Edward Carpenter was one of the early socialists in Britain. In 1883, Henry Hyndman, the founder of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) took him to a basement meeting of revolutionaries in Westminster Bridge Road, where he met William Morris. They were one of several fervent clusters. Things had been moving fast—according to the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, only two years before, when Hyndman had called a ‘Socialist Congress’, it had been so tiny that most of the delegates could assemble in the Hyndmans’ home.

Edward Carpenter was not an obvious recruit to the class struggle. Born in 1844, he had been brought up in an upper-class Brighton family and graduated from Cambridge, becoming first an Anglican curate and then a lecturer in University Extension, an adult education movement. His lectures took Carpenter to the North of England where he met both middle-class feminists like Isabella Ford and working-class students. Uncomfortably alienated from his own background, he settled in a grey stone house, Millthorpe, in the Cordwell Valley outside Sheffield. His new friends were local people, farmers, labourers, and a razor grinder called George Hukin, with whom Carpenter fell in love.

In his autobiography, My Days and Dreams (1916), Carpenter expresses his loathing of commercialism in public life, class division, the subordination of women, ‘the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs.’  Opposed to capitalism, he adopted a do-it-yourself alternative, the simple life, and with this went an early critique of the devastation of the environment by industrialisation. He helped to build the independent Sheffield Socialist Society, propagandising around Britain.

Through the 1890s Carpenter sat in a wooden shed in his Millthorpe garden writing away about his visions for a better society. In his account of a long trip to India and Sri Lanka, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta: Sketches in Ceylon and India (1892), he poked fun at the portentous representatives of the Raj and described how, guided by Ponnambalam Arunachalam, his friend from Cambridge, he learned from the Gnani Ramaswamy.

Between 1893 and 1895, he produced three pamphlets on sex in which he contested both male supremacy and the prevailing secrecy about sexual relationships. The novelist Edith Ellis, who was married to the early sex psychologist Havelock Ellis, but attracted to women, looked forward to his ‘sex-bombs’. They were indeed explosive, especially the third, Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society, which was printed only for private circulation, because same-sex love was not just regarded as indecent—it was illegal.

In Love’s Coming of Age (1896), Carpenter hails the new women, intellectually restless and sexually rebellious, who he observed travelling unaccompanied on buses and trains or riding their bicycles. This forceful minority were strenuously resisting the confinement of the Victorian era, in contrast, Carpenter notes with amusement, to the upper-class ‘man, the ungrown’, blithely pelting along with his hobby or his career, until falling in love, whereupon he ‘struggles like a fly in treacle’.

Carpenter himself had fallen in love with a young man called George Merrill from a poor Sheffield family. Attracted from their first glance in 1891 on a train to Totley, the two men were to become lifelong companions. Sexual taboos were not boundaries to skirt for Merrill; he was simply oblivious of their existence. E. M. Forster would later relate how, on a visit to Millthorpe in 1914, Merrill had touched his ‘backside’ and released in him the capacity to write his novel Maurice.

In the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Carpenter’s home was visited by troupes of rebels and reformers, nature conservers, garden city designers, trades unionists, Clarion socialist cyclists, feminists, birth control advocates, vegetarians, and radical Christians like the young Fenner Brockway, who was a member of the Independent Labour Party. Brockway would later describe how ILP-ers like himself avidly read Carpenter’s long Whitmanite poem, Towards Democracy, ‘in those moments when we wanted to retire from the excitement of our socialist work, and in quietude seek the calm and power that alone gives sustaining strength’.

Carpenter’s Bristol socialist friend Robert Gilliard reflected that there was a ‘bread and cheese side of socialism and… a much deeper and broader side.’ The latter assumed various manifestations, from Brockway’s humanitarian ethics to a fusion of spirituality and creative  revolution around the avant-garde magazine New Age. When a shy Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson enquired of Carpenter how he fused his interest in human experience, mysticism and socialism, he ‘replied that he liked to hang out his red flag from the ground floor and then go up above to see how it looked.’

Carpenter continued to write until the late 1920s, acquiring an international following and extending his range into anthropology, pagan religions, land reform, and industrial democracy. He advocated workers’ control not simply in the mines and railways but in the army and the police as well. After his death his influence waned, though he continued to be remembered by local people in the countryside near Millthorpe, by older socialists and by some of the gay men who began organising in the 1960s and ’70s.

I came across him when I was sixteen in a biography about Havelock Ellis. A few years later, through the historian E. P. Thompson, I learned that the Leeds New Unionist organiser and poet Tom Maguire had been influenced by Carpenter. In the mid 1960s I read Carpenter’s papers in Sheffield Library and was hooked, writing about him in Socialism and the New Life with Jeffrey Weeks (1977) and eventually writing a biography of him. I was drawn to his dry humour and cautious courage and inspired by his version of utopianism—feet on the ground and eyes on the stars.