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Edward Carpenter: A Victorian Rebel Fighting for Gay Rights
In his new book, Edward Carpenter: A Victorian Rebel Fighting for Gay Rights, Brian Anderson explores the life of the neglected Victorian gay icon Edward Carpenter. Using a large number of previously unpublished letters to his lovers, and friends, his tortuous journey from conforming youth to outspoken critic of Victorian society is traced.
His adolescent hurts and sexual confusion, his fumbling first love affairs, the remarkable expansion of his mind at Cambridge and his timely release from a priestly and donnish life, are recounted.
His entry into the world of socialist politics as a polemical writer and his turning from socialist rhetoric to sexual politics forms a central part of the narrative, together with an account of the obstacles that he faced in finding publishers daring enough to take his work at the height of the Oscar Wilde scandal.
The intimate details of his gay life are, for the first time, combined with the most extensive analysis to date of his pioneering writing on homosexuality.
His adolescent hurts and sexual confusion, his fumbling first love affairs, the remarkable expansion of his mind at Cambridge and his timely release from a priestly and donnish life, are recounted.
His entry into the world of socialist politics as a polemical writer and his turning from socialist rhetoric to sexual politics forms a central part of the narrative, together with an account of the obstacles that he faced in finding publishers daring enough to take his work at the height of the Oscar Wilde scandal.
The intimate details of his gay life are, for the first time, combined with the most extensive analysis to date of his pioneering writing on homosexuality.
- GenresNonfictionLGBT
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 28, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 12, 2022
For anyone interested in queer histories Edward Carpenter’s life and work’s worth exploring. Carpenter grew up in Victorian England in a comfortable, conventional middle-class home, attended Cambridge University and entered the Anglican church as a minister. Then he suddenly broke with his past, moved to a self-sufficient, smallholding in Millthorpe, close to Sheffield, and set out to reinvent himself. It seems the impetus for this radical change was a growing recognition of his love for other men and his concerns about broader questions of social inequality. Brian Anderson aims to tell Carpenter’s story with a focus on his pioneering ideas about gender and sexuality.
Carpenter was dismissed by some contemporaries as the kind of “man who will wear sandals and invite anyone into his garden” and later disparaged by writers like George Orwell as an arty-crafty crank, “the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light.” A difficult figure to situate, Carpenter was perpetually on the fringes of a number of the burgeoning socialist groups of his time, despite strong connections with people like William Morris and Olive Schreiner. But he never fully committed to any particular ideological grouping, something Anderson attributes to his anti-systemic, idiosyncratic stance, indicated in writings that shift between the abstract and the deeply personal.
Anderson covers Carpenter’s early epiphany sparked by his discovery of Walt Whitman, his involvement in Sheffield campaigning groups through to later links with others interested in promoting freedom and tolerance for homophiles as well as women’s emancipation. Something increasingly prominent in his thinking from the 1880s onwards, when he discovered the theories of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who coined the term ‘Uranian’ to describe gay men, and challenged the notion of gender as binary. This led Carpenter to a small circle of theorists interested in similar issues including budding sexologist Havelock Ellis.
Carpenter comes across as a contradictory individual, a fierce defender of the ‘new woman’ but an advocate of curiously static perspectives on the masculine versus the feminine. A campaigner for workers’ rights who also fetishized the bodies of working-class men – as did many of his friends and near-contemporaries such as E. M. Forster. A fellow traveller in socialist organisations but a sceptic when it came to the centrality of economic change over individual self-realisation, including time spent flirting with newly-circulating forms of Eastern philosophy. Sometimes welcomed into the developing left-wing fold, sometimes shunned for the controversial aspects of his publications, particularly post Wilde’s trial when vice and scandal became central to public perceptions of men who were identified as ‘inverts’/homosexual. Part of Carpenter’s work focused on undermining links between, what he called, homogenic relationships and physical acts such as anal sex. Instead Carpenter wanted to foreground love, intimacy and freedom of expression.
