In Search of Carpenter

Abstract

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 i 88os until he moved to Guildford in 1922. Going to visit Millthorpe, Dronfield and Totley was a geographical locating of a group of radicals, socialists and feminists who had lived in the area or visited while Carpenter was there. I have been and still am struggling with the more complicated social, political and personal placing of this group. They have had a curiously persistent fascination for me ever since I read a review of a biography of Havelock Ellis by Arthur Calder-Marshall when I was in my teens in the late 1950s. Carpenter, socialist and writer on sexual liberation, feminism and homosexuality; Ellis, pioneer sex psychologist; and Olive Schreiner, the South African feminist, author of 'Story of an African Farm', have all become important to me at different times rather like the kind of closeness you have with old friends. There is the waxing and waning of intimacy with the security of knowing they are always around. The friendship is getting on for being a twenty year relationship which is longer than with any of my real friends. Information has accumulated in a haphazard kind of way as it does with old friends. I've slowly introduced myself to more and more of their circle until it has become like having an address book of the past. So I had to pinch myself as I walked on that foggy March day down the road to Millthorpe to remember I wasn't going to find them sitting there. It is one of the sadnesses of history for me this loving intimacy with ghosts. I was attracted first by the picture of Ellis as a medical student which was printed with the review, and then intrigued by the description of his mystical experience when he was a young man, alone in Sparkes Creek in Australia. Ellis had somehow come across James Hinton's Life in Nature. Hinton's vision of reconciliation between religious feeling and materialism illuminated Ellis's own spiritual anguish. He said,