This observation made by Edward Carpenter in 1914, indicates his own late-Victorian rebellion which had begun as a young uppermiddle-class clerical fellow at Cambridge with religious and social doubts. Influenced by the romantic poets and Walt Whitman he had inclined to the radical nationalism of Mazzini. In the early 1870s he had wrestled with the problem of unearned wealth and debated how to respond to the Paris Commune.