Edward Carpenter Going Barefoot Into Utopia
Alex Williamson
LOOK LEFT
The portrait of an unfairly forgotten writer hangs in a London gallery. Hands buried in what the painter described as a “very anarchist overcoat”, the figure stares fixedly outside the frame, as though he has caught sight of the world beyond. The writer is Edward Carpenter, a nineteenth-century English socialist poet and lecturer, remembered too infrequently for his radical tracts on homosexuality, women’s emancipation, and the simplification of life. Not unlike his portrait, Carpenter’s works defied easy limits and categorisations. He envisioned a “larger socialism” than his contemporaries, one which “would not simply end inequality but would bring new forms of associating and relating, a new aesthetic of the everyday in harmony with Nature” as his recent biographer, Sheila Rowbotham, writes. Carpenter despised the presence of “commercialism in public life … the worship of stocks and shares … the contempt of manual labour, and the cruel banning of women from every useful expression of their lives”. His ideas were popular; crowds of otherwise acrimonious I.L.P. members, Fabians and trade unionists travelled to hear
him lecture in a circuit of northern cities. His ‘religion of socialism’ that preached revolution not merely through economic precepts or class struggle, but also comradeship, retreat to nature and free-love, found many unexpected fans, among them leading socialist figures like William Morris, Henry Hyndman, Ramsay MacDonald, Bruce Glasier and Keir Hardie. His central work, Towards Democracy – originally a slim volume of poetry with Epic aspirations that Carpenter continually added to for over a decade – circulated widely and internationally. On Carpenter’s request, it was smuggled into Russia to be read by Leo Tolstoy, who declared him the “heir to Ruskin”. Though he may have preferred a comparison to Whitman or Thoreau, and certainly these comparisons were made, to be read alongside such a hugely influential figure to the labour movement of the late nineteenth century as John Ruskin must have been incredibly complimentary to Carpenter. Nevertheless, there were detractors. Shortly after his death, the journalist and novelist George Orwell had
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