Edward Carpenter
Encyclopedia
Edward Carpenter was an English
socialist
poet
, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay
activist.
A leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society
and the Labour Party
. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman
and Rabindranath Tagore
, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Besant
, Isadora Duncan
, Havelock Ellis
, Roger Fry
, Mahatma Gandhi
, James Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London
, George Merrill, E D Morel, William Morris
, E R Pease
, John Ruskin
, and Olive Schreiner
.
As a philosopher he is particularly known for his publication of Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilisation is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilisations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilisation successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis
, Sigmund Freud
and Wilfred Trotter
who all recognised that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual that can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis
and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia
.
A strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a gay community near Sheffield, he had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence
and E. M. Forster
.
, near Brighton
, Carpenter was educated at Brighton College
where his father was a governor; his brothers Charles and Alfred also went to school there. When he was ten, he displayed a flair for the piano. During these formative years, he spent his free time horse-riding or walking.
His academic talent appeared relatively late in his youth, but was prolific enough to earn him a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge
. Whilst there he began to explore his feelings for men. One of the most notable examples of this is his close friendship with Edward Anthony Beck (later Master of Trinity Hall), which, according to Carpenter, had "a touch of romance".Beck eventually ended their friendship, causing Carpenter great emotional heartache. Carpenter's sense of rejection mirrored his general unease with his sexuality, causing him to visit male prostitutes in Paris. Carpenter graduated as 10th Wrangler in 1868. After university he joined the Church of England
as a curate
, "as a convention rather than out of deep Conviction". He was heavily influenced by the minister at his church, Frederick Denison Maurice, who was the leader of the Christian Socialist movement.
In the following years he experienced an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with his life in the church and university and became weary of what he saw as the hypocrisy of Victorian society. He found great solace in reading poetry, later remarking that his discovery of the work of the gay, unconventionally spiritual, politically-radical Walt Whitman
caused "a profound change" in him. (My Days and Dreams p. 64) Reading Whitman caused Carpenter to reject a life spent in a comfortable clerical post and instead he wished to dedicate himself to life helping the working-class gain the right to education.
Carpenter left the church in 1874 and became a lecturer
in astronomy
, sun worship, the lives of ancient Greek women and music
, moving to Leeds
as part of University Extension Movement, which was formed by academics who wished to introduce higher education to deprived areas of England. He hoped to lecture to the working class
es, but found that his lectures were attended by middle class
people, many of whom showed little active interest in the subjects he taught. Disillusioned, he moved to Chesterfield
, but finding that town dull, he based himself in nearby Sheffield
a year later. Here he finally came into contact with manual workers, and he began to write poetry. Despite his obvious affinity for labourers, he was invited to become a tutor to the future George V
. He politely declined the post.
In Sheffield, Carpenter became increasingly radical. Influenced by a disciple of Engels, Henry Hyndman
, he joined the Social Democratic Federation
(SDF) in 1883 and attempted to form a branch in the city. The group instead chose to remain independent, and became the Sheffield Socialist Society
. While in the city he worked on a number of projects including highlighting the poor living conditions of industrial workers. In May 1889, Carpenter wrote a piece in the Sheffield Independent calling Sheffield the laughingstock of the civilized world and said that the giant thick cloud of smog rising out of Sheffield was like the smoke arising from Judgment Day, and that it was the altar on which the lives of many thousands would be sacrificed. He said that 100,000 adults and children were struggling to find sunlight and air, enduring miserable lives, unable to breathe and dying of related illnesses. Also while in Sheffield he wrote "England Arise!", a socialist marching song to promote left-wing politics, rivalling Connell's "Red Flag" in the British Labour Movement. In 1884, he left the SDF with William Morris
to join the Socialist League
. This move was in part promoted by the more conventional political aspirations of the SDF, a feeling made obvious by Hyndman, who in 1881 remarked, "I do not want the movement to be a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, and anti-vaccinationists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them."
Increasingly attracted by a life close to nature, Carpenter moved in with tenant farmer Albert Fearnehough and his family in Bradway
, then in Derbyshire. It was here that Carpenter began to develop the crux of his Socialist politics. Influenced by John Ruskin
, he envisioned a future that took the form of primitive communism, which flatly rejected the industrialism of the Victorian age. In this utopian community he envisaged "mutual help and combination will...become spontaneous and instinctive". When his father Charles Carpenter died in 1882, he left his son a considerable fortune. This enabled Carpenter to quit his lectureship to start a simpler life of market gardening
in Millthorpe, near Barlow, Derbyshire
. By this time he fully acknowledged his sexual orientation, and this, along with the ending of many of his conventional family ties (his mother died in 1881) and his adoption of a life closer to nature, produced a period of artistic creativity. Carpenter wrote, in a "kind of wooden sentinel box" in his garden, the poems that would become his book of verse, Towards Democracy, which was heavily influenced by Eastern spirituality and Carpenter's long reading of the writings of Walt Whitman.
