Book Reviews
The Long Happy Life of Edward Carpenter:
An Appreciation of Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, by Sheila Rowbotham
by Professor Michael Robertson
Reprinted from The Common Review by permission of author.
Not even his friends were certain that Edward Carpenter’s writing would survive him. E. M. Forster, whose pioneering gay novel Maurice was inspired by a visit to Carpenter and his partner George Merrill, dismissed Carpenter’s books as famous in their day but unlikely to live. Forster was more interested in Carpenter and Merrill as a couple; they touched a creative spring within him, he said. “George Merrill also touched my backside—gently and just above the buttocks,” Forster wrote. “I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth.”
To the extent that Carpenter is remembered now, it’s largely among gay historians and activists. He would not object to being a gay icon. Well into old age, he flirted with the young men who clustered around him; even in his eighties, if one colorful American memoirist is to be believed, he was not averse to taking handsome young visitors into his bed. However, it is reductive to remember Carpenter only as a pioneering defender of the love that, until he came along, dared not speak its name. As revealed in the long, sympathetic but shrewd new biography by Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, he was at the center of every progressive movement in Victorian and Edwardian England. Gay rights, socialism, feminism, anti-colonialism, Eastern religion, animal rights, environmentalism—Carpenter lectured about them all, published books, issued pamphlets, wrote poems and song lyrics, started petitions, gave money, and marched. By the nineteenth century’s end, his name was instantly recognizable across England, connoting a combination of avant-garde poetry, mystical religion, and radical politics. To imagine his equivalent in the American counterculture of the 1960s, one would have to combine Daniel Berrigan, Tom Hayden, Robert Bly, Ram Dass, Gloria Steinem, Gary Snyder, Larry Kramer, and Wavy Gravy.
In many ways, Edward Carpenter was a New Ager ahead of his time. However, he deserves comparison not just to the flakiest of thinkers but to the best. He is, ultimately, in the tradition of the poet-prophets who sought a transformed society through a transformed human heart: Blake, Shelley, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
* * *
Carpenter’s own life testifies to the transformative power of the poet-prophet. Reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass turned Carpenter’s world upside down, though in the manner of most overnight changes, the transformation extended over several years.
Born in Brighton in 1844, Edward Carpenter was the grandson of an admiral in the Royal Navy and the son of an unambitious father who had given up careers in the navy and the law to live off his investments. When it came time to enter Cambridge, Edward chose Trinity Hall because of its rowing team. Rather to his surprise, he earned an honors degree in mathematics and was invited to remain at Cambridge on a clerical fellowship. Raised in the liberalism of Broad Church Anglicanism, he had no objection to being ordained, and he settled into what should have been a comfortable role as university don and curate at a local parish.
Yet perhaps not so comfortable after all. Reading Whitman shortly before his ordination stirred Carpenter intensely. The American poet celebrated unfettered individualism, a post-Christian mystical spirituality, and the beauty of working-class men, all of which appealed to Carpenter. He began to see his conventional upper-middle-class milieu through Whitmanesque eyes, and the sight made him recoil: the congregation in their sleek Sunday best dozing off during his sermons; the elderly women who, at the Reverend Mr. Carpenter’s knock on their door, would hastily shuffle a Bible or prayer book onto the table. He stuck it out for six years, then tendered his resignation. The dean tried to talk him out of it: they all knew Anglican doctrine was tomfoolery, why make such a bother about reciting a creed he did not believe? But Carpenter was adamant; he had to find a more authentic mode of existence.
For the moment, that took the form of a move to the industrial north of England and a position as a university extension lecturer. He imagined that he would be plunged into the life of the common people; instead he found himself lecturing on abstruse topics to uncomprehending middle-class women. In 1877 Carpenter made a pilgrimage to Camden, New Jersey, where Walt Whitman had moved into his brother’s house following a serious stroke. Carpenter trailed Whitman around the city, where the old poet seemed to know everyone: tram conductors, fish sellers, loafers on the pavement. Bucked up by the visit, Carpenter eventually threw over the university extension position, and in 1880 he moved to a farm in rural Derbyshire. He would remain in Derbyshire for the next forty years; he bought a wagon, painted “Edward Carpenter, Market Gardener” on its side, and used it to take vegetables into Sheffield to sell.
