SOURCE: "Visions of Inversion," in the Times Literary Supplement, No. 4264, January 25, 1985, pp. 95-6.

In the following essay, Ryle provides an overview of the works contained in the first volume of Carpenter's Selected Writings.

Carpenter came one evening. I remember him vividly. His head and features were of extraordinary beauty, his face a chiselled statue, clear-cut and of perfect outline, his eye bright and kindly, there was refinement in his every movement and in the tone of his voice. One" admired and loved him at once.

In 1929, the year of Edward Carpenter's death, Fenner Brockway wrote this description of his arrival at a Socialist gathering in the previous decade. The tone of hero-worship was not unusual: Carpenter was a godfather of the new-born Labour Party, author of several best-selling and much translated works of radical social theory and a public speaker of renown who electrified audiences in the Owenite...