During 1886, he had a brief relationship with George Hukin, who was employed in the Sheffield razor trade; despite Hukin's subsequent marriage, which caused a rift between them, the men ultimately formed a close and lifelong friendship.
In the 1880s Carpenter developed an intellectual passion for Hindu mysticism and Indian philosophy. During this period, Carpenter received a pair of sandals from a friend in India. "I soon found the joy of wearing them", Carpenter wrote. "And after a little time I set about making them." This was the first successful introduction of sandals to Britain. In 1890 he travelled to Ceylon and India to spend time with the Hindu teacher called Gnani, who he describes his work Adam's Peak to Elephanta. The experience had a profound effect on his social and political thought. Carpenter began to believe that Socialism should not only concern itself with man's outward economic conditions, but also affect a profound change in human consciousness. In this new stage of society Carpenter argued that mankind would return to a primordial state of simple joy: "The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon." (Edward Carpenter (1889) Civilisation: its cause and cure) This brand of "Mystical socialism" inspired him to begin a number of campaigns against air pollution, promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.
trial of 1895 and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed a decade earlier "outlawing all forms of male homosexual contact". Their relationship not only defied Victorian sexual mores but also the highly stratified British class system. Their partnership, in many ways, reflected Carpenter's cherished conviction that same-sex love had the power to subvert class boundaries. It was his belief that at sometime in the future, gay people would be the cause of radical social change in the social conditions of man. Carpenter remarks in his work The Intermediate Sex:
(Note: The term "Uranian
", referring to a passage from Plato's Symposium, was often used at the time to describe someone who would be termed "gay" nowadays.)
Despite their unorthodox living arrangement, Carpenter and Merrill managed to escape scandal and arrest in the hostile social climate due to the seclusion afforded them in Millthorpe and Carpenter's notable literary diplomacy. In his writings Carpenter was keen to downplay the physical side of same-sex partnerships, emphasizing the emotional depth of such relationships. To bolster such a portrayal, Carpenter drew a great deal of inspiration from Plato
's idealised view of same-sex love, popular with Victorian gay men, who used classical allusions to 'Greek Love' as a coded language to discuss their sexual orientation. Their remoteness from society allowed Carpenter to indulge in naturism which he believed was a symbol of a life at one with nature. Carpenter also began to cultivate a philosophy which argued for a radical simplification of life, focusing on the need for the open air, rational dress and a healthy diet based on "fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, eggs, etc... and milk in its various forms".
It is also perhaps this seclusion that allowed Millthorpe to become a focal-point for socialists, humanitarians, intellectuals and writers from Britain and abroad. Carpenter included among his friends the scholar, author, naturalist, and founder of the Humanitarian League
, Henry S. Salt, and his wife, Catherine; the critic, essayist and sexologist, Havelock Ellis
, and his wife, Edith; actor and producer Ben Iden Payne
; Labour activists, John Bruce
and Katharine Glasier
; writer and scholar, John Addington Symonds
and the writer and feminist, Olive Schreiner
. E. M. Forster
was also close friends with the couple, who on a visit to Millthorpe in 1912 was inspired to write his gay-themed novel, Maurice
. Forster records in his diary that, Merrill, "...touched my backside - 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. He made a profound impression on me and touched a creative spring."
It can clearly be seen that the relationship between Carpenter and Merrill was the template for the relationship between Maurice and Alec, the gamekeeper in Forster's novel. Carpenter was also a significant influence on the author D. H. Lawrence
, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover
can be seen as a heterosexualised Maurice. Carpenter was a prolific letter writer and corresponded with a number of gay men on questions relating to "homogenic type". One such man was Siegfried Sassoon
, who came across Carpenter's work at Cambridge, which had a profound influence on his attitude towards his own sexuality, giving him both answers and personal peace of mind.
. He strongly believed that same-sex attraction was a natural orientation for people of a third sex. His 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex, would become a foundational text of the LGBT movements of the 20th century. It can only be speculated why Carpenter felt compelled to embark on such an unpopular and even dangerous subject in such hostile times, but one theory is that Carpenter's moral courage was ignited by the death of gay scholar and middle-class radical John Addington Symonds
. In the 1880s Symonds had composed a number of works in defence of same-sex orientation, which were distributed among a small group of people, including Carpenter. On Symonds' death in 1893, Carpenter perhaps saw the political mantle passing to him and within a couple of years made his first attempt to write on the subject. While engaged in this campaign Carpenter developed a keen interest in progressive education, especially providing information to young people on the topic of sexual education, and was a good friend of John Haden Badley
, the social reformer and educationalist and would regularly visit Bedales School
when his nephew Alfred Francis Blakeney Carpenter was a student there.
