'Edward Carpenter: Going Barefoot Into Utopia' - Alex Williamson

'Edward Carpenter: Going Barefoot Into Utopia' - Alex Williamson

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 complained in The Road to Wigan Pier that “Socialism” was home to “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, pacifist and feminist in England”. These were the “readers of Edward Carpenter”, an overly “pious sodomite” whose vegetarianism, love of sandals and eastern spirituality were particularly loathsome to Orwell.

Calling Carpenter a “noble savage”, George Bernard Shaw’s criticism seems less spiteful. After all, the poet was a middle-class Cambridge don who had merely adopted the labouring-class community of Sheffield. No matter how earnest Carpenter’s beliefs, his upbringing and England’s rigid social codes marked him out. His ideas of simplification and wholelife socialism were equally as derided as they were venerated. Many found his haste to go “barefoot into Utopia” politically naïve.

Despite being an increasingly controversial figure on the British left, his death just over a year after that of his partner George Merill inspired a rare moment of unity among the frenetic and disparate socialist groups and movements of the early twentieth century. Obituaries from the leading figures of the first Labour government, including the Prime Minister, joined a chorus of grief led by national newspapers and socialist publications. He was remembered for his striking eyes, his spirited defence of homosexuality, his opposition to rabbit coursing, and so much more. The novelist E.M. Forster, work Maurice had been inspired by Carpenter’s romance with George Merill, wrote after his death that he “touched everyone, everywhere .. Even when he wasn’t intimate he was in direct contact”. It is surprising that a figure once considered so influential has been so sidelined in scholarship. He was a man who, as Sheila Rowbotham writes, “helped to prod the modern world into being” before it forgot him and his outlandish ideas, trapping him in smaller and smaller frames from which he can only peer beyond.

[Alex Williamson is a History Student at Mansfield College]