In this post, I introduce the writer, socialist, and campaigner, Edward Carpenter,1844-1929.
As we approach Cumbria Pride on 25 September, it is worth remembering historical pioneers like the socialist and reformer, Edward Carpenter, who was a great exponent of homosexual acceptance and equality. Carpenter published pioneering works, and endeavoured to live out his ideas in practice too.
Edward Carpenter was born in Hove, in Sussex, in 1844 to a comfortably off upper middle class family. He was educated at Brighton College, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained as a curate in the Church of England, but became dissatisfied, and with other clerics, petitioned Gladstone to be able to resign his orders. He left clerical orders, and consequently had to resign his Cambridge fellowship, in 1874. Thereafter, Carpenter moved to the Leeds, Sheffield, and Derbyshire area, and he began to lecture as a member of the Cambridge staff for the university extension movement. This movement was designed to take lectures to people who had not been able to attend university.
In the 1880s, Carpenter had developed his interests in natural living, vegetarianism, and in 1886, helped found the Sheffield Socialist Society. He became friends with William Morris, and was influenced by the ideas of John Ruskin. Carpenter was attracted to other men too, and he lived first with Albert Ferneyhough, at Totley, near Sheffield, and then at Bradway, where he began to write poetry. Albert Ferneyhough was a scythe-maker, and Carpenter and Ferneyhough were unusual in crossing class as well as sexual boundaries.
Carpenter’s father, Charles, died in 1882. The £6000 of Edward’s inheritance, a significant sum at the time, allowed him financial security to live and work independently. In 1883, Carpenter bought land at Millthorpe, Derbyshire, and established himself there, in a new cottage and a small market garden. Albert and Albert’s family moved in too. Carpenter became involved with other men, George Hukin, a razor grinder, and Cecil Reddie, founder of Abbotsholme school, Derbyshire, a school in which outdoor tasks and animal work featured heavily.
Visitors to Carpenter and Millthorpe included the artist and art critic, Roger Fry, who painted the portrait at the top of this post; Raymond Unwin, an architect who became involved with the garden city movement, and its progressive ideas of better homes for working people and closeness to nature; and in 1912, the novelist, E.M. Forster, whose novel about homosexual love, Maurice, was to remain unpublished until 1971.
During the winter of 1889-90, Edward Carpenter met George Merrill in a railway carriage. Merrill was a working class man from Sheffield, and they began a relationship. Again, they were crossing class and sexual boundaries. From 1893, Merrill was Carpenter’s partner and companion, living with him from 1898 at Millthorpe. Their relationship endured until George Merril’s death, in 1928.
By Unknown author – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52263389
The breadth and depth of Carpenter’s reforming ideas are striking. An active socialist, he campaigned hard with others against the air pollution and bad conditions caused by industries in Sheffield. Carpenter, who as I mentioned had become vegetarian, was friends with Henry and Catherine Salt and supported the Humanitarian League which they and others founded in 1891. The Humanitarian League promoted animal rights and prison reform, and campaigned against cruel sports and vivisection, and against capital and corporal punishment.
Carpenter was also friends with the activist and suffragette, Charlotte Despard, founder of the Women’s Freedom League. He advocated dress reform, made and sold sandals, and promoted sandal wearing. Carpenter had early become interested in Hindu spirituality, and in 1890-1, he travelled to India and Ceylon, to explore the culture and philosophy, and converse with a guru. Philosophical, spiritual, political, economic, and practical ideas of equality and of freedom could all dovetail in his mind.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8575502
In the area of homosexual recognition and rights, Carpenter is an important pioneer. In 1894-5, his pamphlets on sex, love, marriage, woman’s place in a free society were published, and then printed as a book, Love’s Coming-of-Age, in 1896. In fact, Carpenter had also written a fourth pamphlet, not included in the book, called, “Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society”. This pamphlet dealt with sexual relations between men, and was printed only for private circulation. By 1906, though, this section was able to be included in a new edition of Love’s Coming-of-Age. In 1908, Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women was published. This book did have an impact, and those influenced by reading it included the poet and autobiographer, Siegfried Sassoon, who corresponded with Carpenter about it in 1911. Sassoon was attracted to other men, and Carpenter’s book helped his understanding and recognition of this.
Carpenter helped to convey the theorising and reforming ideas of the German writer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs into English. Ulrichs published radical works in the 1860s, and himself, homosexual, defended homosexuality and advocated reform. Indeed, Ulrichs theorised about bisexuality and intersex too. He coined words such as Urning, in English, Uranian, and may be thought of as a pioneering sexologist.
In his book, The Intermediate Sex, Carpenter discusses Ulrichs’s ideas, and gives his own thoughts,
“If the modern woman is a little more masculine in some ways than her predecessor, the modern man (it is to be hoped), while by no means effeminate, is a little more sensitive in temperament and artistic in feeling than the17 original John Bull. It is beginning to be recognised that the sexes do not or should not normally form two groups hopelessly isolated in habit and feeling from each other, but that they rather represent the two poles of one group—which is the human race; so that while certainly the extreme specimens at either pole are vastly divergent, there are great numbers in the middle region who (though differing corporeally as men and women) are by emotion and temperament very near to each other.”
Carpenter says also,
“‘Urnings,’ or Uranians, are by no means so very rare; but that they form, beneath the surface of society, a large class…Of course, if in addition are included those double-natured people (of whom there is a great number) who experience the normal attachment, with the homogenic tendency in less or greater degree superadded, the estimates must be greatly higher.”
He goes on to add that Uranian men may be artistic, sensitive, given to music and to poetry, as well perhaps as being, “often muscular and well-built, and not distinguishable in exterior structure and the carriage of body from others of their own sex;”
This would have been comforting to Siegfried Sassoon, a sporty poet!
Edward Carpenter was also friendly with Havelock Ellis, and met John Addington Symonds, who were working on a book length study of homosexuality, or inversion, to use the language of the time. Havelock Ellis’s book, Sexual Inversion, 1897, was the first medical textbook on homosexuality; it contained anonymous contributions by Edward Carpenter and by others, and endeavoured to treat homosexuality as a natural phenomenon, rather than as a sin or disease.
It is notable, that despite being an active proponent of what he sometimes termed homogenic love, Carpenter did not encounter trouble with the law, as Oscar Wilde did, in 1895. Carpenter’s attachments were no secret; indeed, he lived with male partners, and had a wide circle of homosexual friends and acquaintances.
Edward Carpenter died in Guildford, Surrey, in 1929. If you would like to read more about this complex and pioneering man, there are suggestions to follow up in the acknowledgements.
Acknowledgements:
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Edward Carpenter
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32300
Viewable with the number on a Cumbria public library card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carpenter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Socialist_Society
https://johnryle.com/?article=a-uranian-among-edwardians
A very informative webpage with information and illustrations
https://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/taxonomy/term/243?page=1
A brief history of Edward Carpenter
An illustrated webpage on Edward Carpenter and his home of Millthorpe
https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/homes-and-domestic-spaces/millthorpe-and-edward-carpenter/
https://shefflibraries.blogspot.com/2020/12/edward-carpenter-activist-and.html
Jean Moorcroft Wilson. Siegfried Sassoon: The making of a War Poet. Duckworth, 2004, pp. 151-5
Books on Edward Carpenter:
Sheila Rowbotham. Edward Carpenter: a life of liberty and love. Verso, 2009
Brian Anderson. Edward Carpenter: A Victorian rebel fighting for gay rights. Troubador Publishing, Matador imprint, 2021
An online version of Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53763/53763-h/53763-h.htm
LGBT+ Language and Archives 