Edward Carpenter was one of the early socialists in Britain. In 1883, Henry Hyndman, the founder of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) took him to a basement meeting of revolutionaries on Westminster Bridge Road, where he met William Morris. They were one of several fervent clusters. Things had been moving fast — according to the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, only two years before, when Hyndman had called a “Socialist Congress,” it had been so tiny that most of the delegates could assemble in the Hyndmans’ home.

Edward Carpenter was not an obvious recruit to the class struggle. Born in 1844, he had been brought up in an upper-class Brighton family and graduated from Cambridge, becoming first an Anglican curate and then a lecturer in University Extension, an adult education movement. His lectures took Carpenter to the North of England where he met both middle-class feminists like Isabella Ford and working-class students. Uncomfortably alienated from his own background, he settled in a gray stone house, Millthorpe, in the Cordwell Valley outside Sheffield. His new friends were local people, farmers, laborers, and a razor grinder called George Hukin, with whom Carpenter fell in love.

In his autobiography, My Days and Dreams (1916), Carpenter expresses his loathing of commercialism in public life, class division, the subordination of women, “the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs.” Opposed to capitalism, he adopted a do-it-yourself alternative, the simple life, and with this went an early critique of the devastation of the environment by industrialization. He helped to build the independent Sheffield Socialist Society, propagandizing around Britain.