* * *
With his highly Romantic move to the countryside, the former clergyman and don was materially and psychologically poised to begin a new life. He began supplementing his reading of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu religious texts then circulating in colonial-era England. Unsurprisingly, this mixture of American transcendentalism and Indian spirituality resulted in an experience that Carpenter called Cosmic Consciousness, a mystical apprehension of the unity of nature and humankind. Fired by the new revelation, he began writing a lengthy poem that would be published in 1883 as Towards Democracy. While at Cambridge, Carpenter had published a volume of conventional verse, but Towards Democracy was nothing like his earlier work. Its form was Whitmanesque free verse, its content a combination of ecstatic mysticism (“Joy, joy arises—I arise. The sun darts overpowering piercing rays of joy through me, and the night radiates it from me”), praise of the common man, and attacks on “the puppet dance of gentility” that Carpenter experienced at Brighton and Cambridge.
Carpenter was hailed by Edward Aveling, the partner of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor, as “the English Walt Whitman.” Not that Towards Democracy was Marxist—the poem is vague about the nature of the democracy towards which it points, a strategic ambiguity that gained it readers across a broad spectrum of the British left. When he published the first edition of Towards Democracy, Carpenter was a political neophyte, and his conception of democracy involved little more than fellow-feeling: “Of that which exists in the Soul, political freedom and institutions of equality, and so forth, are but the shadows (necessarily thrown); and Democracy in States or Constitutions but the shadow of that which first expresses itself in the glance of the eye or the appearance of the skin.” If this is dreadful as poetry, it appealed to the idealistic, non-Marxist strain of British socialism that was taking shape in the 1880s. With the publication of Towards Democracy, Carpenter was drawn into left-wing politics and soon became celebrated as the premier spokesman for a movement that he later dubbed the Larger Socialism.
* * *
Trade unionists may have been concerned with the clash of labor and capital, Fabians with infiltrating the parliamentary system, but Larger Socialists saw socialism as a religious crusade. The industrial north of England was the movement’s epicenter; not coincidentally, it was also home to Britain’s most fervent evangelical Christians. The children of mid-Victorian lower-middle-class evangelicals, turned away from conventional religion by the discoveries of Darwin and the critiques of biblical scholars, were not suddenly transformed into modern secularists. Instead, thousands of them transferred their evangelical fervor to socialism. William Morris, himself a nonbeliever, nevertheless spoke frequently about the “religion of socialism.” J. Keir Hardie, a former miner and the first socialist representative to Parliament, said that socialism aimed “to resuscitate the Christianity of Christ” and that it was simply “the embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system.”
Edward Carpenter was the guru of the Larger Socialism. His lyric “England, Arise!” became a socialist hymn, sung at services of the Labour Church—founded in Manchester in 1890, the movement included over fifty congregations by 1895. Towards Democracy was the new Bible. “We read it aloud in the summer evenings,” one prominent socialist reminisced. “We read it at those moments when we wanted to retire from the excitement of our Socialist work, and in quietude seek the calm and power that alone gives sustaining strength. We no longer believed in dogmatic theology. Edward Carpenter gave us the spiritual food we still needed.”
Hundreds of true believers in the new movement made the pilgrimage to Carpenter’s home Millthorpe, near Sheffield, where Carpenter had settled in 1883. His inheritance from his father left him a wealthy man; he used much of the money to subsidize various socialist organizations and publications, a portion to buy a seven-acre farm and build Millthorpe cottage. There he wrote, gardened, made sandals (he regarded boots as “leather coffins”), and received visitors eager for instruction in the Simple Life.
