Edward CarpenterArticle Free Pass Edward Carpenter, (born Aug.
29, 1844, Brighton, Sussex, Eng.—died June 28, 1929, Guildford,
Surrey), English writer identified with social and sexual reform
and the late 19th-century anti-industrial Arts and Crafts
Movement. Carpenter was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge,
where he was elected a fellow and ordained in 1869. In 1870 he
became the theologian Frederick Denison Maurice’s curate. But in
1874, revolting against the social and religious conventions of
his time, he became a traveling lecturer for the newly founded
university extension movement, teaching in industrial towns in
the north of England. In 1883 he bought a small farm in
Derbyshire, where he lived until 1922. Carpenter had long been
influenced by the work of Walt Whitman, whose verse forms he
followed in his long, unrhymed poem Towards Democracy (1883;
expanded 1905). As a social thinker, he was a follower of
William Morris, John Ruskin, and Henry Thoreau and was more
interested in the reform of society