SOURCE: "Edward Carpenter and Friends," in Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, Quartet Books, 1977, pp. 68-83.

In the following excerpt, Weeks profiles Carpenter in terms of his sexual identity.

'We call a man a criminal, not because he violates any eternal code of morality—for there exists no such thing—but because he violates the ruling code of his time'—Edward Carpenter, 'Defence of Criminals' (1889)

Just as Whitman was to provide the occasion for collaboration between J. A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis, so, earlier in the 1880s, he had been one of the common strands that brought Ellis into contact with Edward Carpenter. Ellis had purchased Carpenter's long Whitmanite poem, Towards Democracy, on a second-hand bookstall in 1885. At first he had been unenthusiastic, dismissing it as 'Whitman and water'. But when he eventually wrote to Carpenter, he was rather warmer in...