FABIAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT:

Series One: The Papers of Edward Carpenter, 1844-1929, from Sheffield Archives, Sheffield Libraries and Information Services

Part 1: Correspondence and Manuscripts

Part 2: Manuscripts, Cuttings, Pamphlets and Selected Publications

Supporting Comments

“The publication of the papers of individual Fabians in Fabian Economic and Social Thought is an extremely welcome addition to the sources available to scholars.  As an archivist, I appreciate the saving of wear and tear of manuscripts when students can consult a microfilm reproduction.  Scholars will be able to work in the material in the comfort of their own university libraries, with all other aids to research at hand – a great time saver.”

Patricia Pugh

Author of Educate, Agitate, Organize: 100 Years of Fabian Socialism (Methuen, 1984)

“ .. 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

“Democratic author and poet and one of the leading personalities in the revival of Socialism in England during the 1880s, Carpenter was the foremost advocate of the cause of homosexuals at a time when all male homosexual acts were liable to legal prosecution.”

Chushichi Tsuzuki

Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo

Carpenter was a man of many talents, fervent enthusiasms, and attractive personality.  He had a singular capacity for making and keeping friends, and made a deep impression on everyone he met.  Many of his ideas have become so much a part of modern thought that they now seem almost commonplace, and even his books are only pale reflections of the vivid spirit which those who knew him loved.

To sum up his philosophy is not easy for he never set out to be a “man with a message”, but sought for and found an opportunity to suit his own tastes; but in trying to express his own individuality he voiced the needs of many others to whom the social duties, heavy diet and clothing, and distrust of emotion, which laid the nineteenth century open to the charge of being stuffy and repressive, were becoming increasingly burdensome.  He wanted for others what he wanted for himself.  He looked to Socialism to release the labouring classes from overwork, grinding poverty, and ugliness of environment; he urged upon the middle and upper classes (especially their women) a wider and freer education, a more buoyant, simple and useful sphere of activity, a more intelligent treatment of the emotional problems involved in friendship and marriage.

He sought to lead no party; he looked upon himself primarily as a writer, putting before his readers, in simple and graceful prose, a new viewpoint, honestly striving to deal with fundamentals.  At the root of his outlook on life was a belief that all animate creatures are variations on one life, linked together by a fundamental nature.  So, as anything alive, man or brute, whom he considered to be repressed or exploited, found in him a ready sympathizer and champion, all kinds of reformers admired and used his writings.  In expressing and freeing his own very individual views and temperament he worked for everybody.”

from A Bibliography of Edward Carpenter (Sheffield City Libraries, 1949)

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