Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

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Edward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter’s first significant works, Towards Democracy, England’s Ideal
and Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, appeared in the 1880s and from the 1890s the
second two – above all Civilization: Its Cause and Cure – and later titles were selling
extremely well. By 1919 16,000 copies of England’s Ideal had been printed and 21,000
of Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, and by 1921 no fewer than 30,000 of the complete
edition of Towards Democracy, which had been published only as recently as 1905,
while Love’s Coming-of-Age of 1896 reached 14,000 with Allen & Unwin by 1916 and
had gone into a cheap edition with another publisher. Besides American editions of
almost all Carpenter’s books, there were translations into French, German, Dutch,
Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Russian, Bulgarian and Japanese. It
has been estimated that Love’s Coming-of-Age had worldwide sales of at least 100,000;
and its translator believed that no other modern English book had been so successful
in Germany. By 1916 four books discussing his oeuvre had been published in English
and one in French, as well as many articles. 1
Although Carpenter himself lived (and published) for another ten years, all this
changed drastically with the ending of the First World War; and after the publication
of a fine memorial volume in 1931 and Tom Bell’s interesting pamphlet the
following year 2 there was not a single book or pamphlet about him – with the partial
exception of the indispensable bibliography produced by Sheffield City Libraries, to
which he had bequeathed his books and papers 3 – for nearly forty years. Carpenter’s
reputation had collapsed for the same reasons, and even more completely than those
1 These details are taken from the very useful bibliography appended to Edward Carpenter, My Days
and Dreams: Being Autobiographical Notes (1916; London: Allen & Unwin, 3rd edn, 1921) [hereafter
MDD], pp. 325–36; and Keith Nield, ‘Edward Carpenter: The Uses of Utopia’, in Tony Brown
(ed.), Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism (London: Frank Cass, 1990), pp. 19–20.
2 Gilbert Beith (ed.), Edward Carpenter: In Appreciation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931); T.H. Bell,
Edward Carpenter: The English Tolstoi (Los Angeles, CA: The Libertarian Group, 1932).
3 A Bibliography of Edward Carpenter: A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts, Letters Etc. by and about
Edward Carpenter in the Carpenter Collection in the Department of Local History of the Central Library,
Sheffield, with Some Entries from Other Sources (Sheffield: Sheffield City Libraries, 1949). The
Carpenter Collection has now been removed to Sheffield Archives.
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