Brian Anderson’s chosen a difficult subject to cover in little more than 200 pages, particularly because he wants to understand Carpenter in his own contexts alongside establishing his contemporary relevance. This often leads to a sense of fragmentation and incoherence: biographical chapters are juxtaposed with sections detailing the work of Ellis and Ulrichs; passages outlining Carpenter’s personal life compete with truncated histories of the Decadent movement and Wilde’s prosecution. There are outlines of socialist movements/theories and even a post-Carpenter chapter covering the period up to, and beyond, the Stonewall uprising. The end result’s more tantalising than satisfying, slightly breathless, frustratingly hard to grasp at times. Anderson’s treatment of Carpenter veers between analytical and descriptive, his prose’s similarly uneven, sometimes stilted, opaque or inelegant, sometimes persuasive and poignant. It’s a book desperately in need of careful editing. It does serve as a reasonable introduction to Carpenter’s life and work but I’m not sure how convincing it might be for readers who’ve never heard of him. It did whet my appetite enough that I may finally tackle Sheila Rowbotham’s epic biography.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Matador, imprint of Troubadour Books for an arc
Rating: 2.5
Carpenter was dismissed by some contemporaries as the kind of “man who will wear sandals and invite anyone into his garden” and later disparaged by writers like George Orwell as an arty-crafty crank, “the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light.” A difficult figure to situate, Carpenter was perpetually on the fringes of a number of the burgeoning socialist groups of his time, despite strong connections with people like William Morris and Olive Schreiner. But he never fully committed to any particular ideological grouping, something Anderson attributes to his anti-systemic, idiosyncratic stance, indicated in writings that shift between the abstract and the deeply personal.
Anderson covers Carpenter’s early epiphany sparked by his discovery of Walt Whitman, his involvement in Sheffield campaigning groups through to later links with others interested in promoting freedom and tolerance for homophiles as well as women’s emancipation. Something increasingly prominent in his thinking from the 1880s onwards, when he discovered the theories of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who coined the term ‘Uranian’ to describe gay men, and challenged the notion of gender as binary. This led Carpenter to a small circle of theorists interested in similar issues including budding sexologist Havelock Ellis.
Carpenter comes across as a contradictory individual, a fierce defender of the ‘new woman’ but an advocate of curiously static perspectives on the masculine versus the feminine. A campaigner for workers’ rights who also fetishized the bodies of working-class men – as did many of his friends and near-contemporaries such as E. M. Forster. A fellow traveller in socialist organisations but a sceptic when it came to the centrality of economic change over individual self-realisation, including time spent flirting with newly-circulating forms of Eastern philosophy. Sometimes welcomed into the developing left-wing fold, sometimes shunned for the controversial aspects of his publications, particularly post Wilde’s trial when vice and scandal became central to public perceptions of men who were identified as ‘inverts’/homosexual. Part of Carpenter’s work focused on undermining links between, what he called, homogenic relationships and physical acts such as anal sex. Instead Carpenter wanted to foreground love, intimacy and freedom of expression.
Brian Anderson’s chosen a difficult subject to cover in little more than 200 pages, particularly because he wants to understand Carpenter in his own contexts alongside establishing his contemporary relevance. This often leads to a sense of fragmentation and incoherence: biographical chapters are juxtaposed with sections detailing the work of Ellis and Ulrichs; passages outlining Carpenter’s personal life compete with truncated histories of the Decadent movement and Wilde’s prosecution. There are outlines of socialist movements/theories and even a post-Carpenter chapter covering the period up to, and beyond, the Stonewall uprising. The end result’s more tantalising than satisfying, slightly breathless, frustratingly hard to grasp at times. Anderson’s treatment of Carpenter veers between analytical and descriptive, his prose’s similarly uneven, sometimes stilted, opaque or inelegant, sometimes persuasive and poignant. It’s a book desperately in need of careful editing. It does serve as a reasonable introduction to Carpenter’s life and work but I’m not sure how convincing it might be for readers who’ve never heard of him. It did whet my appetite enough that I may finally tackle Sheila Rowbotham’s epic biography.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Matador, imprint of Troubadour Books for an arc
Rating: 2.5
July 16, 2023
Very very dry. Good for an academic text but I thought there would actually be more to it going by the title.
November 14, 2021
Edward Carpenter - this book - and - the actual person- aren't what I expected when requesting this book.
Meaning that , while I enjoyed getting to know about Mr. Carpenter , in his own way a trailblazer ; the way the story is written is a bit dry and academic.
None of the less, I am glad I read this book as queers during the Victorian era is always interesting topic me.
I just reviewed Edward Carpenter by Brian Anderson. #EdwardCarpenter #NetGalley
Meaning that , while I enjoyed getting to know about Mr. Carpenter , in his own way a trailblazer ; the way the story is written is a bit dry and academic.
None of the less, I am glad I read this book as queers during the Victorian era is always interesting topic me.
I just reviewed Edward Carpenter by Brian Anderson. #EdwardCarpenter #NetGalley
June 8, 2025
How can somebody so famous in the gay world be so difficult to extract from his times? Because if he had lived in our times he would never have stood out, never been prophetic, and as any prophet knows being prophetic is a difficult vocation to stick to, where being misunderstood and the message being diverted comes with the job description. Where Carpenter was a prophet for the acceptance of same sex love, and where the book publishing industry of hs time was slow and often unremunerative, Carpenter, 'Chips' to his friends, did well with his inheritance, and with his education found a living as a public speaker, where his personal charisma made him well listened to. Carpenter was in the mould of some modern musicians who remain active today's music business, say Billy Bragg.
