ABSTRACT
ON 2 MAY 1877, A HANDSOME ENGLISHMAN OF THIRTY-TWO ARRIVED AT 431 Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey. It was the residence of Walt Whitman, notorious among many in the United States as the immoral author of Leaves of Grass. The three-story row house he occupied suggested the genteel aspirations of the poet’s brother and sister-in-law with whom he lived. But to Edward Carpenter industrial Camden must have seemed like the North of England, ideal for a political poet who shunned the collegiality of middle-class literati such as Lowell and Longfellow for the “comradeship” of uneducated working men like Peter Doyle and Harry Staffbrd. A self-identified homosexual and socialist, Carpenter felt “cut off from the understanding of others,” but Whitman’s writings had given him “a ground for the love of men” that was sexual, political, and religious. For Carpenter, an ex-minister for whom literature had become a substitute for religion, this long-delayed journey was tantamount to a spiritual pilgrimage. 1
