The impact of Edward Carpenter on D.H. Lawrence’s Ideology

Artefact 5: The Stamp of Willie Hopkin | Article 3 of 4

Willie Hopkins’ political mentor, Edward Carpenter

In the third of four articles, John Pateman argues that Willie Hopkins’ political mentor, Edward Carpenter, pushed Lawrence towards primitive communism and an interest in the psychological differences existing between men and women.

John Pateman

Lawrence’s vision to create a communist colony – ‘Rananim’ – marked his transition from the vague but fairly orthodox English socialism to other more radical political formulas. If Hopkin helped Lawrence’s ideological development from utopian to revolutionary socialism, then it was Hopkin’s political mentor, Edward Carpenter, who moved Lawrence towards primitive communism.

Lawrence read Carpenter at an early age, from 1905 or 1906 onwards via Alice Dax’s bookshelves, the married woman who Lawrence had a brief, but significant, affair with, and who would later inspire the character of Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers. Traces of Carpenter’s thinking can be found in the ever pastoral tone of The White Peacock. There are also some resemblances between Carpenter’s Towards Democracy and Lawrence’s early poetry. In late 1912-13 Lawrence’s foreword to Sons and Lovers and his first draft of The Sisters (an early version of what was to become The Rainbow and Women in Love) contain traces of deep and consistent influences from Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, The Art of Creation and The Drama of Love and Death. In 1914 Lawrence wrote Study of Thomas Hardy which was influenced by Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk. Lawrence read and discussed Carpenter’s books between late 1914 and the summer of 1916, which was a period when Lawrence was keenly interested in developing his political philosophy. Carpenter’s influence can be seen in Lawrence’s essay on Walt Whitman and in ‘Education of the People’.

Lawrence’s plan for Rananim is similar to the themes of Carpenter’s first Fabian lecture, ‘Civilization, Its Cause and Cure’, in which he described civilization as a form of disease through which human societies pass. Lawrence’s form of ‘Communism based, not on poverty but on riches’ i s similar to the Fellowship of the New Life, a perfectionist community founded by Carpenter in 1883. The Fellowship’s constitution had many features borrowed from American communist societies, which were described in W.H. Dixon’s New America, and Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States. Lawrence’s 1914-15 writings and ideas are similar to the doctrine of John Humphrey Noyes’s History of American Socialisms and Bible Communism, which promoted a Unitarian form of socialism and were the closest to Lawrence’s Rananim thinking. Lawerence was also influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance which took place at Brook Farm, one of the many American socialistic ventures. Lawrence discussed ‘ideal little [New England] communities’ with his American friend Hilda Doolittle.

Edward Carpenter had a significant influence on Lawrence’s thinking. The theme of ‘The Sisters’ was ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’. The germ of this idea, which was topical at the height of the agitation for women’s suffrage, was evident in Lawrence’s letter to Sallie Hopkin on 12 December 1912 in which he described himself as ‘a priest of love’. In 1915 Lawrence rewrote The Rainbow in which can be traced many ideas and themes of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age and to a lesser extent of The Intermediate Sex. The theme of the individualization and enfranchisement of woman and of the need for a corresponding evolution and liberation of man, were expressed in Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, which bears some striking resemblances to Women in Love. The titles of Carpenter’s chapters practically constitute a plan for Lawrences ‘Sisters’ novels: Man, the Ungrown; Woman, the Serf; Woman in Freedom; Marriage: a Retrospect; Marriage: a Forecast; Love’s Ultimate Meaning: the Free Society. The original plan of ‘The Sisters’ closely follows Carpenter’s ideas but in the published novels Lawrence is concerned not just with women, but with the couple. His reading of Carpenter made him keenly aware of the deep psychological differences existing between men and women. In a letter to Arthur Macleod on 2 June 1914 Lawrence suggested that the only way for ‘civilization to get a new life, a new start’ was by bringing together men and women: ‘revealing themselves, each to the other’. The source of all life and knowledge was in the ‘meeting and mingling’ of man and woman: ‘man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.’

For more information see Pateman, John, Willie Hopkin: D.H. Lawrence’s Socialist Friend, (Five Leaves Press, 2024).

References:
i Emile Delavenay, D.H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition (Heinemann, 1971), 58
ii Emile Delavenay, D.H. Lawrence: The Man and his Work: The Formative Years 1885-1919 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 262
iii Emile Delavenay, D.H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter, 60
iv D.H. Lawrence Letters Vol I, (CUP, 1979), 493
v D.H. Lawrence Letters Vol II (CUP, 1981), 181
vi Ibid