Figuring in History: The Reputation of Edward Carpenter, 1883-1987 Annotated Secondary Bibliography, I

Figuring in History: The Reputation of Edward Carpenter, 1883-1987 Annotated Secondary Bibliography, I TONY BROWN University College of North Wales, Bangor In a tribute to Edward Carpenter published in 1931, some two years after Carpenter's death, E. M. Forster wrote: If my impression of him is correct, he is not likely to have much earthly immortality. He will always be known to students of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for his pioneer work; for his courage and candour about sex, particularly about homosexuality; for his hatred of snobbery while snobbery was still fashionable; for his support of Labour before Labour wore dress-clothes; and for his cult of simplicity. But I do not think he will be remembered long either as a man of letters or scientist. He will not figure in history. Forster's prediction has proved to be largely correct-indeed perhaps even a little optimistic, since until fairly recently even in academic circles mention of his name brought forth little or no response. Yet in his time, in the literary world as well as in Socialist and radical circles, Carpenter was a household name. On his eightieth birthday in 1924 he received the congratulations of the Labour Government, signed by every member of the Cabinet, beginning with the Prime Minister, and ten years earlier, on his seventieth birthday, Carpenter received a congratulatory address expressing "admiration and gratitude for your lifework ," signed by some three hundred friends and admirers, including Harley Granville Barker, Roger Fry, John Galsworthy, Edward Garnett, Jack London, Olive Schreiner, Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats. Tolstoy described Carpenter as "a worthy heir of Carlyle and Ruskin"-a comparison also made by some English reviewers-and wrote a preface for a Russian translation of one of Carpenter's works. Indeed, Carpenter's books were translated into most European languages, as well as into Japanese. Towards Democracy was in print continuously from the 1880s to the 1930s. Civilisation : its Cause and Cure (1889) was in its thirteenth edition by 1914 and Love's Coming-of-Age went through fourteen editions between 1896 and 1919 (and the German translation sold a reputed 50,000 copies before the First World War). 35 Brown: Carpenter: Annotated Secondary Bibliography, I Carpenter's life was in many respects a remarkable one and his autobiography, My Days and Dreams (1916), reveals how his writing, especially Towards Democracy and the early essays, sprang in an unusually urgent and direct way from his own emotional history. Born in fashionable Brighton in 1844, the son of an independently-wealthy barrister, Carpenter went to Cambridge and in 1868 was elected to the clerical fellowship at Trinity Hall which had been vacated by Leslie Stephen. Carpenter also became curate at St. Edward's, Cambridge, under F. D. Maurice. But he soon began to experience an "insuperable feeling of falsity and dislocation" (My Days and Dreams, 58), arising it seems not so much from religious doubts per se, but from both a sense of the futility of ministering to a congregation composed mainly of the commercial middle classes, with its "petty vulgarities and hypocrisies" and, more profoundly, from his own sense of isolation and emotional unfulfilment. As an undergraduate Carpenter had finally realized that he was a homosexual and his loneliness and sense of falsity brought him by 1871 to the verge of a nervous breakdown. At Cambridge he had for the first time read Whitman-"With a great leap of joy ... I met with the treatment of sex which accorded with my own sentiments" (My Days and Dreams, 30). Further reading of Whitman convinced Carpenter that he should throw off his middle-class life and go and make his life with "the mass of the people and the manual workers" (My Days and Dreams, 77). He resigned his fellowship and, after a period as a University Extension lecturer in the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North of England, he settled in 1883 on a small-holding at Millthorpe in Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield. He lived, in contrast to his old life, with working-class friends-and eventually with a working -class lover, George...