"Eros the Great Leveller": Edward Carpenter, Sexual Cosmotopianism and the Northern Working Man

Abstract

"Eros the Great Leveller":Edward Carpenter, Sexual Cosmotopianism and the Northern Working Man Alison Twells This article focuses on the domestic and transnational dimensions of Edward Carpenter's writings on the naturalness and cultural significance of same-sex love. I explore the relationship between Carpenter's representations of "comradely love" between men in Ancient Greece, in Hindu mythology and culture, and in industrial communities in northern England, to contribute to recent scholarship on friendship and anti-imperial politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article draws on the concept of "aspirational cosmotopianism", defined by Clare Midgley as "a transnational and transcultural utopian space of interaction", which, in Carpenter's case, involved a homo-erotic imagining of a universal humanity and valorisation of cross-class same-sex desire.2 I argue that bringing Carpenter's interest in transnational and cross-class desire into the same frame enables exploration of his "cosmotopian" aspirations and his ultimate inability to escape the structures of late nineteenth/early twentieth century imperial Britain. The article brings together the transnational dimensions of Carpenter's "comradely-love" with his writing about northern working-class men, amongst whom he lived following his move to Sheffield in 1877. As Sheila Rowbotham has noted, historians have long tended to "do" Edward Carpenter "in bits," emphasising his socialism or his interest in the East or advocacy of sex reform.3 More recent scholarship focusing on the transnational dimensions of his writing on same-sex love similarly separates into distinct strands of scholarship, examining the influences of Ancient Greece and Walt Whitman on his concept of "comrade-love,"4 and the "erotic and philosophical culture of the East" as a source of inspiration throughout his work.5 A related strand of scholarship considers issues of "sexual colonialism" and "homosexual orientalism" in Carpenter's accounts of his travels in India and Ceylon in 1890-91 as part of a problematic search for, and identification of, same-sex sexual practices among colonised and "primitive" peoples.6 Most recently, Leela Gandhi has inverted the relationship to explore Carpenter as representative of a small group of Britons who were enabled by their own marginalised social status—in his case, as a gay man—to pursue cross-cultural friendships and so create spaces for anti-imperial politics.7 By bringing together Carpenter's writings on class and sexuality within a transnational and transcultural frame, I reveal and explore the co-existence of anti-imperial qualities in Carpenter's thought alongside hegemonic class and orientalist features of his writings that suggest limits to his aspirational cosmotopianism. In the first part of the paper, I argue that Carpenter's representation of northern working-class men derived not just from his personal encounters with men in South Yorkshire's industrial communities but was crucially shaped by his cosmopolitan and transnational friendships and interests. Most important here was Walt Whitman, with whose work Carpenter was deeply engaged, and who he twice visited in the United States. Building on William Pannapacker's insightful exploration of the hopes and limitations of Carpenter's democratic vision of "comrade-love," I argue that Carpenter's tendency to impose his own emergent sexological understandings of same-sex desire onto the lives of his working-class lovers and interlocutors potentially obscured their own worldviews and reinforced both his own position as an educated outsider with power to interpret and create meaning and hegemonic representations of northerness and northern working men. It was also a forerunner to Carpenter's writing about "primitive" peoples across the globe. The second part of the article places Carpenter's cross-class theorisation alongside his anthropological interests in Vedantic mysticism, male friendship in India and Ceylon and the homosocial culture of Ancient Greece. Spurred on by the Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, with its prohibition as "gross indecency" of intimacy between men, and working alongside John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis and other sexologists, Carpenter sought evidence of cultures in which same-sex desire was accorded social value. His aim was to develop a more high-minded, pure-hearted, possibly heroic and certainly comradely and democratic articulation of sexual desire and same-sex relationships. His writings on...