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