Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was a proponent of a "larger" Socialism, one that embraced the liberation of the emotional and spiritual life along with the economic. A small-holding farmer and cultural and political activist, he advocated the Simplification of Life and put his beliefs into practice. A man of letters, he published over 20 books, including his collection of poems Towards Democracy, and numerous additional articles. He campaigned through out his life on many issues of social concern, ranging from women's suffrage to the protection of the environment, from sexual emancipation to the formation of trade unions. A unifying spiritual vision underlay all of his life and work. As a homosexual man, he lived openly and in quiet celebration while his writings and example laid the foundation for the homosexual freedom movement of the twentieth century.
Through his many friendships, Edward Carpenter transversed again and again the divisions of class, gender, sexuality, race and creed. Men and women from across the world and from all walks of life came into connection with each other through him and his home at Millthorpe in Derbyshire, England. Appreciative of this, the Edward Carpenter Forum aims to welcome a diversity of men and women from around the world, and representative of a wide range of interest groups; social, political or academic.
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Welcome to the Edward Carpenter Forum Website!
We hope you enjoy the inaugural issue of the Website. Please take your time and, along with reading the articles, explore the other features of the site. Out of a conviction that Carpenter’s ideas have a continuing relevance for today, our goal is to blend the resources of a scholarly publication with the community engagement more typical of a fan site. Towards that end we will be featuring essays on Carpenter, hosting online forums for members to share their thoughts, compiling Carpenter photos, reviews, letters, studies and hopefully some entertaining anecdotes. We’ll be featuring works by Carpenter, both previously published and premiered here online for the first time. We encourage your feedback and participation and, if you like what you see here, invite you to become a member of the Edward Carpenter Forum.
Our very grateful thanks go to the following:
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Carpenter copyright holder Jonathan Cutbill for permission to publish Carpenter’s works and his unpublished letters and writings.
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The Sheffield Archives for permission to publish photographs from their collections.
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The History Workshop Journal for their permission to include the essay ‘In Search of Edward Carpenter’ by Sheila Rowbotham.
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The group who met in May of 2006 and came up with the plans for the Forum: John Baker, Simon Dawson, Sheila Rowbotham, Sally Goldsmith, Rony Robinson, and Joey Cain.
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This issue was jointly edited by John Baker and Joey Cain.
Joey Cain designed and created the website using the the free, Open Source software Joomla. Visit them them at www.joomla.org.
This website will display best if the Display setting in your Control panel is set at 1024 x 800 pixels or higher.
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 Millthorpe Revisited
by John Baker
Over the past few years a number of Forum participants have had the chance to visit Carpenter House at Millthorpe, where Edward Carpenter lived for nearly 40 years. The following photographs give a glimpse of Millthorpe as it looks today.
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 In Search of Edward Carpenter
By Sheila Rowbotham
Sheila Rowbotham's writings on Carpenter in the 1970s were a significant contribution to the rediscovery of his world, ideas and continuing relevance. Because of this and her ongoing research and work, we dedicate this first issue of the Edward Carpenter Forum website to her.
Thanks Sheila!
"The pub at Millthorpe near Sheffield was deserted with a 'For Sale' notice outside when I went there with friends on a grey March day in 1976. Just down the road there was 'Carpenter House' where Edward Carpenter had lived from the early 1880s until he moved to Guildford in 1922."
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In each issue of the Edward Carpenter Forum website we will publish a Member's Choice of a work or excerpt from a work by Edward Carpenter. We invite member's to send us their favorites along with any comments they wish on the piece submitted.
This issue's Members' Choice is:
"The Secret of Time and Satan"
Is there one in all the world who does not desire to be divinely beautiful?
To have the most perfect body-unerring skill, strength-limpid clearness of mind, as of the sunlight over the hills-
To radiate love wherever he goes-to move in and out, accepted?
The secret lies close to you, so close.
Read Member's Choice
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 Carpenter's Letters to Edith Vance
The Forum will be publishing letters of Edward Carpenter on an ongoing basis. In this issue we are presenting the first of two instalments of letters to Edith Vance, who had written to Carpenter seeking help in aiding a friend in legal trouble due to their homosexuality.
Read Letters
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 Anarchist Seeds Beneath The Snow; Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward.
By David Goodway
Liverpool University Press, 2006.
"Carpenter was the early Labour Party's guru, but he supported all sections within the labour movement and at core was an anarchist communist, seeking the emergence of a ‘non-governmental society'; and his art of everyday living points forward equally to the individualist anarchism of John Cowper Powys."
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 The Religious Influence of Art
By Edward Carpenter
To celebrate the launch of the Edward Carpenter Forum website we are premiering the online publication of Carpenter's hard to find first publication of 1870, The Religious Influence of Art. This was the essay that won him the Burney Essay Prize for 1869 at Cambridge. In it the 26 year old Carpenter is still very much the Cambridge undergratuate beholding to the ideas of Church and University. Around the edges, however, the influences of Walt Whitman, whom he had discovered the year before, and his reading in the German philosophers were begining to move in. A number of the themes that were to remain with him his whole life are evidenced.
The essay is essential reading to understand the starting point of Carpenter's spiritual, intellectual and political journey.
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