1903 – Edward Carpenter in Leek
Edward Carpenter was an influential socialist of the Victorian era who wrote about same sex desire at a time when homosexual behaviour was criminalised and widely condemned. In 1891, he met George Merrill, a working-class man from Sheffield, who became his lifelong companion. His 1908 book “The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women expressed views on homosexuality in ways that may seem very distant from our understanding of LGBT+ culture today, but at the time were both risky and groundbreaking.
In Edward Carpenter’s Autobiography “My Days and Dreams” published in 1916 his list of publications includes a pamphlet titled “The Art of Creation. Being the second Anniversary Lecture of the Larmer Sugden Memorial, delivered at the William Morris Labour Church, at Leek, by Edward Carpenter, and printed at Hanley, in Staffordshire, 1903”.
In 1904 Carpenter published a book with the same title as the lecture delivered in Leek “The Art of Creation : Essays on the Self and its Powers”. The book is a spiritual but nonreligious discussion of how human consciousness can conceive and invent to achieve our full physical and intellectual potential. If it had been written in modern times we might classify it as “New Age” thinking.
Edward Carpenter and his life partner George Merrill.
The Reformers Yearbook of 1901 suggests that Carpenter was present at the opening of the William Morris Labour Church in Leek in 1896. It also tells us that the churches banner, created by Stephen Webb (a founder of the Arts and Crafts Society), carried the legend “Every Heart Contains Perfection’s Germ”. This quote is from Queen Mab, a philosophical poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley published in 1813. Shelley’s sexuality is a subject of ongoing debate, but his life and work indisputably contains homoerotic elements and references to free love that were non conforming in the period he lived in. The relationships he had with men, such as his close friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, are suggestive of male bonding and intense emotional attachment.
Edward Carpenter and William Morris were influential figures of the Victorian era who were colleagues and correspondents, frequently appearing together on radical lecture lists in the 1880s. William Morris, who was the founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, had significant ties to Leek. He lived and worked there between 1875 and 1877 to develop new textile dyeing techniques with his friend Thomas Wardle.
When The William Morris Labour Church opened in 1896 the building was not new. It was in fact built around 1692 and has a long history of association with early Quakerism in the Staffordshire Moorlands. It is visible on this map of 1897 as “The Friends Meeting House” and it still exists today. In the twentieth century the Quakers were early advocates of reforming the laws that criminalised sex between men.