Sexual education for Carpenter also meant forwarding a clear analysis of the ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women, contained in Carpenter's radical work Love's Coming-of-Age. In it he argued that a just and equal society must promote the sexual and economic freedom
of women. The main crux of his analysis centred on the negative effects of the institution of marriage. He regarded marriage in England as both enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution. He did not believe women would truly be free until a socialist society was established. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, this led him to conclude that all oppressed workers should support women's emancipation, rather than to subordinate women's rights to male worker's rights. He remarked, "...there is no solution except the freedom of woman - which means, of course, the freedom of the masses of the people, men and women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery. There is no solution which will not include the redemption of the terms free women and free love to their true and rightful significance. Let every woman whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare herself and to constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman."
in 1892. The following year he became a founder member of the Independent Labour Party
with, among others, George Bernard Shaw
. A true radical in his own lifetime, many of Carpenter's beliefs were rejected, and even ridiculed, by those on the Left. Carpenter was unperturbed by hostility of this kind. The attitude of many socialist contemporaries can be seen in George Orwell
's later The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937), an attack on "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" in the Socialist movement.
He continued to work in the early part of the 20th century composing works on the "Homogenic question". The publication in 1902 of his groundbreaking anthology
of poems, Ioläus
: An Anthology of Friendship, was a huge underground success, leading to a more advanced knowledge of homoerotic
culture. In April 1914, Carpenter and his friend Laurence Houseman founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Some of the topics addressed in lecture and publication by the society included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex; a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct and problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilization, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution. At this time, he also lectured to the Independent Labour Party
and to the Fellowship of the New Life, from which the Fabian Society
later grew.
Carpenter's interests were not confined to what his detractors may have termed fringe political subjects, but included the pressing international issues of the time. His left-wing pacifism led him to become a vocal opponent of the Second Boer War
and then World War I. In 1919, he published The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife, where he argued passionately that the source of war and discontent in western society was class-monopoly and social inequality. He termed this social injustice "class-disease", where each class acts only in its own interests. To Carpenter's mind, a radical social and economic restructuring needed to take place in order to end social fragmentation. In his later years, he remarked that:
Carpenter's later years were characterised not only by continued writings on pacifism, but also activity in the trade-union movement. He was a hero to the first generation of Labour politicians. During the short-lived Labour government in 1924, his 80th birthday was marked by a commemorative greeting signed by every member of the Cabinet.
he had moved to Guildford
, Surrey, with George Merrill. In January 1928, Merrill died suddenly, leaving Carpenter devastated. Carpenter's state of mind is described vividly by the noted political activist G Lowes Dickinson
,
In May 1928, Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke. He lived another 13 months before he died on Friday 28 June 1929. On 30 December 1910 Carpenter had written:
Unfortunately the existence of his request was not discovered until several days after his burial. The closing words form the epitaph engraved on his tombstone:
at Guildford
in Surrey
.
At the time of his death, Carpenter was largely forgotten, but his books were stocked in many libraries' "restricted to adults" sections and proved inspirational to gay people searching for solace. One such man was the American gay rights activist and Communist Harry Hay
. He was so inspired by the work of Carpenter and his prophecy of the coming together of gay people to fight for their rights that he decided to put the words into action by founding the Mattachine Society
which started advancing gay rights in America.
Ansel Adams
was an admirer of Carpenter's writings, especially Towards Democracy.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....
activist.
A leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society
Fabian Society
The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World...
and the Labour Party
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
and Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Besant
Annie Besant
Annie Besant was a prominent British Theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self rule.She was married at 19 to Frank Besant but separated from him over religious differences. She then became a prominent speaker for the National Secular Society ...
, Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life...
, Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis
Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis , was a British physician and psychologist, writer, and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and...
, Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
, Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , pronounced . 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement...
, James Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
, George Merrill, E D Morel, William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, E R Pease
Edward R. Pease
Edward Reynolds Pease was an English writer and a founding member of the Fabian Society.Pease, the sixth of fifteen children, was born near Bristol, the son of devout Quakers, Thomas Pease and Susanna Ann Fry sister of Edward Fry, the judge...
, John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
, and Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm which has been highly acclaimed ever since its first publication in 1883 for the bold manner in which it dealt with some of the burning issues...
.
As a philosopher he is particularly known for his publication of Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilisation is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilisations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilisation successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis
Boris Sidis
Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D. was a Ukrainian Jewish psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education. Sidis founded the New York State Psychopathic Institute and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. He was the father of the child prodigy William James Sidis...
, Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and Wilfred Trotter
Wilfred Trotter
Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter, FRS was a British surgeon, a pioneer in neurosurgery. He was also known for his studies on social psychology, most notably for his concept of the herd instinct, which he first outlined in two published papers in 1908, and later in his famous popular work Instincts of...
who all recognised that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual that can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis
Neurosis
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...
and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia
Neurasthenia
Neurasthenia is a psycho-pathological term first used by George Miller Beard in 1869 to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, neuralgia and depressed mood...
.
A strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a gay community near Sheffield, he had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
and E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
.
Early life
Born in HoveHove
Hove is a town on the south coast of England, immediately to the west of its larger neighbour Brighton, with which it forms the unitary authority Brighton and Hove. It forms a single conurbation together with Brighton and some smaller towns and villages running along the coast...
, near Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
, Carpenter was educated at Brighton College
Brighton College
Brighton College is an institution divided between a Senior School known simply as Brighton College, the Prep School and the Pre-Prep School. All of these schools are co-educational independent schools in Brighton, England, sited immediately next to each another. The Senior School caters for...
where his father was a governor; his brothers Charles and Alfred also went to school there. When he was ten, he displayed a flair for the piano. During these formative years, he spent his free time horse-riding or walking.
His academic talent appeared relatively late in his youth, but was prolific enough to earn him a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Trinity Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the fifth-oldest college of the university, having been founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.- Foundation :...
. Whilst there he began to explore his feelings for men. One of the most notable examples of this is his close friendship with Edward Anthony Beck (later Master of Trinity Hall), which, according to Carpenter, had "a touch of romance".Beck eventually ended their friendship, causing Carpenter great emotional heartache. Carpenter's sense of rejection mirrored his general unease with his sexuality, causing him to visit male prostitutes in Paris. Carpenter graduated as 10th Wrangler in 1868. After university he joined the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
as a curate
Curate
A curate is a person who is invested with the care or cure of souls of a parish. In this sense "curate" correctly means a parish priest but in English-speaking countries a curate is an assistant to the parish priest...
, "as a convention rather than out of deep Conviction". He was heavily influenced by the minister at his church, Frederick Denison Maurice, who was the leader of the Christian Socialist movement.
In the following years he experienced an increasing sense of dissatisfaction with his life in the church and university and became weary of what he saw as the hypocrisy of Victorian society. He found great solace in reading poetry, later remarking that his discovery of the work of the gay, unconventionally spiritual, politically-radical Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
caused "a profound change" in him. (My Days and Dreams p. 64) Reading Whitman caused Carpenter to reject a life spent in a comfortable clerical post and instead he wished to dedicate himself to life helping the working-class gain the right to education.
Moving to the North of England
Lecturer
Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
in astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
, sun worship, the lives of ancient Greek women and music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
, moving to Leeds
Leeds
Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in West Yorkshire, England. In 2001 Leeds' main urban subdivision had a population of 443,247, while the entire city has a population of 798,800 , making it the 30th-most populous city in the European Union.Leeds is the cultural, financial and commercial...
as part of University Extension Movement, which was formed by academics who wished to introduce higher education to deprived areas of England. He hoped to lecture to the working class
Working class
Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...
es, but found that his lectures were attended by middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
people, many of whom showed little active interest in the subjects he taught. Disillusioned, he moved to Chesterfield
Chesterfield
Chesterfield is a market town and a borough of Derbyshire, England. It lies north of Derby, on a confluence of the rivers Rother and Hipper. Its population is 70,260 , making it Derbyshire's largest town...
, but finding that town dull, he based himself in nearby Sheffield
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...
a year later. Here he finally came into contact with manual workers, and he began to write poetry. Despite his obvious affinity for labourers, he was invited to become a tutor to the future George V
George V of the United Kingdom
George V was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 through the First World War until his death in 1936....
. He politely declined the post.
In Sheffield, Carpenter became increasingly radical. Influenced by a disciple of Engels, Henry Hyndman
Henry Hyndman
Henry Mayers Hyndman was an English writer and politician, and the founder of the Social Democratic Federation and the National Socialist Party.-Early years:...
, he joined the Social Democratic Federation
Social Democratic Federation
The Social Democratic Federation was established as Britain's first organised socialist political party by H. M. Hyndman, and had its first meeting on June 7, 1881. Those joining the SDF included William Morris, George Lansbury and Eleanor Marx. However, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's long-term...
(SDF) in 1883 and attempted to form a branch in the city. The group instead chose to remain independent, and became the Sheffield Socialist Society
Sheffield Socialist Society
The Sheffield Socialist Society was an early revolutionary socialist organisation in Sheffield, England.The Society was founded in 1886 on the initiative of Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was influenced by Henry Hyndman's book England for All, and struck up a friendship with William Morris...