Carpenter had little interest in the communal living experiments that proliferated in Great Britain during the 1880s and 1890s, yet his life at Millthorpe was itself a utopian experiment, a countercultural alternative to repressive, materialistic late-Victorian society. Invited to address the Fabian Society in London in 1888, Carpenter delivered a lecture that made him notorious among scientific socialists. Demonstrating his intellectual debt to Rousseau, Carpenter declared civilization to be a disease, advocated vegetarianism and nudism, and envisioned a future in which humanity, “on the high tops once more gathering,” would “celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars.” Following this remarkable speech, George Bernard Shaw began referring to Carpenter as the Noble Savage. H. M. Hyndman, head of the Social Democratic Federation, grumbled that he did not want the socialist movement to become “a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them.” Rowbotham, in contrast, sagaciously notes the conviction of Carpenter and the thousands who admired him that “theorising social change involved living some part of the future in the here and now.”
* * *
Throughout his career, Carpenter courageously insisted that men’s love for one another was central to the utopian future he envisioned. In his several books of sexual theorizing, he argued that homosexuals would form the vanguard of the coming egalitarian society. For those who imagine that the gay rights movement began in Greenwich Village in 1969, Rowbotham’s account will come as a revelation.
When Carpenter began writing about sexuality in the 1890s, he had virtually no predecessors to draw on. English-language writing about homosexuality was restricted to police reports and medical cases, which labeled homosexuals as either criminals or diseased perverts. The only exceptions were essays by Carpenter’s contemporary John Addington Symonds, who furtively published his works in editions of ten or a hundred copies, and the young Australian physician Havelock Ellis’s book Sexual Inversion, which was banned in Britain. The most prominent sex researcher of the era was the German Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who classed homosexuality with bestiality and other perversions.
In this unpropitious climate, Carpenter seized on the sexual theorizing of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, an Austrian civil servant who avoided Krafft-Ebing’s term homosexual—using an obscure passage in Plato, Ulrichs came up with the terms Uranians and Urnings to describe himself and other man-lovers—and, resorting to Latin when the going got juicy, declared that they possessed anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa: a woman’s soul in a man’s body. Carpenter had his doubts about this formulation—he declared that “anything effeminate in a man . . . repels me”—but it offered a non-pathological way of viewing his sexual temperament. Drawing upon Ulrichs’ ideas about androgyny, Carpenter coined the term “intermediate sex,” and he used the label throughout his career to make remarkably progressive and politically astute arguments for homosexual rights, basing his theories in the pervasive gender inequality of Victorian society.
Growing up in genteel Brighton, Carpenter watched his unmarried sisters, trapped in enforced virginity, turn into frail recluses. Most men of the era would have dismissed them as spinsters, but Carpenter identified with his sisters—his sexual confusion and ignorance as a young man had isolated him as well. Once he encountered socialist ideas, he quickly connected capitalism, patriarchy, and sexual repression. He wrote that “Man’s craze for property and individual ownership . . . culminated in the enslavement of woman.” From Carpenter’s socialist perspective, men had split into the classes of rapacious capitalist and exploited worker; women had only the options of the lady, the household drudge, or the prostitute.
Into this unequal, unhappy social landscape strode the heroic deliverer, the Urning. Men’s love for men, or women’s for women, was, Carpenter believed, inherently more egalitarian than heterosexual unions, given the gender inequality in capitalist society. Uranian love pointed the way to the socialist future, and Urnings served as models for the more androgynous, spiritually evolved human beings to come. As he wrote in his poem “O Child of Uranus”:
Thy Woman-soul within a Man’s form dwelling
(Was Adam perchance like this, ere Eve from his side was drawn?)
So gentle, gracious, dignified, complete,
With man’s strength to perform, and pride to suffer without sign,
And feminine sensitiveness to the last fibre of being;
Strange twice-born, having entrance to both worlds—
Loved, loved by either sex,
And free of all their lore!