Writers in Carpenters time had to tour and lecture both for the income derived from them talking live and for them to have new material to tour with, where if it sold poorly then it pulled in audiences on the tour. To continue the rock star/famous touring author theme, it has been well known talented and thought-to-be-durable musicians who were famous died in the fifties, Michael Jackson, Jerry Garcia, and Frank Zappa each died of very different causes in their fifties, enduring many highs and lows in their public reputations over the years of applying themselves to the duty of public performance.
But get back to the author of this book Brian Anderson, he is something of a specialist in writing about figures like Edward Carpenter, who writers as they were, were well below the levels of high profile/fame of writers like Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Brian Anderson does a good job of putting some pace into the early and early adult life of Edward Carpenter, where many previous attempts by writers to get under the skin of the the early Edward Carpenter and utterly failed. I have read the Sheila Rowbotham doorstop of a book where Carpenter is thoroughly explored, but he is like a needle to be retrieved from a Victorian haystack. There is an awful lot of haystack to be gone through to find the man.
Here there is no haystack to read your way through, but as many quotes from EC that have some sort of pithiness and directness to them embedded among the ordinary modern prose of the author. The chapter titles help, 'A House of Mammon', 'A Rogue Intervention', 'The Making of a Socialist' where events are summarised briskly in the title. Some aspects of Victorian life suffer in this approach. The lack of delicacy means that the reader misses the nuance in how the opposition to the prophetic writings of Carpenter actually worked in opposing and and limiting Carpenter's effectiveness as thinker and speaker. Where Carpenter proceeded by inventing and adapting language his critics ignored how he reinvented language to broaden how life might be described. He certainly lived the broadened life and had many strokes of extraordinary good luck meeting people on his way through to settling at Millthorpe first as a market gardener, and minor local prophet.
Anderson does a good job of explaining the process of his writings. The first point is that EC writes in Millthorpe, not London, To go back to the writerly/musical analogies EC was 'getting his work together in the country' the way that band like Traffic recorded their early albums from 1967 onward. EC's work was writing pamphlets, not books. If there had been a guide to how the publishing industry worked and what got published it would have made clearer how EC got his works published. As it is what we get is a stress on how far from the mainstream publishing culture EC was as a writer, and how much a book consisted of several pamphlets and each pamphlet had to break new ground, politically, because as a minor non-London prophet Carpenter was so far from main stream London-based politics that to them he did not exist. The accretion of work that became the publishing of 'Love's Coming Of Age' amid the uproar that followed Oscar Wilde vs the Marquis of Queensberry which led to a collective press and public hysteria against homosexual behaviour took quite some charm and luck to pull off.
But Carpenter's quiet diligence was made him the the first writer in English to write and get published writings about same sex love. That librarians filed the writings under 'pornographic' or 'medical [therefore of no general interest]' was a battle against human habit that was too big for him. His finding lasting love aged 40, and after years of serious academia and friendships is sweetly told. His needing love, and the love of a working class man, to balance him as a person is made clear. What a biography of George Merrill might add and compliment the writings here about Carpenters search for the personal version of what he made it his message to say other people needed is anyone's guess. The book trails off towards the end. The author steers away from the way that the war based patriotism that attacked Carpenters conjoined twin thesis that socialism had to have a sexual and gender-based liberation element to it for the socialism to be truly redistributive.
Socialism that reinforced patriarchy property rights, and power balance, was not socialism. Wars reinforce patriarchal capitalism thus WW1 forced Carpenter and Merrill to leave Millthorpe, near Sheffield for a calmer life in the home counties. That is not commented on here, instead the reader gets the reflections that others left of the effect of Carpenter, the way he walked the walk and talked the talk, and was a comfort to many who were lonely from being unimaginatively told that marriage and property values mean you should not expect love and tenderness. His writings and others to dare to dream, and there is still the courage to dream of making empathic spaces, and not being afraid of hugs where self evident need should trump the fear of accepting our fragility.
Writers in Carpenters time had to tour and lecture both for the income derived from them talking live and for them to have new material to tour with, where if it sold poorly then it pulled in audiences on the tour. To continue the rock star/famous touring author theme, it has been well known talented and thought-to-be-durable musicians who were famous died in the fifties, Michael Jackson, Jerry Garcia, and Frank Zappa each died of very different causes in their fifties, enduring many highs and lows in their public reputations over the years of applying themselves to the duty of public performance.
But get back to the author of this book Brian Anderson, he is something of a specialist in writing about figures like Edward Carpenter, who writers as they were, were well below the levels of high profile/fame of writers like Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Brian Anderson does a good job of putting some pace into the early and early adult life of Edward Carpenter, where many previous attempts by writers to get under the skin of the the early Edward Carpenter and utterly failed. I have read the Sheila Rowbotham doorstop of a book where Carpenter is thoroughly explored, but he is like a needle to be retrieved from a Victorian haystack. There is an awful lot of haystack to be gone through to find the man.