. While in the city he worked on a number of projects including highlighting the poor living conditions of industrial workers. In May 1889, Carpenter wrote a piece in the Sheffield Independent calling Sheffield the laughingstock of the civilized world and said that the giant thick cloud of smog rising out of Sheffield was like the smoke arising from Judgment Day, and that it was the altar on which the lives of many thousands would be sacrificed. He said that 100,000 adults and children were struggling to find sunlight and air, enduring miserable lives, unable to breathe and dying of related illnesses. Also while in Sheffield he wrote "England Arise!", a socialist marching song to promote left-wing politics, rivalling Connell's "Red Flag" in the British Labour Movement. In 1884, he left the SDF with William Morris
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
to join the Socialist League
Socialist League (UK, 1885)
The Socialist League was an early revolutionary socialist organisation in the United Kingdom. The organisation began as a dissident offshoot of the Social Democratic Federation of Henry Hyndman at the end of 1884. Never an ideologically harmonious group, by the 1890s the group had turned from...
. This move was in part promoted by the more conventional political aspirations of the SDF, a feeling made obvious by Hyndman, who in 1881 remarked, "I do not want the movement to be a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, and anti-vaccinationists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them."
Increasingly attracted by a life close to nature, Carpenter moved in with tenant farmer Albert Fearnehough and his family in Bradway
Dore and Totley
Dore and Totley ward—which includes the districts of Bradway , Dore, Totley, and Whirlow—is one of the 28 electoral wards in City of Sheffield, England. It is currently represented by three Liberal Democrat councillors. It is located in the southwestern part of the city and covers an...
, then in Derbyshire. It was here that Carpenter began to develop the crux of his Socialist politics. Influenced by John Ruskin
John Ruskin
John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...
, he envisioned a future that took the form of primitive communism, which flatly rejected the industrialism of the Victorian age. In this utopian community he envisaged "mutual help and combination will...become spontaneous and instinctive". When his father Charles Carpenter died in 1882, he left his son a considerable fortune. This enabled Carpenter to quit his lectureship to start a simpler life of market gardening
Market gardening
A market garden is the relatively small-scale production of fruits, vegetables and flowers as cash crops, frequently sold directly to consumers and restaurants. It is distinguishable from other types of farming by the diversity of crops grown on a small area of land, typically, from under one acre ...
in Millthorpe, near Barlow, Derbyshire
Barlow, Derbyshire
Barlow is a village and civil parish in the North East Derbyshire district of Derbyshire, England. According to the 2001 census it had a population of 884. The village is about three miles north-west of Chesterfield....
. By this time he fully acknowledged his sexual orientation, and this, along with the ending of many of his conventional family ties (his mother died in 1881) and his adoption of a life closer to nature, produced a period of artistic creativity. Carpenter wrote, in a "kind of wooden sentinel box" in his garden, the poems that would become his book of verse, Towards Democracy, which was heavily influenced by Eastern spirituality and Carpenter's long reading of the writings of Walt Whitman.
During 1886, he had a brief relationship with George Hukin, who was employed in the Sheffield razor trade; despite Hukin's subsequent marriage, which caused a rift between them, the men ultimately formed a close and lifelong friendship.
In the 1880s Carpenter developed an intellectual passion for Hindu mysticism and Indian philosophy. During this period, Carpenter received a pair of sandals from a friend in India. "I soon found the joy of wearing them", Carpenter wrote. "And after a little time I set about making them." This was the first successful introduction of sandals to Britain. In 1890 he travelled to Ceylon and India to spend time with the Hindu teacher called Gnani, who he describes his work Adam's Peak to Elephanta. The experience had a profound effect on his social and political thought. Carpenter began to believe that Socialism should not only concern itself with man's outward economic conditions, but also affect a profound change in human consciousness. In this new stage of society Carpenter argued that mankind would return to a primordial state of simple joy: "The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon." (Edward Carpenter (1889) Civilisation: its cause and cure) This brand of "Mystical socialism" inspired him to begin a number of campaigns against air pollution, promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.
Life with George Merrill
On his return from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working class man also from Sheffield, and the two men struck up a relationship, eventually moving in together in 1898. Merrill had been raised in the slums of Sheffield and had no formal education. Their relationship endured and they remained partners for the rest of their lives, a fact made all the more extraordinary by the hysteria about homosexuality generated by the Oscar WildeOscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
trial of 1895 and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed a decade earlier "outlawing all forms of male homosexual contact". Their relationship not only defied Victorian sexual mores but also the highly stratified British class system. Their partnership, in many ways, reflected Carpenter's cherished conviction that same-sex love had the power to subvert class boundaries. It was his belief that at sometime in the future, gay people would be the cause of radical social change in the social conditions of man. Carpenter remarks in his work The Intermediate Sex:
"Eros is a great leveller. 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. It is noticeable how often 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, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies."
