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Carpenter, Edward.
Towards Democracy (with author’s signature].
Publisher: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Limited, and S. Clarke, London & Manchester;
Date of Publication: 1905
Stock Code: 14644
Fourth Edition, the first with all four parts as Carpenter intended. Four parts in one volume, paginated continuously. Duodecimo, pp., 507, [3] including [1] of publisher’s advertisements. Publisher’s original calf, titled in gilt to spine and upper board; all edges dyed red. Author’s signature in his inimitable hand in ink to slip pasted to front free end-paper. Very slight spots of soiling to boards, and corners slightly bumped. Foxing to end-papers but contents otherwise clean, bright, and fresh. A near-fine copy. An attractive copy of the first complete edition of Carpenter’s great work of liberationist poetry. Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) was a campaigner for homosexual equality, socialist, and poet. In 1881, having studied a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, Carpenter retired to a wooden hut in the gardens of his cottage at Bradway, and began to write poetry. Carpenter described what followed as the ‘slow disentanglement’ of the ‘hymn of the soul’, in the style of Walt Whitman (1819-1892). The result of that period of disentanglement was this poem, which instantiated Carpenter’s sexual, spiritual, and political liberation. Towards Democracy was originally published anonymously in a print run of 500 copies only in 1883. This fourth edition added an explicitly homosexual fourth part originally published in 1902 as Who Shall Command the Heart? £75.00