Free of conventional gender limitations, intermediate types were uniquely capable of contributing to gender equality. They had an equally important role to play, Carpenter believed, in ending economic inequality. “Eros is a great leveller,” he wrote.
He should know. “My ideal of love is a powerful, strongly built man, . . . preferably of the working class,” Carpenter wrote in the autobiographical case study he contributed to Ellis’s Sexual Inversion. The love of his life was George Hukin, a Sheffield razor-grinder whom Carpenter met in 1886 at the local Socialist club. Unfortunately, at that moment Hukin was courting a young woman named Fannie, whom he married less than a year later, despite having become Carpenter’s lover. Carpenter saved every letter Hukin wrote him, including a painful one sent shortly after Hukin’s marriage: “I do wish you could sleep with us sometimes Ted, but I don’t know whether Fannie would quite like it yet and I don’t feel I could press it on her anyway. Still I often think how nice it would be if we three could love each other so that we might sleep together sometimes without feeling that there was anything at all wrong in doing so.” Carpenter’s socialist circle anticipated by decades the complicated romantic and sexual lives of the modernist bohemians.
Carpenter’s turbulent romantic life smoothed out as he approached fifty, when George Merrill, a working-class man twenty-five years his junior, picked him up on a train. Merrill eventually moved into Millthorpe and remained with Carpenter for the rest of his life. Unlike the refined, bisexual, morally fastidious Hukin, Merrill was coarse, humorous, and sexually bold; on hearing that Jesus had spent his last night at Gethsemane, he smartly replied, “Who with?” Merrill’s flamboyant behavior occasionally threatened Carpenter’s Derbyshire respectability, but Carpenter’s service on the parish council and his friendship with the vicar rendered him immune to serious attack. The locals knew him as a prominent writer who “had a remarkable number of gentlemen to visit.”
Carpenter was able to publish works like The Intermediate Sex with impunity partly because he did not declare himself in print to be an Urning, partly because he couched radical ideas in a mild, surely-we-can-all-agree tone. Carpenter may have revolted against virtually every aspect of Victorian society, but his protests are pitched in the sweetly reasonable key of the Broad Church parson he started out as. It may be Carpenter’s rosy optimism that all differences of opinion can be reconciled that, as much as anything, is responsible for his twentieth-century eclipse. “If anyone will only think for a minute of his own inner nature,” he wrote in an 1897 essay, “he will see that the only society which would ever really satisfy him would be one in which he was perfectly free, and yet bound by ties of deepest trust to the other members.” It seems never have occurred to Carpenter that some people, consulting their own inner nature, might find there not the desire to live in a harmonious socialist utopia but rather deep distrust of others, or self-critical insecurity, or unreasoning rage.
* * *
Following the Great War, the rise of Stalinism, the triumph of Nazism in Germany, and the destruction of Hiroshima, leftists had little use for Carpenter’s earnest poetry and sweetly reasonable essays. With the triumph of consumer capitalism following World War II, few progressives regarded Carpenter’s retreat to the countryside as a model to be emulated. It took the utopian energies released by the 1960s for Carpenter to be rediscovered. Gay British historians recovered his writings on sexuality, and Sheila Rowbotham, one of Britain’s most prominent feminist historians, circled around Carpenter for years, publishing essays and, at last, this definitive biography.
Does Carpenter have anything to offer us now, eighty years after his death? Rowbotham, a lifelong activist as a well as an academic, believes that he does. Carpenter anticipated virtually every social movement of the sixties—gay rights, women’s liberation, anti-colonial protest, back-to-the-land communes, New Age spirituality, environmentalism, animal rights—and he has a message for each: look beyond your own interest, form alliances with others, and keep your eyes on the prize, which, according to Carpenter, is the utter transformation of society.
