The author clearly has done thorough research on Edward Carpenter’s life and even more research on the history of criminality of homosexuality in England from the inception of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act to the present day. This read more like an academic paper than a mainstream biography. The prominent topic of the book was this history of criminality and social acceptance of homosexuality in England and the life and life work of Edward Carpenter took a backseat to the overall excavation of that topic. I could never get a real sense of Carpenter’s personality, his passions, hopes, goals, struggles. Not that those weren’t presented in the book. They were but in such a dry, dispassionate way that no corresponding emotion was sparked in the reader.

Edward Carpenter has been overlooked as a prominent voice of his era in regards to homosexuals in society. Anderson touches on the prejudices and treatment of his writing that shuffled him to the sidelines of history, particularly in comparison to his contemporary, Oscar Wilde. I’m not sure “rebel” is how I would describe Edward Carpenter based on the description of his life in this book, however he certainly asserted his independence of thought and sought to write about homosexual desire in a way that educated the reader, and would be a comfort to readers who were, themselves, homosexual. He did not write with the shock or wit of a Wilde but the quoted passages in this biography reveal a pragmatic thinker whose social concerns went beyond the dilemma of the homosexual. Glimpses of an interesting man here but the focus of the book was not as expected.

An interesting and worthwhile read exploring the life and work of Edward Carpenter, the trial-blazing campaigner for gay rights. His many writings on the subject of homosexuality or “inversion” as it was often called at the time, helped to open up the taboo subject to a whole generation and forged the way for changes in the law. This is not a conventional cradle-to-grave biography, but a more wide-ranging examination of the issues and as such is an illuminating introduction to the man, his writings, his influence on his peers, and the contemporary attitudes prevailing at the time.

Edward Carpenter - this book - and - the actual person- aren't what I expected when requesting this book.

Meaning that , while I enjoyed getting to know about Mr. Carpenter , in his own way a trailblazer ; the way the story is written is a bit dry and academic.

None of the less, I am glad I read this book as queers during the Victorian era is always interesting topic me.

I just reviewed Edward Carpenter by Brian Anderson. #EdwardCarpenter #NetGalley

Thanks to Netgalley and Matador publishing for an arc of this in exchange for my honest review.

This was much more academic in feel than I was expecting after some more accessible non-fiction reads. As a result of this more difficult language (I consider my own vocabulary decent and still needed to look up multiple words per page) and multitude of footnotes, I found myself really bored and distractable. His life seems like it would be interesting from the cover and indeed stepping back I’m able to see that might be the case, but reading this did not come across as engaging and interesting as I’d hoped, unfortunately. For the academic, researching reader, this might not be a problem, but for someone looking to read a first look at an influential person, it was hard for me.

For anyone interested in queer histories Edward Carpenter’s life and work’s worth exploring. Carpenter grew up in Victorian England in a comfortable, conventional middle-class home, attended Cambridge University and entered the Anglican church as a minister. Then he suddenly broke with his past, moved to a self-sufficient, smallholding in Millthorpe, close to Sheffield, and set out to reinvent himself. It seems the impetus for this radical change was a growing recognition of his love for other men and his concerns about broader questions of social inequality. Brian Anderson aims to tell Carpenter’s story with a focus on his pioneering ideas about gender and sexuality.

Carpenter was dismissed by some contemporaries as the kind of “man who will wear sandals and invite anyone into his garden” and later disparaged by writers like George Orwell as an arty-crafty crank, “the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell, who go about spreading sweetness and light.” A difficult figure to situate, Carpenter was perpetually on the fringes of a number of the burgeoning socialist groups of his time, despite strong connections with people like William Morris and Olive Schreiner. But he never fully committed to any particular ideological grouping, something Anderson attributes to his anti-systemic, idiosyncratic stance, indicated in writings that shift between the abstract and the deeply personal.

Anderson covers Carpenter’s early epiphany sparked by his discovery of Walt Whitman, his involvement in Sheffield campaigning groups through to later links with others interested in promoting freedom and tolerance for homophiles as well as women’s emancipation. Something increasingly prominent in his thinking from the 1880s onwards, when he discovered the theories of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who coined the term ‘Uranian’ to describe gay men, and challenged the notion of gender as binary. This led Carpenter to a small circle of theorists interested in similar issues including budding sexologist Havelock Ellis.

Carpenter comes across as a contradictory individual, a fierce defender of the ‘new woman’ but an advocate of curiously static perspectives on the masculine versus the feminine. A campaigner for workers’ rights who also fetishized the bodies of working-class men – as did many of his friends and near-contemporaries such as E. M. Forster. A fellow traveller in socialist organisations but a sceptic when it came to the centrality of economic change over individual self-realisation, including time spent flirting with newly-circulating forms of Eastern philosophy. Sometimes welcomed into the developing left-wing fold, sometimes shunned for the controversial aspects of his publications, particularly post Wilde’s trial when vice and scandal became central to public perceptions of men who were identified as ‘inverts’/homosexual. Part of Carpenter’s work focused on undermining links between, what he called, homogenic relationships and physical acts such as anal sex. Instead Carpenter wanted to foreground love, intimacy and freedom of expression.

Brian Anderson’s chosen a difficult subject to cover in little more than 200 pages, particularly because he wants to understand Carpenter in his own contexts alongside establishing his contemporary relevance. This often leads to a sense of fragmentation and incoherence: biographical chapters are juxtaposed with sections detailing the work of Ellis and Ulrichs; passages outlining Carpenter’s personal life compete with truncated histories of the Decadent movement and Wilde’s prosecution. There are outlines of socialist movements/theories and even a post-Carpenter chapter covering the period up to, and beyond, the Stonewall uprising. The end result’s more tantalising than satisfying, slightly breathless, frustratingly hard to grasp at times. Anderson’s treatment of Carpenter veers between analytical and descriptive, his prose’s similarly uneven, sometimes stilted, opaque or inelegant, sometimes persuasive and poignant. It’s a book desperately in need of careful editing. It does serve as a reasonable introduction to Carpenter’s life and work but I’m not sure how convincing it might be for readers who’ve never heard of him. It did whet my appetite enough that I may finally tackle Sheila Rowbotham’s epic biography.

Thanks to Netgalley UK and publisher Matador, imprint of Troubadour Books

I received this book for free for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley

Omg wow I had no idea this man even existed. I'm so happy someone finally told his story. I'm not using to biographies but this one hit it's mark.