Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, By Sheila Rowbotham

It's rare for a doorstep biography to be accused of going too fast. One measure of the importance of Sheila Rowbotham's subject, however, is that I devoured these 550 pages in a day, longing for more. Despite his palpable influence on writers, politicians and the public across the globe over the last century, Edward Carpenter's writings are today unread and untaught. Many of you may be scratching your heads. But among British writers, few of Tolstoy's contemporaries can legitimately claim to have influenced the Russian, rather than the other way round. His other intimates and correspondents included Walt Whitman, Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, Forster, Shaw, Isadora Duncan, Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon, even Gandhi.

Enthusiasts for Carpenter's idiosyncratic weave of socialism, vegetarianism, gay rights and feminism have been awaiting a serious critical life for decades. Rowbotham first wrote on him 30 years ago. Still, while this conscientious, capacious life more than answers their high expectations, at its close, one remains unsure whether Carpenter was a gifted writer. As a historian, Rowbotham is more engaged with Carpenter's ideas than with his literary contribution. Even his admirers feared, on his death in 1929, that the man's charm gave him an impact which his publications lacked. By this time, Carpenter had conspicuous detractors. Orwell counselled against reading the works of "pious sodomites".

Carpenter relentlessly composed essays, poems and dramas on, seemingly, every burning topic of the day. His day, moreover, was a long one. Born in 1844, he survived the Great Recession, the post-Wilde witchhunt of homosexuals and the rounding-up of the unpatriotic during the First World War. Until the end – his eighties – he seemed indestructible, regularly taking boy admirers to bed, undertaking 20-mile walks and working long days on his smallholding. What he could not survive was the loss in 1928 of his partner, George Merrill, whom he had rescued from the Sheffield slums. The pair had cohabited openly for three decades.

Carpenter has often been characterised as the English Whitman. But Whitman was politically unengaged and, latterly, reclusive. Carpenter, paradoxically, became so famous for his advocacy of simple, reclusive living that he and Merrill were never alone. His roving public readings and capacity for contradictory thought more closely resembled Emerson, whom he also met and whose interest in Eastern philosophy he shared. Still, Carpenter's chief fixation – the place of the homosexual in Western culture – meant that the kinship with Whitman was irrevocable.

Rowbotham underlines the paradoxes in Carpenter's life. A socialist, he lived on inherited wealth. He sought out sex with "railway-men, porters, clerks, signalmen, ironworkers, coach-builders, Sheffield cutters". But he was capable of snobbery. His distaste for ostentation meant he hardly lifted a finger or wrote a word respecting Wilde's demise. For two years Carpenter prevaricated over the Great War. During the Boer War, he argued that British forces were being "led by the nose by the jews".

Such repellent anti-Semitism was commonplace. But Carpenter's prejudice cautions against our idealising him, or anyone. We must think, and rethink, our beliefs in the light of others' claims – as Carpenter would argue. Rowbotham concludes rather defensively that her subject is "not going to vanish entirely from view". On the contrary, thanks to her fine efforts, this incomparable progenitor of both green and sexual politics may belatedly get his due.

Richard Canning is author of 'Oscar Wilde' (Hesperus Press)

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