ABSTRACT
Edward Carpenter describes the Victorian Age as: a period in which not only commercialism in public life, but can't in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart. The influence of Buddhism and Thoreau in the early 1880s strengthened Carpenters desire to break with materialism and the social conventions of his class. From the late 1870s onwards, trade unionism, socialism and the ideas of state intervention and improvement began to influence and provoke establishment culture. Carpenters homosexuality was no secret in the socialist movement and his pamphlet Homogenic Love was published by Manchester Labour Press. With a surfeit of radical optimism Carpenter declared, No longer can priest or anyone cast obloquy on the sexual act or on woman, on the testes or vagina or womb, or the sweetness of coition. The Oscar Wilde trial in 1895 marked a powerful reaction against sexual and cultural radicalism.
