Edward Carpenter and Ronald Firbank were two Trinity Hall members and gay pioneers of the 19th Century. The piece has been specially written by Alison Hennegan, former Fellow in English and Director of Studies at Trinity Hall. For years before that, she worked in gay publishing and broadcasting.
“LGBT+ History month seems a good time to remember two remarkable but very different Trinity Hall gay pioneers, Edward Carpenter, a gay rights ground breaker, and Ronald Firbank, an innovative writer of fiction who has influenced several generations of writers.
Edward Carpenter, born in Sussex in 1844, became a Fellow of Trinity Hall, and like many dons of that time was ordained as an Anglican priest. Early on he was aware of his homosexuality. In an age which accepted and indeed honoured passionate male friendship, often erotic but not necessarily clearly sexual, he had a particularly close friendship with Edward Beck who later went on to become Master of Trinity Hall, and another person deserving more attention from a gay perspective.
In 1874 Carpenter was ‘released’ from his priesthood, but his political and ethical values were always informed by Christ’s humane and socialistic teaching. (A few years ago I heard one of his early sermons being delivered from the pulpit of Trinity Hall’s own church, St Edward King and Martyr where Carpenter served, and it could have been written that morning, with its passionate call for social justice.) Carpenter would go on to be an international figure prominent in pacifism, internationalism, feminism, socialism, vegetarianism, animal rights and what we would now call eco politics. But, from our perspective today, it is as a pioneer of gay rights that he is particularly significant.
He relinquished his Trinity Hall Fellowship and was invited to be Tutor to the young prince who would become George V, but he declined, leaving us with a tantalising set of ‘what if?’s.
He returned to the north where eventually he established a communal household at Millthorpe, then on the outskirts of Sheffield. The house and surrounding dwellings attracted a diverse group of friends and adherents, ranging from Eton masters to local working class men, often accompanied by their understanding wives. One of those working class men, George Merrill, became Carpenter’s lifelong partner. (Famously, the novelist E.M. Forster first understood his own sexuality when George gently goosed him on his way into the kitchen.) The constant stream of international visitors to Millthorpe included many who were key figures in their own countries’ progressive and radical movements.
Carpenter produced a steady stream of books and pamphlets from 1870 until his death, many of them arguing for the naturalness of homosexuality and its evolutionary value. He used many forms – analytical essays, polemical pamphlets, historical anthologies celebrating same-sex love and desire, and social anthropology (I’m particularly fond of ‘Civilization, its Cause and Cure’). And his book-length, Whitmanesque poem, Towards Democracy, became a secular Bible for British Socialism which continued to honour him until after the Second World War. If you don’t know him yet, now’s the time to meet him.
Likewise, Ronald Firbank, seemingly a very different matter, but in his way just as challenging and resistant to his period’s heterosexual norms and constraints as Carpenter. Wilde’s trial and conviction in 1895 ushered in a period of great caution for gay men, many going into exile if they could afford it, others doing their best to live under the radar. As an undergraduate (his rooms were where the MCR now is), Firbank was defiantly ‘effeminate’ in dress, speech and manner, drawing hostility from contemporaries. He didn’t proceed to his degree, going down in 1909, in his second year, very like Wilde’s younger son, Vyvyan Holland, who was a friend of Firbank at Trinity Hall, but that’s another story….
Later Firbank’s chosen weapon would be fiction characterized by its wit, and the development of a unique prose style which is now usually recognized as the progenitor of Camp, difficult to define but we think we know it when we see it. Orton later acknowledged him as ‘the source’ of a comedic gay male literary line which we can trace from Wilde through Saki, Coward, Orton, and Alan Bennett, all of them subversive in their use of wit, epigram, and paradox, and supreme linguistic control. Firbank clothes his often unsettling attitudes to race, conventional morality and religion in formal language of such self-conscious artifice that it can take a few seconds for its underlying satire to register, creating a constant ripple of laughter under the surface.
A private income would enable him to live openly as a homosexual but in more tolerant places outside England – North Africa, the Middle East, Italy and Spain among them. In 1907 he became a rather disconcerting convert to Roman Catholicism which didn’t prevent him from writing works such as “Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli” (1926) in which the scandalous and the genuinely religious combine and conflict in dizzying contradictions, and the novel is recognized as one of the great pieces of Modernist fiction.
Never physically robust, in 1926 Firbank died at forty of tuberculosis, ten years before Carpenter. Both men were in their very different ways remarkable fighters who deserve to be remembered and thanked during LGBT+ History month.”
First published for LinkHall, Trinity Hall’s alumni community platform.
