being "akin to the disgust he had felt at seeing the female nudes in a French art gallery". For Carpenter, "acceptable femininity consisted of lithe gay men and supportive, tom-boyish sister figures".
 
Perhaps the most lasting and pertinent thing about his life is a question: how on Earth did the old bugger get away with it? How did he avoid a huge scandal? How did he end up so lionised in his old age? Especially when you consider what happened to Wilde.
 
The answer is probably the same reason for his lack of appeal today. His prose now seems strangely precious and oblique, replete with coy, coded classical references. Worst of all for modern audiences, he necessarily downplayed the sexual aspect of same-sex love. Class helped too: even his live-in relationship with Merrill was often seen as one of master and servant (that's how Merrill, who was financially dependent on Carpenter, was legally described).
 
One contemporary suspected that Carpenter might not be as simple as he presented himself, that his mysticism "gave him a certain detachment which protected him against prosecution as a heretic". To which Rowbotham drily observes: "As for the non-mystical Merrill, he just tried out the idealistic admirers." (Or, as that Northern prophet Morrissey was to sing many years later: "I recognise that mystical air / It means I'd like to seize your underwear.")
 
Whatever Carpenter's survival secret, it's rather wonderful for us that he did. Although he fades in and mostly out of consciousness today, it's hard not to agree with Rowbotham's conclusion: "This complicated, confusing, contradictory yet courageous man is not going to vanish entirely from view."

"...Though after the Wilde trial, homosexual men began to be labelled as 'oscarwildes', men who did not fit the green carnation stereotype remained in the shadows, swathed in a cloak of ambiguity... In socialist circles, this opaqueness was compounded by the overlap between political and personal comradeship"

Edward Carpenter: A life of liberty and love, By Sheila Rowbotham (Verso £24.99)

The lost Utopian: Why have so few of us heard of Victorian poet and renowned socialist Edward Carpenter? By Mark Simpson. The Independent  , October 5, 2008.

Further information : 

The Friends of Edward Carpenter

The Edward Carpenter Community