Edward Carpenter
From Philosopedia
Carpenter, Edward (29 August 1844 - 28 June 1929)
Carpenter, ordained as a minister in 1869, became a Fabian socialist, renouncing religion when he was thirty and quitting the Church.
A friend of Walt Whitman, Carpenter wrote a long unrhymed poem about social reform entitled Towards Democracy (1863—1902). He also wrote Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894), Love’s Coming of Age (1897), and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk (1914). These books proposed equality between the sexes, were gay-positive, and showed that in primitive societies homosexual behavior was often considered normal and sometimes even exalted.
His religious nonbelief is evident in Myth, Magic, and Morals, A Study of Christian Origins (1910). Carpenter’s rationalism is shown in My Days and Dreams (1916). However, the English Freethinker states he was no secularist, that “his writings mingled elements of rural Utopianism with mysticism. But neither was he a conventional superstitionist. . . . Carpenter could be said to have been a courageous pioneer of both modern feminism and of Gay liberation, and his writings still may be read with profit and pleasure.”
Carpenter’s love of George Merrill inspired E. M. Forster’s representation of the love of Maurice Hall and Scudder, the gamekeeper, in Maurice.
(See entry for Gay Philosophers).
(See a review by Julian Bell of a 2009 book by Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love.)
