Splinters

At the Guardian, Fiona Maccarthy reviews a very interesting sounding biography by Sheila Rowbotham - Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love. I must confess I'd scarcely heard of Carpenter, he certainly doesn't get as much namechecking as those other early left stalwarts, Morris, Hardie, Owen et al. Perhaps a reason for this reticence is that unlike them he " lived alongside and had sex with local working-class men. He was crossing class barriers and sexual boundaries simultaneously." It seems the visionary Carpenter, who set up his own commune and advocated sexual equality alongside the abolition of private property, had more influence on the more idealist-utopian side of British socialism than has often been noted, and this book sounds a good way to offset that overlooking discrepancy.