Edward
Carpenter,
the son of Lieutenant Charles Carpenter, was born in Brighton
on 29th August, 1844. The Carpenters were very much a naval family.
Both of Edward's grandfathers were naval officers and one of them
reached the rank of admiral.
After studying at Brighton College, Carpenter
entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1864.
He was ordained in 1870 and was appointed as curate of the Church
of St. Edward. Frederick Denison Maurice,
the leader of the Christian Socialist
movement, was the minister at the church and he had a profound influence
of Carpenter's political opinions. Soon after becoming a curate he
joined the Republican Club, led by Henry Fawcett,
the husband of Millicent Fawcett, and
the future leader of the NUWSS.
In 1874 Edward Carpenter left the Church and became a lecturer on
astronomy, science and music for the recently established University
Extension Scheme. This teaching involved visiting Northern industrial
towns and cities.
By 1880 Carpenter had acknowledged his homosexuality and had moved
in with Albert Fearnhough, a scythe riveter from Sheffield.
When Charles Carpenter died in 1882 he left his son a considerable
amount of money. This enabled Edward Carpenter to purchase a farm
on the Derbyshire Moors and to concentrate on his writing.
Influenced by the work of John Ruskin and
William Morris, Carpenter began to develop
ideas about a utopian future that took the form of a kind of primitive
communism. In 1883 he began attended meetings of the Social
Democratic Federation and contributed articles to the party journal,
Justice. In 1885 Carpenter joined
Morris, Eleanor Marx, Ernest
Belfort Bax and Edward Aveling in
the Socialist League.
By the 1880s Carpenter had established himself as a poet of democracy
and socialism with books like Towards
Democracy
(1883) and England's
Ideal
(1887). He also wrote socialist songs and hymns such as England
Arise!
that were used by the Labour Church movement
in the 1890s.
In 1893 Carpenter joined with Keir Hardie,
George Bernard Shaw, Tom
Mann, H. H. Champion, Ben
Tillett, Philip Snowden, and Ramsay
Macdonald to form the Independent Labour Party.
It was decided that the main objective of the party would be "to
secure the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution
and exchange".
Carpenter believed that homosexuality was innate and should not be
classed as a sin. A strong advocate of sexual freedom, Carpenter wrote
several pamphlets on the subject including Sex
Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894), Women
and her Place in a Free Society (1894), Marriage
in a Free Society (1894) and Homogenic
Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1895).
After the House of Commons passed the Criminal
Law Amendment Act that made all homosexual acts illegal, Carpenter
had to abandon his campaign for sexual tolerance. In 1908 Carpenter
returned to this theme with his book Intermediate
Sex. Although the book created
a great deal of hostility it had a strong influence on literary figures
such as Siegfried Sassoon, D.
H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster.
Carpenter was a pacifist and opposed both the Boer
War and the First World War. He played
an active role in the No Conscription Fellowship
and wrote important anti-war pamphlets such as Healing of Nations
(1915) and Never Again! (1916). Edward
Carpenter died in Guildford on
28th June, 1929.
(1)
Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, (1916)
The
scenery and surroundings of Brighton are also bare and chilly enough;
and trees, whose friendly covert I have always loved, do not exist
there; but the place has two nature-elements in it - and these two
singularly wild and untampered - the Sea and the Downs. We lived within
two hundred yards of the sea, and its voice was in our ears night
and day. On terrific stormy nights it was a grisly joy to go down
to the water's edge at 10 or 11 p.m. - pitch darkness - feeling one's
way with feet or hands, over the stony beach, hardly able to stand
for the wind - and to watch the white breakers suddenly leap out of
the gulf close upon one, the booming of the wind, like distant guns,
and the occasional light of some vessel labouring for its life in
the surge.
(2)
Edward Carpenter joined the Social Democratic
Federation in 1883.
