Introduction

Edward Carpenter was the greatest spiritual inspiration of our lives. His Towards Democracy was our Bible .... We read it aloud in the summer evenings when, tired by tramping or games, we rested awhile ... We read it at those moments when we wanted to retire from the excitements of our Socialist work and in quietude seek the calm and power that alone give sustaining strength .... Carpenter came one evening. I remember him vividly. His head and features were of extraordinary beauty: his face a chiselled statue, clear-cut and of perfect outline; his eyes bright and kindl y; there was refinement in his every movement and in the tone of his voice. One admired and loved him at once. 1

This is Fenner Brockway, writing on Carpenter's death in 1929, illustrating the kind of influence and adulation which Carpenter enjoyed in the labour movement in the years before the First War. His attacks, from the 1880s onwards. on the values which he saw as governing Victorian middle-class life - "cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares. the starving of the human heart,,2 - made him a hero of English radicalism in the decades around the tum of the century. On his seventieth birthday, in 1914, he received a congratulatory address. expressing "admiration and gratitude" for his work, signed by some three hundred friends and admirers. including figures as various as R. B. Cunninghame-Graham, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville-Barker, Keir Hardie, Peter Kropotkin, Jack London, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and W.B. Yeats. 3 On his eightieth birthday he received the congratulations of the Labour Government, signed by the whole Cabinet. But by then his reputation was fading. E. M. Forster, whose visit to Carpenter in 1913 had inspired Maurice, wrote in 1931: "If my impression of him is correct, he is not likely to have much earthly immortality . .. . He will not figure in history.'>4 Forster's prediction proved for many years to be correct. Only in recent years, as many of the issues on which he wrote have been engaged anew, has interest in Carpenter at all revived, with the publication of several studies of his life and work and the re-issue of some of his books. The present collection is intended as a further contribution to this renewed discussion of Carpenter's writing and the type of radicalism that he represented.