This article considers the place of the everyday in Edward Carpenter’s life and writings through the concept of queer ecology, which draws on queer theory to challenge and expand the possibilities for pleasure, experience, and relationships that occur in the interactions between human and non-human agents. The simple mode of everyday life based on a more direct relationship with the natural world, as described and advocated by Carpenter, was one that foregrounded desire and other intensities of experience, and had the capacity to transform the everyday. Contains numerous references to Kate Salt.
The correspondence between Edward Carpenter and Kate Salt (wife of Henry Salt, pioneer of animal rights and vegetarianism) spanned decades. They discussed everything from buying jam jars and furnishing a cottage to reincarnation and queer desire. It was in her letters to Carpenter that Kate Salt disclosed her diverse and intense feelings — for Carpenter, for literature and music, for other women. In 1884 Henry and Kate Salt had left Eton (where Henry was a master) for a cottage in Tilford, Surrey, to put into practice their principles of vegetarianism and simplicity. Their frequent visitors in the 1880s and 1890s included Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw (both of whom played piano duets with Kate) and other leading socialists such as Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, such that Tilford became a kind of rural hub of socialism. So Kate Salt’s letters to Carpenter are not simply the writings of a ‘disciple’ (as Carpenter’s followers were often described) but of a woman who herself lived by the same principles of self-sufficiency and sustainability with as much rigour and dedication as Carpenter did. I mention Kate Salt here, not only as a reminder of the diversity and inclusivity of socialist subculture in the late nineteenth century — where, as Diana Maltz puts it, domestic lifestyle was central to political identity — but to establish from the outset that Carpenter’s intimates and associates demonstrated a queering of what Kirsten Harris calls the discursive practices of fin-de-siècle socialism, intertwining ‘the visionary and the spiritual, the practical and the everyday’.
Visit: https://19.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/1459/
Wendy Parkins
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, No. 26, 5 July 2018, 18 pages