Edward Carpenter

Edward Carpenter (Hove, 1844 – Guildford, 1929) was an English writer, poet and philosopher whose thought combined utopian and ethical socialism with an early commitment to gay rights. He was one of the first public voices in Britain to speak openly for sexual liberation and prison reform, and his ideas reached well beyond the small circles in which he moved.

Born into a middle-class family with naval connections, he was educated at Brighton College and then at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of the Christian Socialist theologian F. D. Maurice and first explored his feelings for men. After a brief period as an Anglican curate he left the Church in 1874 and became a lecturer for the university extension movement in Leeds, though his audiences were mostly middle-class. He then settled in Sheffield, where he came into contact with manual workers and began to write poetry. His major poetic work, Towards Democracy, grew out of this period and was strongly shaped by Walt Whitman.

In the 1880s he joined the Social Democratic Federation and later the Socialist League, alongside William Morris. After inheriting his father's estate he settled at Millthorpe in Derbyshire, where he lived simply, gardened and made leather sandals. A journey to Ceylon and India in 1890 convinced him that socialism had to change inner consciousness as well as economic conditions. From 1891 he shared his life with George Merrill, a working-class man from Sheffield, and the two lived together from 1898 until the end of their lives.

His central ideas join socialism with a critique of industrial civilisation, a preference for a natural and simple life, and a belief in inner transformation. In Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure he presented civilisation as a kind of disease through which societies pass, and in The Intermediate Sex he defended same-sex love as a force capable of dissolving class barriers. His influence reached D. H. Lawrence, Sri Aurobindo and E. M. Forster, who drew on his friendship with Merrill for his novel Maurice.