(Note: The term "Uranian
Uranian
frame|right|From [[John Addington Symonds]]' 1891 book A Problem in Modern Ethics.Uranian is a 19th century term that referred to a person of a third sex — originally, someone with "a female psyche in a male body" who is sexually attracted to men, and later extended to cover homosexual gender...
", referring to a passage from Plato's Symposium, was often used at the time to describe someone who would be termed "gay" nowadays.)
Despite their unorthodox living arrangement, Carpenter and Merrill managed to escape scandal and arrest in the hostile social climate due to the seclusion afforded them in Millthorpe and Carpenter's notable literary diplomacy. In his writings Carpenter was keen to downplay the physical side of same-sex partnerships, emphasizing the emotional depth of such relationships. To bolster such a portrayal, Carpenter drew a great deal of inspiration from Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's idealised view of same-sex love, popular with Victorian gay men, who used classical allusions to 'Greek Love' as a coded language to discuss their sexual orientation. Their remoteness from society allowed Carpenter to indulge in naturism which he believed was a symbol of a life at one with nature. Carpenter also began to cultivate a philosophy which argued for a radical simplification of life, focusing on the need for the open air, rational dress and a healthy diet based on "fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, eggs, etc... and milk in its various forms".
It is also perhaps this seclusion that allowed Millthorpe to become a focal-point for socialists, humanitarians, intellectuals and writers from Britain and abroad. Carpenter included among his friends the scholar, author, naturalist, and founder of the Humanitarian League
Humanitarian League
The Humanitarian League was an organisation formed in England in 1891 byHenry Salt who was also the General Secretary and Editor. Other founding members were John Galsworthy, Colonel W. L. Blenkinsop Coulson,,and Edward Carpenter...
, Henry S. Salt, and his wife, Catherine; the critic, essayist and sexologist, Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis
Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis , was a British physician and psychologist, writer, and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He was co-author of the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and...
, and his wife, Edith; actor and producer Ben Iden Payne
Ben Iden Payne
Ben Iden Payne was an English actor, director and teacher. Born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, he was raised and educated in Manchester. He started his career as a walk-on actor in 1899. He served as director of the Abbey Theatre for a short time in 1907 and then returned to Manchester to work with Annie...
; Labour activists, John Bruce
John Bruce
John Bruce may refer to:* John Bruce , U.S. federal judge* John Bruce , first president of the Métis provisional government during the Red River Rebellion...
and Katharine Glasier
Katharine Glasier
Katharine Glasier was a British socialist journalist.Glasier was born in Stoke Newington as Katharine St John Conway, the second of seven children. Her older brother was Robert Seymour Conway...
; writer and scholar, John Addington Symonds
John Addington Symonds
John Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible...
and the writer and feminist, Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm which has been highly acclaimed ever since its first publication in 1883 for the bold manner in which it dealt with some of the burning issues...
. E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
was also close friends with the couple, who on a visit to Millthorpe in 1912 was inspired to write his gay-themed novel, Maurice
Maurice (novel)
Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays, through university and beyond. It was written from 1913 onwards...
. Forster records in his diary that, Merrill, "...touched my backside - 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. He made a profound impression on me and touched a creative spring."
It can clearly be seen that the relationship between Carpenter and Merrill was the template for the relationship between Maurice and Alec, the gamekeeper in Forster's novel. Carpenter was also a significant influence on the author D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...
can be seen as a heterosexualised Maurice. Carpenter was a prolific letter writer and corresponded with a number of gay men on questions relating to "homogenic type". One such man was Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...
, who came across Carpenter's work at Cambridge, which had a profound influence on his attitude towards his own sexuality, giving him both answers and personal peace of mind.
Political Writing
The 1890s saw Carpenter produce his finest political writing in a concerted effort to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientationSexual orientation
Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...
. He strongly believed that same-sex attraction was a natural orientation for people of a third sex. His 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex, would become a foundational text of the LGBT movements of the 20th century. It can only be speculated why Carpenter felt compelled to embark on such an unpopular and even dangerous subject in such hostile times, but one theory is that Carpenter's moral courage was ignited by the death of gay scholar and middle-class radical John Addington Symonds
John Addington Symonds
John Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible...
. In the 1880s Symonds had composed a number of works in defence of same-sex orientation, which were distributed among a small group of people, including Carpenter. On Symonds' death in 1893, Carpenter perhaps saw the political mantle passing to him and within a couple of years made his first attempt to write on the subject. While engaged in this campaign Carpenter developed a keen interest in progressive education, especially providing information to young people on the topic of sexual education, and was a good friend of John Haden Badley
John Haden Badley
John Haden Badley , author, educator, and founder of Bedales School, which claims to have become the first coeducational public boarding school in England in 1893....
, the social reformer and educationalist and would regularly visit Bedales School
Bedales School
Bedales School is a co-educational independent school situated in Hampshire, in the south east of England. Founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley in reaction to the limitations of conventional Victorian schools, today the school is one of the most expensive in the UK, charging £9,985 per term for a...
when his nephew Alfred Francis Blakeney Carpenter was a student there.
