Visionary, mystic , English socialist and radical philosopher poet and humanitarian, Edward Carpenter was born on Sunday, 29th of August 1844 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.. Domestic pursuits included learning the piano and taking long horse-rides out over the Downs.
He went to university at Trinity College Cambridge, where he realised both that he was gay and"felt a friendly attraction towards my own sex, and this developed after the age of puberty into a passionate sense of love". also realising 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 https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/03/william-morris-2431854-3101896-no.html.Carpenter purchased a property near Sheffield and began promoting a socialist lifestyle that included market gardening. His political writings over the years to come became the very basics of British Socialism. He supported trade unions and called for industries to be controlled by workers. But he also argued that socialism must mean a total transformation of society,,including changes to personal life and relationships.
An early champion of homosexuality, animal rights, ecology, women's suffrage, recycling, prison reform, and sexual freedom, opposing imperialism and war, striving for a simpler more sustainable way of living. A man so ahead of his time, who throughout his life campaigned and wrote on a whole range of issues, an early champion of homosexuality, animal rights, ecology,vegetarianism, womens' suffrage, recycling, prison reform, naturism and sexual freedom, opposing imperialism and war,while advocating for s simpler, more sustainable way of living. A man so ahead of his time, who throughout his life campaigned and wrote on a whole range of social concerns, he is a huge inspiration ( who incidentally also happens to share a birthday with me).
Influenced by the work of John Ruskin, Carpenter began to develop ideas about a utopian future that took the form of a primitive communism, that still resonates strongly today.He sought a personal liberation of brotherhood and emancipation, a life of liberty and love,a world free of class struggles,ways of life he embraced himself,ideals that we should all be proud of.
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. In the early 20th century, Carpenter was a celebrity. Hordes of men and women – but mostly young men – had beaten a path to his rural retreat in Millthorpe, near Sheffield, to sit at his vegetarian, be-sandalled feet, or to take part in his morning sun-baths and sponge downs in his back garden.
.The spiritual side to his writing were both influenced by Walt Whitman.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/05/happy-birthday-walt-whitman-legendary.html .Although Whitman was not a socialist, his writing had a profound effect on Carpenter, who made the long trip to America primarily as a pilgrimage to his literary and spiritual inspiration. He visited the poet for several weeks in 1877 and again in 1884. In 1906 he published an account of his visits to America, Days with Walt Whitman, writing a respectful, even somewhat glorified, portrait of his ido . In his emulation of Whitman, Carpenter became one of the first of many disciples, spreading Whitman's message into another country and another century.
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. In
1890 Carpenter met his long-term lover George Merrill, a young working class man who surprised Carpenter's friends by his frankness about his sexuality.They lived openly and remained partners for the rest of their lives, a remarkable achievement that defied Victorian sexual mores and the British class system at a time when hundreds of men were prosecuted for homosexuality.
Carpenter was pro-feminist and a close friend of the lesbian novelist Edith Lees Ellis [wife of sexologist Havelock Ellis]. Carpenter and his ideas became an inspiration to many. Artist CR Ashbee was inspired to found the co-operative Guild of Handicrafts in London in 1888, and agreed with Carpenter on the glorious love of comrades.
Carpenter courageously published Homogenic Love (1895), Love’s Coming of Age (1896) at the time that Oscar Wilde's trial had recently scandalised the country, and wrote one of the early textbooks on homosexuality The Intermediate Sex. It was published in 1908, and was so popular that it went through 3 impressions in 4 years. By this point his writing was positively celebrating the homosexual condition as "a forward force in human evolution". Same-sex love was, according to Carpenter, ‘not only natural, but needful and inevitable.’This book formed the basis with which people came to understand LGBTQ identity over the next hundred years. He also called for a critique of the way that gender roles oppressed women and wrote extensively on the harm of institutionalized marriage , an argument that persisted into the modern marriage equality movement, with many activists insisting that queer people can do better than just imitating heterosexual couples.
Edward Carpenter also engaged in spirited critiques of capitalist exploitation of workers, calling for an end to social inequality, again mirroring the modern-day observations that capitalism will always victimize disadvantaged minorities.He was also 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.
The last years of Carpenter's life saw him admired throughout the left. On his 80th birthday in 1924 he received greetings from the first Labour Party cabinet, the TUC and dozens of other organisations.George Merrill and Edward Carpenter moved to Guildford after the First World War, and in 1928, after 30 years together, died within a year of each other. They are buried together at the Mont Cemetery in Guilford. .
Carpenter was a truly inspirational man, seriously ahead of his time in terms of his ideas on nearly everything. A real pioneer who laid the groundwork for the freedoms and struggles we experience to this day.His eccentricities are easy to mock, but they are the least important thing about him. Far more significant is his determination to live according to his principles. One of my favourite books by him is called Towards Democracy which has served me well over the years, acting as a kind of personal bible. Nearly every word contained within its covers, glistens with beautiful reasoning, a poetic and spiritual summons to human improvement. I would urge anyone to seek out this vivid book, and carry on hungrily building upon the seeds that are contained within. How come though, we are still seeking?
Edward Carpenter - Love's Vision
At night in each other's arms,
Content, overjoyed, resting deep deep down in the darkness,
Lo! the heavens opened and He appeared-
Whom no mortal eye may see,
Whom no eye clouded with Care,
Whom none who seeks after this or that, whom none who has not escaped from self.
There- in the region of Equality, in the world of Freedom no longer limited,
Standing as a lofty peak in heaven above the clouds,
From below hidden, yet to all who pass into that region most clearly visible-
He the Eternal appeared.
Edward Carpenter - So Thin a Veil
So thin a veil divides
Us from such joy, past words,
Walking in daily life- the business of the hour, each detail seen to;
Yet carried, rapt away, on what sweet floods of other Being:
Swift streams of music flowing, light far back through all Creation shining,
Loved faces looking-
Ah! from the true, the mortal self
So thin a veil divides!
Further Reading :
Edward Carpenter: A life of liberty and love, By Sheila Rowbotham (Verso)
