Edward Carpenter and the Domestic Interior

Abstract

In Towards Democracy, his major work published in four volumes between 1883 and 1902, Edward Carpenter makes a bold promise: ‘You are in prison and I can give you space’.1 This metaphor of space as political and personal freedom is, in many respects, mere convention. But Carpenter's usage deserves a more considered analysis. For he attempted to bridge the gap between the metaphorical and the literal, to bring this idea of free space to daily life and, in doing so, to challenge the conventional configuration of sexuality, politics, and space. When Carpenter promised space, he meant to do so in a literal manner. It is telling that Carpenter deployed this idea of external space so powerfully at a moment when, for many homosexual men, it was the interior that afforded them some sense of what sexual freedom would be. While homosexuality was certainly present in the public space of a city like London in the late-nineteenth century, one need only think of the popular gentlemen's lavatory in Marylebone or the cruising grounds by the Thames, it was the domestic interior where sexuality was more often adumbrated, and sexual identity crafted. The domestic interior served not only as a means of escape, a refuge from homophobia, but also as a place to integrate homosexual and heterosexual lives. This was certainly true of someone like the designer and writer C. R. Ashbee whose house in Chelsea was both his family home, and imprinted everywhere with the comradely and eroticised relations with the men in his Guild of Handicraft; this chimney piece, for instance, is marked with the Guild's symbol of the pink as well as the initials of both Ashbee and his artisanal colleague Arthur Cameron (Fig. 1).2 The interior provided a space for imaginative projection, for dreaming …