Sexual education for Carpenter also meant forwarding a clear analysis of the ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women, contained in Carpenter's radical work Love's Coming-of-Age. In it he argued that a just and equal society must promote the sexual and economic freedom
Economic freedom
Economic freedom is a term used in economic and policy debates. As with freedom generally, there are various definitions, but no universally accepted concept of economic freedom...
of women. The main crux of his analysis centred on the negative effects of the institution of marriage. He regarded marriage in England as both enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution. He did not believe women would truly be free until a socialist society was established. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, this led him to conclude that all oppressed workers should support women's emancipation, rather than to subordinate women's rights to male worker's rights. He remarked, "...there is no solution except the freedom of woman - which means, of course, the freedom of the masses of the people, men and women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery. There is no solution which will not include the redemption of the terms free women and free love to their true and rightful significance. Let every woman whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare herself and to constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman."
Later political activism
The last twenty years of Carpenter's life were filled with a continued political radicalism, marked by his persistent involvement in progressive issues, including environmental protection, animal rights, sexual freedom, the Women's movement and vegetarianism. He wrote on the awfulness of the capitalist system, against the landed aristocracy and for his vision of socialism – a new era of democracy, comradeship, cooperation and sexual freedom. He supported Fred Charles of the Walsall AnarchistsWalsall Anarchists
The Walsall Anarchists were a group of anarchists arrested on explosive charges in Walsall in 1892.Although the British Home Office and the Metropolitan Police attempted to conceal the evidence for over 80 years, recent research into police files has revealed that the bombings were instigated by...
in 1892. The following year he became a founder member of the Independent Labour Party
Independent Labour Party
The Independent Labour Party was a socialist political party in Britain established in 1893. The ILP was affiliated to the Labour Party from 1906 to 1932, when it voted to leave...
with, among others, George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
. A true radical in his own lifetime, many of Carpenter's beliefs were rejected, and even ridiculed, by those on the Left. Carpenter was unperturbed by hostility of this kind. The attitude of many socialist contemporaries can be seen in George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's later The Road to Wigan Pier
The Road to Wigan Pier
The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the British writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions amongst the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World...
(1937), an attack on "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" in the Socialist movement.
He continued to work in the early part of the 20th century composing works on the "Homogenic question". The publication in 1902 of his groundbreaking anthology
Anthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
of poems, Ioläus
Iolaus
In Greek mythology, Iolaus was a Theban divine hero, son of Iphicles, Heracles's brother, and Automedusa.He was famed for being Heracles's nephew and for helping with some of his Labors, and also for being one of the Argonauts...
: An Anthology of Friendship, was a huge underground success, leading to a more advanced knowledge of homoerotic
Homoeroticism
Homoeroticism refers to the erotic attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female , most especially as it is depicted or manifested in the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements...
culture. In April 1914, Carpenter and his friend Laurence Houseman founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Some of the topics addressed in lecture and publication by the society included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex; a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct and problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilization, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution. At this time, he also lectured to the Independent Labour Party
Independent Labour Party
The Independent Labour Party was a socialist political party in Britain established in 1893. The ILP was affiliated to the Labour Party from 1906 to 1932, when it voted to leave...
and to the Fellowship of the New Life, from which the Fabian Society
Fabian Society
The Fabian Society is a British socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World...
later grew.
Carpenter's interests were not confined to what his detractors may have termed fringe political subjects, but included the pressing international issues of the time. His left-wing pacifism led him to become a vocal opponent of the Second Boer War
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902 between the British Empire and the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State...
and then World War I. In 1919, he published The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife, where he argued passionately that the source of war and discontent in western society was class-monopoly and social inequality. He termed this social injustice "class-disease", where each class acts only in its own interests. To Carpenter's mind, a radical social and economic restructuring needed to take place in order to end social fragmentation. In his later years, he remarked that:
"I can see only one ultimate way out of the morass in which we are engulfed. The present commercial system will have to go, and there will have to be a return to the much simpler systems of co-operation be-longing to a bygone age . . . To that condition, or something very like it, I am convinced we shall have to return if society is to survive. I say this after a long and close observation of life in many phases. . . This is what the miners, I think, in a dim, subconscious way, have already perceived, for they retain in their minds much of the primitive mentality of pre-civilization days."
Carpenter's later years were characterised not only by continued writings on pacifism, but also activity in the trade-union movement. He was a hero to the first generation of Labour politicians. During the short-lived Labour government in 1924, his 80th birthday was marked by a commemorative greeting signed by every member of the Cabinet.
