Like Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he shared many ideas, Edward Carpenter
abandoned a comfortable social position to adopt a thoroughly sceptical view
of society’s values and conventions. His life’s work was pursued through a
series of overlapping circles and causes – socialism, anarchism, sex reform,
female emancipation, environmentalism, vegetarianism, nudism and animal
rights – but despite the prominence he achieved by the Edwardian period he
never really became the leader of anything. He managed to get away with
what, from the perspective of late-Victorian, bourgeois society, was a
lifetime of subversion without seeking formal political influence – and
without being prosecuted for his views. Given the availability of papers at
Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester it seems remarkable that there have been so
few attempts to write Carpenter’s biography and Sheila Rowbotham is to be
congratulated on giving us such a scholarly and sympathetic study of a
Victorian who, in effect, helped to create the twenty-first century for us.
Why has it not been done before? Partly because Carpenter was a man of
connections rather than institutions. Consequently, after his death, though
his followers tried to preserve his papers and maintain his legacy in a
modest way, there was no major institutional interest to keep his reputation
before later generations. Although he went as far as sitting on a parish
council in Yorkshire, Carpenter never aspired to any greater office,
preferring his role as a propagandist and promoting his ideals by his
writing and by putting them into practice.
As a boy growing up in a middle-class Brighton family Carpenter realized at an
early age “a friendly attraction towards my own sex”, but he was not clear
about his sexuality until the age of twenty. At Cambridge he proved to be a
first-class mathematician, and so, according to the arcane traditions of the
university, he was awarded a clerical fellowship; as he was not a convinced
Christian, friends advised him to take an historical-cum-philosophical view
of the Bible and Anglican doctrine. In 1874, Carpenter made the key decision
of his life, abandoning Cambridge to go to the North where he initially
worked in the University Extension Movement and eventually settled in
Sheffield; by 1881, he had acquired a cottage and seven acres at Millthorpe
where he combined manual labour with writing for most of the rest of his
life.
What had begun as a Victorian gap year enabled him to discover who he really
was. In Yorkshire he realized his desire to find “a powerful, strongly built
man of my own age or rather younger – preferably of the working class”. One
of the many virtues of Rowbotham’s book is that it puts Carpenter’s
homosexual experience into context. Despite the scandal generated by the
Oscar Wilde case, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 was not widely
enforced. Moreover, the homosexual trade of upper- and middle-class London
represented only one aspect of late-Victorian sexuality. In Yorkshire,
Carpenter encountered a different culture based on rural, working-class
communities of men for whom it was routine to be naked together for swimming
or even athletics, to dance together in the absence of women, and to share
beds for lack of space. As a result they often grew up without the
self-consciousness about physical contact that afflicted the higher classes
and were willing to take sexual encounters with men in their stride before
and even during marriage. By explaining how Carpenter settled down to live
with George Merrill in a stable relationship that lasted decades while
continuing to enjoy encounters with other men, Rowbotham shows that a
homosexual lifestyle was feasible despite the severity of the law and
society’s disapproval.
How did he get away with it? Partly because his relationships were enveloped
in an alternative community involved in market gardening, sandal-making and
vegetarianism which may have been mildly eccentric but was perfectly
recognizable to conventional Victorians. The class system also helped, in
that the working-class residents of Millthorpe could be passed off as
servants employed by the gentlemanly Carpenter. But he took precautions.
Rowbotham explains that his first public discussion of homosexuality,
Homogenic Love, was one of four pamphlets which gave him cover as a writer
on sexual topics generally rather than homosexuality in particular.
Carpenter’s gradualist strategy was undoubtedly hindered by the Wilde trial
in 1895, which created an atmosphere of moral panic and distracted from his
careful writing. However, it did not stop Carpenter publishing Love’s Coming
of Age in 1896, in which he made the case for legalization of homosexuality
on the basis that it was congenital, that private behaviour should be beyond
the province of the law, and that legal regulation was impractical and
encouraged blackmail – in effect the modern, liberal case. He came within
inches of being prosecuted for indecency for the book in 1916, but by that
time his celebrity and contacts protected him.
Carpenter’s own sexuality inevitably led him to question conventional notions
about masculinity, femininity and gender roles and thus to sympathize with
female emancipation. But although he joined the Men’s League for Women’s
Suffrage it is not clear from Rowbotham’s account whether he played a major
role in the movement, though the limitations are hinted at. Perhaps
Carpenter was, once again, a little ahead of his time. Certainly respectable
suffragists like Millicent Fawcett steered clear of him, and one cannot
image that Christabel Pankhurst approved of his free and easy attitude
towards sex. Most pre-war feminists believed that men should rise to the
higher and stricter behaviour of women rather than use emancipation as an
excuse for self-indulgence.
In the same way Carpenter’s significance in relation to Socialism and the
Labour Movement was more limited than his huge circle of friends and
contacts would suggest. Indeed, contemporary acquaintances including Robert
Blatchford and John Bruce Glasier, found his ideas about sexuality
embarrassing and his belief in simplicity in material matters, even at the
price of discomfort, seemed proof of eccentricity. He favoured the wearing
of sandals or going barefoot, and clothing made of wool which in due course
was cut up for rugs before going out to the dog kennel and ending its days
on the compost heap. Carpenter’s advocacy of organic gardening and
vegetarianism, and his dislike of excessive and unnecessary consumption
speaks to our concerns today, but was out of kilter with the late-Victorian
mood. Between the 1870s and 1890s the price of bread in Britain fell by
half, allowing working-class families to diversify their expenditure and to
embark on the road that led steadily to a nation of dedicated consumers.
Thus, although Socialists were attracted by Carpenter’s critique of
industrial and capitalist society, many looked askance at the “noble savage”
lifestyle he appeared to recommend. Though not Marxist, the British Labour
Movement implicitly accepted the Marxist assumption that the new society
would take over the technology of the capitalist stage in order to generate
the quantities of goods and services that would sustain a higher standard of
living for all. His emphasis on keeping things simple, local and democratic
gave Carpenter more in common with Gandhi than with the Fabian fondness for
the state, economic planning and centralization.
In fact, despite his role in the network of progressive causes depicted by
Rowbotham, he was in some danger of becoming marginalized until he was
rescued by the First World War, which created new scope for cross-class
relationships between men, and also triggered a backlash against
demasculinity and lesbianism. By drawing the discussion about sexuality out
of the limited circles in which it had been conducted, the war helped to
extend the range of Carpenter’s influence. But what he really needed was a
popularizer, whom he found in the person of Marie Stopes. Stopes apparently
turned up, rucksack on back, at Millthorpe in 1916, and allowed Carpenter to
read a draft of Married Love. The reception of Stopes’s book was an
indication that Carpenter, now in his seventies, had lived to see his first
great success: a society in which sex and sexuality were talked about
freely. The common ground between him and Stopes lay in their belief that
sex should be regarded as a matter of recreation and pleasure rather than as
the means of reproduction or as a burden.
During the 1920s, Carpenter’s articles in praise of nudism were still being
rejected by the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian but by his death in
1929, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his ideas would influence the
attitudes of generations to come. In this moving biography Sheila Rowbotham
has given us not just an account of one remarkable individual’s life, but
has helped to explain how we evolved into the society we are today.
Sheila Rowbotham
EDWARD CARPENTER
A life of liberty and love
576pp. Verso. £24.99 (US $39.95)
978 1 84467 295 0
Martin Pugh’s books include Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and
fascism in Britain between the Wars, 2005, and We Danced All Night: A social
history of Britain between the wars, 2008. His book The Pankhursts: The
history of one radical family was reissued in paperback last year.