George Orwell dismissed Carpenter as a “pious sodomite.” But as Martin Green pointed out in Prophets of a New Age, Orwell’s caustic rejection of Carpenter and other utopian reformers contained an element of self-betrayal, a rejection of his tenderest and most vulnerable hopes. Carpenter was unafraid to expose his own tender, vulnerable hopes in print and, with considerable rigor and courage, he sought to live out his beliefs. To discard one’s formal dinner clothes, as Carpenter did after leaving Cambridge, may have been a highly Romantic gesture, but it was also an act of great resolve. At the height of late-Victorian self-satisfaction, Carpenter abandoned his class privilege, threw in his lot with farmers and working-men, and lived a life close to the earth, surrounded by friends and lovers. Tending his market garden in rural Derbyshire, Edward Carpenter was miles away, in every sense, from his contemporary Oscar Wilde, and the two men never crossed paths. Yet Carpenter surely knew and approved Wilde’s epigram that “a map of the world that does not contain Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”
Wilde, who was ignored for years following his imprisonment, underwent a twentieth-century renaissance; Rowbotham’s biography opens the possibility that Edward Carpenter may have his own rebirth in the twenty-first. E. M. Forster may have coolly appraised Carpenter’s legacy after his death, but when the two first met, the young man was overwhelmed. Carpenter seemed to the emotionally constrained novelist to be living out everything he admired but had not, in his own life, realized: unashamed sensuality, democratic comradeship, a deep connection to nature. Rushing home to write in his diary, the supremely articulate Forster could only burble: “Forward rather than back, Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!”
# # #
Michael Robertson received the B.A. from Stanford, the M.A. from Columbia, and the Ph.D. from Princeton. His research and teaching interests are focused on 19th- and 20th-century trans-Atlantic literary and cultural studies. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and author of two award-winning books: Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton UP, 2008) and Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (Columbia UP, 1997). He is co-editor with TCNJ colleague David Blake of Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present (U of Iowa P, 2008). His book in progress, “The Last Utopians,” is a group biography of utopian socialists in the U.S. and U.K. during the period 1880-1915.
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love
The following clips are from reviews in the British & American press during autumn 2008 (with links to the full text, where available. Click on paper's name).
Mark Simpson, reviews the ‘worthy but fascinating new biography' of the ‘Utopian poet, mystic, activist, homophile, feminist, nudist and environmentalist Edward Carpenter' for The Independent on October 5, 2008. It is seen that Rowbotham ‘to her credit doesn't shrink from pointing out the limits of Carpenter's socialism'. Carpenter's portrayal of those ‘attracted to their own sex as harbinger's of a new age, the cultural advance guard of socialism' and the enraged response of George Bernard Shaw are highlighted, along with several citations of ‘this gloriously eccentric figure's' inconsistencies and detractors, including the paradoxical Carpenter hallmark, pointed out by E.M.Forster, of wishing to ‘merge with the cosmos and retain identity'. Nonetheless the reviewer finds it hard not to agree with Rowbotham's conclusion that "This complicated, confusing, contradictory yet courageous man is not going to vanish entirely from view."
A few days later, on October 7, The Independent followed up with, Richard Canning writing that Carpenter enthusiasts have been ‘awaiting a serious critical life for decades' and ‘read these 550 pages in a day, longing for more'. He sees Rowbotham, ‘more engaged with his ideas than his literary contribution', also ‘underlining the paradoxes in Carpenter's life' - but ‘thanks to her fine efforts, this incomparable progenitor of both green and gay politics may belatedly get his due'.
Melissa Benn writes of ‘pioneering feminist writer and activist Sheila Rowbotham',"A most unshowy icon",for The Guardian, October 22. ‘Sexuality, trade unionism, birth control, wages, love: she brought these disparate concerns together in her activism and writing. She still does.' Interviewed on her ‘magisterial biography of Edward Carpenter', Rowbotham highlights that ‘he linked so many different causes... He was a visionary who was very interested in practical solutions.' ‘I would like people to discover him, to find the book relevant to the things they are interested in now, to how people might live and society could be.'