Merrill's death and Carpenter's last years
After the First World WarWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
he had moved to Guildford
Guildford
Guildford is the county town of Surrey. England, as well as the seat for the borough of Guildford and the administrative headquarters of the South East England region...
, Surrey, with George Merrill. In January 1928, Merrill died suddenly, leaving Carpenter devastated. Carpenter's state of mind is described vividly by the noted political activist G Lowes Dickinson
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , was a British historian and political activist. He led most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.A noted pacifist, Dickinson protested against Britain's...
,
"Edward's grief when that occurred was overwhelming. I remember him walking on my arm to the cemetery at Guildford where they had buried George a few days before, and where he himself was to lie a year or so later. It was a day of pouring rain, and we stood beside the grave, while Carpenter [cried] again and again, 'They have put him away in the cold ground'."
In May 1928, Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke. He lived another 13 months before he died on Friday 28 June 1929. On 30 December 1910 Carpenter had written:
"I should like these few words to be read over the grave when my body is placed in the earth; for though it is possible I may be present and conscious of what is going on, I shall not be able to communicate..."
Unfortunately the existence of his request was not discovered until several days after his burial. The closing words form the epitaph engraved on his tombstone:
"Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped — to reach it. For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven."
Influence
He was interred in Mount CemeteryMount Cemetery
Mount Cemetery is a cemetery in Guildford, Surrey, England. It is situated to the south of Guildford on a hill overlooking the town centre. The cemetery is now full and is no longer able to accept further requests for burials unless the grave has been reserved or there is an existing family...
at Guildford
Guildford
Guildford is the county town of Surrey. England, as well as the seat for the borough of Guildford and the administrative headquarters of the South East England region...
in Surrey
Surrey
Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...
.
At the time of his death, Carpenter was largely forgotten, but his books were stocked in many libraries' "restricted to adults" sections and proved inspirational to gay people searching for solace. One such man was the American gay rights activist and Communist Harry Hay
Harry Hay
Henry "Harry" Hay, Jr. was a labor advocate, teacher and early leader in the American LGBT rights movement. He is known for his roles in helping to found several gay organizations, including the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States.Hay was exposed early in...
. He was so inspired by the work of Carpenter and his prophecy of the coming together of gay people to fight for their rights that he decided to put the words into action by founding the Mattachine Society
Mattachine Society
The Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, was one of the earliest homophile organizations in the United States, probably second only to Chicago’s Society for Human Rights . Harry Hay and a group of Los Angeles male friends formed the group to protect and improve the rights of homosexuals...
which started advancing gay rights in America.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park....
was an admirer of Carpenter's writings, especially Towards Democracy.
Works
| The Religious Influence of Art | 1870 |
| Narcissus and other Poems | 1873 |
| Moses: A Drama in Five Acts | 1875 |
| Towards Democracy | 1883 |
| Modern Money lending | 1885 |
| England's Ideal | 1887 |
| Chants of Labour | 1888 |
| Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure | 1889 |
| From Adam's Peak to Elephanta : sketches in Ceylon and India | 1892 |
| A Visit to Ghani: From Adam's Peak to Elephanta | 1892 |
| Homogenic love and its place in a free society | 1894 |
| Sex Love and its place in a free society | 1894 |
| Marriage in Free society | 1894 |
| Love's Coming of Age | 1896 |
| Angels' Wings: Essays on Art and its Relation to Life | 1898 |
| The Art of Creation | 1904 |
| Prisons, Police, and Punishment | 1905 |
| Days with Walt Whitman | 1906 |
| Iolaus— anthology of friendship | 1908 |
| Sketches from Life in Town and Country | 1908 |
| Non-governmental society | 1911 |
| The Intermediate Sex | 1912 |
| The Drama of Love and Death | 1912 |
| George Merrill a true history | 1913 |
| Intermediate types among primitive folk | 1914 |
| The Healing of Nations | 1915 |
| My Days and Dreams | 1916 |
| Never Again! | 1916 |
| Towards Industrial Freedom | 1917 |
| Pagan and Christian creeds | 1920 |
| The story of Eros and Psyche | 1923 |
| Friends of Walt Whitman | 1924 |
External links
- 65 of Carpenter's works in a variety of formats
- edwardcarpenter.net - A web-based archive of works by Edward Carpenter
- The Edward Carpenter Forum - An online journal and fan site with photos, writings, forums and much more on Edward Carpenter
- Edward Carpenter's biographic sketch at Find A GraveFind A GraveFind a Grave is a commercial website providing free access and input to an online database of cemetery records. It was founded in 1998 as a DBA and incorporated in 2000.-History:...
- London Review of Books essay on Edward Carpenter
- Spartacus on Edward Carpenter
- Edward Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex from Google Books
- Gay great- Edward Carpenter
- Information about the Edward Carpenter Collection at Sheffield Archives