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FABIAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT
Series One: The Papers of Edward Carpenter, 1844-1929, from Sheffield Archives

Part 2: Manuscripts, Cuttings, Pamphlets and Selected Publications

"As an early advocate of techniques of birth control, especially as a partial solution to chronic poverty, Carpenter earned the admiration of Emma Goldmann, Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger … In matters of sex and sexuality, Carpenter was unquestionably one of the earliest contributors to the wholesale reconsideration of these questions in the present century."
Keith Nield
writing in Dictionary of Labour Biography (Volume VII)

"The poet and reformer Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) did more than anyone to apply Whitman’s ideas and poetic practice, and tried to develop a community of lovers devoted to social and sexual equality. In his Whitman-like poem ‘Towards Democracy’ and in essays such as ‘Love’s Coming of Age’ and ‘The Intermediate Sex’, Carpenter developed a social critique based on the adaptation of feminist and socialist theory. The views of Carpenter and his colleagues in Sheffield, joining as they did, multiple reform movements and utopian strains, looked back to the same kind of radical impulse that had given rise to Whitman, but they were increasingly removed from a socialist movement now linked to trade unionism and uninterested in sexual reform. The last gasp of this line of influence, at least during this period, came in E.M. Forster, whose final novel ‘A Passage to India’ records the impact of Carpenter on the young Forster and the novelist’s attempt to imagine the power of an inter-racial, intercultural male friendship to overcome imperialism and racism."
Professor Robert K Martin
Department of English, Université de Montréal
from his chapter in The American Radical edited by Mari Jo Buble,
Paul Buble and Harvey J Kaye
(Routledge 1996)


Part 2 completes the sequence of Manuscript material (MS 188-269 and MS 272-338). Added to this are Newscuttings, Photographs, a section on Art and Travel, Pamphlets, Periodicals (extracts by or about Carpenter), and Selected Printed Items (including first and second editions of works by Carpenter and a number of Appreciation’s written by others on the subject of Carpenter).

The manuscript material includes The Heading of Nations; War and Peace; My Days and Dreams; Carpenter’s Autobiography; Towards Industrial Freedom; The Liberation of Industry; Back to the Land; Pagan and Christian Creeds; Some Friends of Walt Whitman; Primitive Life in the Maine Woods; The Psychology of the Poet Shelley; Light from the East (incorporating Birth-Control and Bi-Sexuality); and The Breakdown of our Industrial System.

Other significant highlights include Diaries, 1915-1920; Notebooks and Commonplace Books, , and contain a variety of material on asia.

Carpenter’s correspondence with his publishers, in particular, an interesting series of exchanges with Stanley Unwin, throw useful light upon book publishing history before and after the First World War. Royalty statements provide evidence on how well Carpenter’s publications sold.

MSS 321 contains a memorandum copy of the Lease from George Burrell of Sheffield to Edward Carpenter of Millthorpe, near Chesterfield, for a house and shop in Scotland Street in Sheffield; MSS 323 includes Carpenter’s licence to keep a male servant, dated 1920; MSS 333 has the very last letter Carpenter wrote on 11 August 1927 to George Pearson of Totley, Sheffield and the next manuscript item is a corrected proof of Days with Walt Whitman, 1906.

Reels 37-39 contain Carpenter’s collection of pamphlets and periodical articles. We have filmed the pamphlets in their entirety; with the periodicals we have only filmed articles written by Edward Carpenter or articles specifically about him or one of his works. These articles bring together a considerable body of material on a diverse range of subjects, from Anarchy to Birth Control, Brotherhood, China, Democracy, Ethics, Gay History, Humanity, Labour History, Love, Music, Pain, Socialism, the Status of Women and other topics close to his heart.

Reels 40-48 are devoted to printed items, especially first editions of Carpenter’s works such as Towards Democracy, Narcissus, The Promised Land, Modern Science, England’s Ideal, and Civilisation.

"Democratic author and poet and one of the leading personalities in the revival of socialism in England during the 1880’s, Carpenter was the foremost advocate of the cause of homosexuals at a time when all male homosexual acts were liable to legal prosecution."
Professor Chushichi Tsuzuki
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan




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