The Guardian's ‘Book of the Week': Fiona MacCarthy labels Carpenter ‘the most rivetingly interesting figure in late 19th-century radical politics' who envisaged ‘a new world in which men and women of all classes could live creatively together in love, beauty and freedom'. In ‘a splendid reassessment', ‘exhaustively researched and resonant in detail', Rowbotham reveals ‘a whole homosexual subculture in 19th-century industrial England' - and ‘an altogether different milieu from the more familiar metropolitan gay underworld of Oscar Wilde.' The Guardian November 1.
For Mary Fitzgerald in The New Statesman , ‘the views of Carpenter libertarian and outspoken campaigner' ‘differ little from those held by many activists today', and, despite his ‘tendency to exaggerate and self-dramatise', ultimately agrees with Rowbotham that ‘Carpenter's inspiring tale remains "as relevant for rebels now as it was then".
Doug Ireland in the November 26th issue of New York City's Gay City News writes: "As brilliantly researched and told by Rowbotham, "Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love" has lessons for same-sexers, and for the left, which are invaluable in considering how we got to where we are and whither we should go. If you think you know Carpenter, this book's revelations will nonetheless surprise you, as they did me. And if you don't know him, you owe it to yourself to add this important and entertaining work, illustrated with numerous photos, to your bookshelf."
In the Library Journal - Xpress Review , Troy Reed stated "Carpenter constantly challenged Victorian era views of society and encouraged his milieu to think in new and different ways. Rowbotham does him justice in this accessible introduction to Carpenter and his times."
Book of the year for the political activist Peter Tatchell in The Observer, November 30; 'one of the best political biographies for many years bursting with ideas that remain relevant to the future of humanity. An engaging insight into the life of a remarkable man.'
Jeanette Winterson commends for her selected books of the year 'a powerful and entertaining biography of the "sexy sage of Sheffield"'. 'This absorbing book opens up the whole period of early socialism in Britain. And it reads beautifully.' The Guardian, November 29 .
A NEW BOOK GIVES GAY-ACTIVISM PIONEER EDWARD CARPENTER AN OVERDUE REVIVAL. Edward Carpenter, the founding father of gay liberation... argued that ‘Uranians' (19th century code for homosexual) were a distinct people. (For Carpenter) sex and politics were deeply intertwined and he believed the Uranian people were "a forward force in human evolution". The feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham has written the big and brilliant biography that this Titan of British radicalism and prophet of gay liberation deserves. Almost 80 years after he died, perhaps the world is finally catching up with Edward Carpenter.' So writes Richard Smith in Gay Scene Brighton 28 October 2008. Gay Times notes Edward Carpenter as ‘an important figure in both mainstream and queer 19th-century history' and a ‘meticulously researched' text, that is' clear and accessible, if sometimes dense.' ‘Shelf Life' Books, GayTimes, November 2008.
Anarchist Seeds Beneath The Snow; Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward.
By David Goodway
Liverpool University Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Joey Cain
The history of the British anarchist movement has been little studied or appreciated outside of the movement itself. David Goodway's book, Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow, should go a long way towards rectifying this blind spot in established labour and political history. His broad ranging erudition combined with a penetrating understanding of the subject matter has produced a fascinating, highly readable history. Its epic sweep explores anarchist ideas in the work of eleven of Britain's native born writers stretching from Willaim Morris in the 1880s down to Colin Ward at the start of the twenty first century. Along the way he provides a valuable cultural history of anarchist thought in Britain and places the actions and ideas of these writers in their historical and political context.