Here there is no haystack to read your way through, but as many quotes from EC that have some sort of pithiness and directness to them embedded among the ordinary modern prose of the author. The chapter titles help, 'A House of Mammon', 'A Rogue Intervention', 'The Making of a Socialist' where events are summarised briskly in the title. Some aspects of Victorian life suffer in this approach. The lack of delicacy means that the reader misses the nuance in how the opposition to the prophetic writings of Carpenter actually worked in opposing and and limiting Carpenter's effectiveness as thinker and speaker. Where Carpenter proceeded by inventing and adapting language his critics ignored how he reinvented language to broaden how life might be described. He certainly lived the broadened life and had many strokes of extraordinary good luck meeting people on his way through to settling at Millthorpe first as a market gardener, and minor local prophet.
Anderson does a good job of explaining the process of his writings. The first point is that EC writes in Millthorpe, not London, To go back to the writerly/musical analogies EC was 'getting his work together in the country' the way that band like Traffic recorded their early albums from 1967 onward. EC's work was writing pamphlets, not books. If there had been a guide to how the publishing industry worked and what got published it would have made clearer how EC got his works published. As it is what we get is a stress on how far from the mainstream publishing culture EC was as a writer, and how much a book consisted of several pamphlets and each pamphlet had to break new ground, politically, because as a minor non-London prophet Carpenter was so far from main stream London-based politics that to them he did not exist. The accretion of work that became the publishing of 'Love's Coming Of Age' amid the uproar that followed Oscar Wilde vs the Marquis of Queensberry which led to a collective press and public hysteria against homosexual behaviour took quite some charm and luck to pull off.
But Carpenter's quiet diligence was made him the the first writer in English to write and get published writings about same sex love. That librarians filed the writings under 'pornographic' or 'medical [therefore of no general interest]' was a battle against human habit that was too big for him. His finding lasting love aged 40, and after years of serious academia and friendships is sweetly told. His needing love, and the love of a working class man, to balance him as a person is made clear. What a biography of George Merrill might add and compliment the writings here about Carpenters search for the personal version of what he made it his message to say other people needed is anyone's guess. The book trails off towards the end. The author steers away from the way that the war based patriotism that attacked Carpenters conjoined twin thesis that socialism had to have a sexual and gender-based liberation element to it for the socialism to be truly redistributive.
Socialism that reinforced patriarchy property rights, and power balance, was not socialism. Wars reinforce patriarchal capitalism thus WW1 forced Carpenter and Merrill to leave Millthorpe, near Sheffield for a calmer life in the home counties. That is not commented on here, instead the reader gets the reflections that others left of the effect of Carpenter, the way he walked the walk and talked the talk, and was a comfort to many who were lonely from being unimaginatively told that marriage and property values mean you should not expect love and tenderness. His writings and others to dare to dream, and there is still the courage to dream of making empathic spaces, and not being afraid of hugs where self evident need should trump the fear of accepting our fragility.
October 5, 2021
Thanks to Netgalley and Matador publishing for an arc of this in exchange for my honest review.
2.5 stars.
This was much more academic in feel than I was expecting after some more accessible non-fiction reads. As a result of this more difficult language (I consider my own vocabulary decent and still needed to look up multiple words per page) and multitude of footnotes, I found myself really bored and distractable. His life seems like it would be interesting from the cover and indeed stepping back I’m able to see that might be the case, but reading this did not come across as engaging and interesting as I’d hoped, unfortunately. For the academic, researching reader, this might not be a problem, but for someone looking to read a first look at an influential person, it was hard for me.
2.5 stars.
This was much more academic in feel than I was expecting after some more accessible non-fiction reads. As a result of this more difficult language (I consider my own vocabulary decent and still needed to look up multiple words per page) and multitude of footnotes, I found myself really bored and distractable. His life seems like it would be interesting from the cover and indeed stepping back I’m able to see that might be the case, but reading this did not come across as engaging and interesting as I’d hoped, unfortunately. For the academic, researching reader, this might not be a problem, but for someone looking to read a first look at an influential person, it was hard for me.
December 6, 2021
An interesting and worthwhile read exploring the life and work of Edward Carpenter, the trial-blazing campaigner for gay rights. His many writings on the subject of homosexuality or “inversion” as it was often called at the time, helped to open up the taboo subject to a whole generation and forged the way for changes in the law. This is not a conventional cradle-to-grave biography, but a more wide-ranging examination of the issues and as such is an illuminating introduction to the man, his writings, his influence on his peers, and the contemporary attitudes prevailing at the time.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews