Edward Carpenter - Moving To The North of England

Moving To The North of England

Carpenter left the church in 1874 and became a lecturer in astronomy, sun worship, the lives of ancient Greek women and music, moving to Leeds as part of University Extension Movement, which was formed by academics who wished to introduce higher education to deprived areas of England. He hoped to lecture to the working classes, but found that his lectures were attended by middle class people, many of whom showed little active interest in the subjects he taught. Disillusioned, he moved to Chesterfield, but finding that town dull, he based himself in nearby Sheffield a year later. Here he finally came into contact with manual workers, and he began to write poetry. Despite his obvious affinity for labourers, he was invited to become a tutor to the future George V. He politely declined the post.

In Sheffield, Carpenter became increasingly radical. Influenced by a disciple of Engels, Henry Hyndman, he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1883 and attempted to form a branch in the city. The group instead chose to remain independent, and became the Sheffield Socialist Society. While in the city he worked on a number of projects including highlighting the poor living conditions of industrial workers. In May 1889, Carpenter wrote a piece in the Sheffield Independent calling Sheffield the laughingstock of the civilized world and said that the giant thick cloud of smog rising out of Sheffield was like the smoke arising from Judgment Day, and that it was the altar on which the lives of many thousands would be sacrificed. He said that 100,000 adults and children were struggling to find sunlight and air, enduring miserable lives, unable to breathe and dying of related illnesses. Also while in Sheffield he wrote "England Arise!", a socialist marching song to promote left-wing politics, rivalling Connell's "Red Flag" in the British Labour Movement. In 1884, he left the SDF with William Morris to join the Socialist League. This move was in part promoted by the more conventional political aspirations of the SDF, a feeling made obvious by Hyndman, who in 1881 remarked, "I do not want the movement to be a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, and anti-vaccinationists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them."

Increasingly attracted by a life close to nature, Carpenter moved in with tenant farmer Albert Fearnehough and his family in Bradway, then in Derbyshire. It was here that Carpenter began to develop the crux of his Socialist politics. Influenced by John Ruskin, he envisioned a future that took the form of primitive communism, which flatly rejected the industrialism of the Victorian age. In this utopian community he envisaged "mutual help and combination will...become spontaneous and instinctive". When his father Charles Carpenter died in 1882, he left his son a considerable fortune. This enabled Carpenter to quit his lectureship to start a simpler life of market gardening in Millthorpe, near Barlow, Derbyshire. By this time he fully acknowledged his sexual orientation, and this, along with the ending of many of his conventional family ties (his mother died in 1881) and his adoption of a life closer to nature, produced a period of artistic creativity. Carpenter wrote, in a "kind of wooden sentinel box" in his garden, the poems that would become his book of verse, Towards Democracy, which was heavily influenced by Eastern spirituality and Carpenter's long reading of the writings of Walt Whitman.

During 1886, he had a brief relationship with George Hukin, who was employed in the Sheffield razor trade; despite Hukin's subsequent marriage, which caused a rift between them, the men ultimately formed a close and lifelong friendship.

In the 1880s Carpenter developed an intellectual passion for Hindu mysticism and Indian philosophy. During this period, Carpenter received a pair of sandals from a friend in India. "I soon found the joy of wearing them", Carpenter wrote. "And after a little time I set about making them." This was the first successful introduction of sandals to Britain. In 1890 he travelled to Ceylon and India to spend time with the Hindu teacher called Gnani, who he describes his work Adam's Peak to Elephanta. The experience had a profound effect on his social and political thought. Carpenter began to believe that Socialism should not only concern itself with man's outward economic conditions, but also affect a profound change in human consciousness. In this new stage of society Carpenter argued that mankind would return to a primordial state of simple joy: "The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon." (Edward Carpenter (1889) Civilisation: its cause and cure) This brand of "Mystical socialism" inspired him to begin a number of campaigns against air pollution, promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.