And what a gathering of writers he has woven into his text! Starting with Morris we move through Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, George Orwell, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Alex Comfort, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Pallis and finally Colin Ward. They were chosen because of their "merit, for the importance or interest of their work and careers." His goal is to demonstrate that "these eleven writers constitute a submerged but creative and increasingly relevant current of social and political theory and practice, an alternative, left-libertarian tradition." The tradition he is articulating encompasses a diverse range of manifestations including individualist, collectivist, communist, revolutionary syndicalist and both the acceptance and rejection of private property, to name a few. What unites these strands into a unified political program is "unremitting hostility to the State and parliamentarianism, employment of direct action, as a means of attaining desired goals, and organizing through co-operative associations, built and federated from the bottom upwards." He sees as anarchistic/libertarian, "but not necessarily ‘anarchist' such features as autonomy, direct action, self-management and workers control, decentralization, opposition to war, sustainability and environmentalism."
Goodway situates the historic anarchist movement as a workers movement that began in the 1860s in much of the industrialized world but not beginning in Britain until the great socialist revival and activism of the 1880s. After exploring Morris' life and the anarchistic elements in his work and outlining the fortunes of the movement down to the 1930s, when he sees it disappearing for decades, Goodway moves on to Edward Carpenter.
Sketching a condensed but effective history of Carpenter's life, the author follows suit with most contemporary writers on Carpenter in identifying his homosexuality as the motivating element in the evolution of his life and thinking. The major themes and concerns of Carpenter's work are represented: the critiques of civilization and modern science, the great sexual libertarian and liberator, the mystic, the movement into vegetarianism, dress reform and the Simplification of life: "Of the three men who inspired English agrarianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was Carpenter alone, not Ruskin or Morris, who provided the practical example."
Carpenter's influences on such folks as Arts and Crafts designer C.R Ashbury and novelist E.M. Foster are recounted and his involvement with the pioneer Socialist organizations, the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League, are reviewed along with his connection to the Fellowship of the New Life.
Where Goodway really excels is in articulating Carpenter's broadly inclusive vision of Socialism: "Carpenter was truly undoctrinaire and, ... supported all sections of the labour movement and all trends within it; so over a period of forty years, he welcomed equally syndicalism and Guild Socialism, and always maintained good relations with the anarchists: ‘Certainly... I stick up for the Fabians and the Trade Unions just as I do for the anarchist[s].... What can be more obvious? We are all traveling along the same road."
Goodway demonstrates that Carpenter did more than just 'stick up for the Anarchists", he was strongly inclined toward Anarchism. While in the cause of the "larger" Socialism he supported labour's parliamentarian aspirations and was "the sage and prophet" of the early Labour Party , especially the Independent Labour Party, at the core of his politics he was doubtful about "the regulative and governmental principle" and continuously envisioned a Socialism that placed greater faith in the "voluntary principle". Carpenter did criticize what he saw as the over emphasis placed on the role of "revolutionary violence" by some elements of the movement and yet came to the defense of the "Walsall Anarchists" after they were charged with building and providing bombs. Ultimately Carpenter's relations with Anarchism and parliamentarianism changed and evolved over the years depending on the given social situation and what tendencies were in the ascendancy in the two movements. When the violent, illegalist element was in the ascendancy in anarchism the early 1890s, Carpenter became supportive of the parlimentarianism of the ILP. When that lead to a bureaucratization of Labour politics and a retreat from a voluntary, non-governmental social ideal, he embraced the anti-parliamentarianism of syndicalism.
The Carpenter chapter also discusses the anarchist elements of Civilization, It's Cause and Cure and it's broad influence on the political discourse of the time and concludes with a short look at Carpenter's prominence (or lack of it) from the 1920s to today.
While I have focused this review on Anarchist Seeds Beneath The Snow's view of Carpenter, I found the discussions on the other authors to be just as insightful and informative. I have a new admiration and interest in John Cowper Powys' work after reading Goodway's account of him. And he has brought back for reconsideration a personal favorite of mine, Christopher Pallis, better known as Maurice Brinton, author of the extremely influential 1970s books The Irrational In Politics and The Bolsheviks and Workers Control 1917-1921: The State and Counter Revolution. Just as importantly, Goodway has achieved his goal to outline and make the case for the left-libertarian tradition and it importance in the history of British social and political thought.