My
ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they
were lacking in definite outline. That outline as regards the industrial
situation was given me by reading Hyndman's England For All. Later
on in the same year I one evening looked in at a committee meeting
of the Social Democratic Federation in Westminster Bridge Road. It
was in the basement of one of one of those big buildings facing the
House of Commons that I found a group of conspirators sitting. There
was Hyndman, occupying the chair, and with him round the table, William
Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion, J. L. Joynes, Herbert Burrows,
and others.
(3)
In his book, My Days and Dreams, Edward Carpenter described
joining the Socialist League in 1885.
Early in 1888 one or two
of us got together to establish our own Sheffield Socialist Society.
We persuaded William Morris to come down (early in March). At that
time, William Morris, having with a few others parted from the Socialist
League - branches of which were springing up merrily all over the
country. And it was William Morris's great hope, often expressed in
the Commonweal and elsewhere, that these branches growing and
spreading, would before long "reach hands" to each other
and form a network over the land - would constitute in fact the New
Society within the framework of the old. There seemed a good hope
for the realization of Morris' dream - and most of us shared in it.
But history is a difficult horse to drive. The little Socialist League
societies after flourishing gaily for a few years - suddenly began
to wane and die out.
Our Sheffield Socialists organised lectures, addresses, pamphlets,
with a street-corner propaganda which soon brought us in amusing and
exciting incidents in the way of wrangles with the police and the
town-crowds. At first an atmosphere of considerable suspicion rested
upon the movement. Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first,
crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men.
(4)
Edward Carpenter was influenced by the ideas of Karl
Marx.
In my book, England's
Ideal, the influences of Ruskin, in style and moral bias, and
of Marx in economics, are very apparent in the volume; and though
I do not think that I ever gave myself "hand and foot" to
Marx in his views; yet I was very willing to adopt his theory of surplus
value as a working hypothesis. The general fact of surplus value,
namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours,
and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious.
(5)
In his book, My Days and Dreams, Edward Carpenter described
the events of Bloody Sunday.
A socialist meeting had
been announced for 3 p.m. in Trafalgar Square, the authorities, probably
thinking Socialism a much greater terror than it really was, had vetoed
the meeting and drawn a ring of police, two deep, all round the interior
part of the Square.
The three leading members of the SDF - Hyndman, Burns and Cunninghame
Graham - agreed to march up arm-in-arm and force their way if possible
into the charmed circle. Somehow Hyndman was lost in the crowd on
the way to the battle, but Graham and Burns pushed their way through,
challenged the forces of 'Law and Order', came to blows, and were
duly mauled by the police, arrested, and locked up.
I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured,
easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment
of mounted police came cantering up. The order had gone forth that
we were to be kept moving. To keep a crowd moving is I believe a technical
term for the process of riding roughshod in all directions, scattering,
frightening and batoning the people.
I saw my friend Robert Muirhead seized by the collar by a mounted
man and dragged along, apparently towards a police station, while
a bobby on foot aided in the arrest. I jumped to the rescue and slanged
the two constables, for which I got a whack on the cheek-bone from
a baton, but Muirhead was released.
The case came into Court afterwards, and Burns and Graham were sentenced
to six weeks' imprisonment, each for "unlawful assembly".
I was asked to give evidence in favour of the defendants, and gladly
consented - though I had not much to say, except to testify to the
peaceable character of the crowd and the high-handed action of the
police. In cross-examination I was asked whether I had not seen any
rioting; and when I replied in a very pointed way "Not on the
part of the people!" a large smile went round the Court, and
I was not plied with any more questions.
(6)
Philip Snowden, An Autobiography
(1934)
I
brought and carefully studied, among other works, Hyndman's England
for All and his Historical Basis of Socialism, which he
claimed were the first works on scientific socialism published in
English. They were based on Marx's Capital. I did not find
these books so interesting and instructive as other volumes on the
subject which I read. I derived much help and information from the
Fabian Essays and the Fabian Tracts, and from the books of Edward
Carpenter - England's Ideal and Civilisation, its Causes
and Cure. I collected quite a library of old radical and socialist
books and periodicals and pamphlets dating from the days of Hunt and
Owen down to modern times.
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