Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany

philosophising and ornamental cleverness, this endless book-learning, and the queer cynicism and boredom underlying – all impressed me with a sense of utter emptiness. The prospect of spending the rest of my life in that atmosphere terrified me.” Carpenter decided to renounce both his fellowship and Holy Orders. Soon, he had a vision of what he should do instead: “it suddenly flashed upon me, with a vibration through my whole body, that I would and must somehow go and make my life with the mass of the people and the manual workers.” 18
    For the next seven years, Carpenter travelled the Midlands as a university extension lecturer, but by the end of this period he was close to a nervous breakdown, tormented by unfulfilled homosexual desires. Finally, he took Whitman’s advice: “The great thing for one to do whenhe is used up, is to go out to nature – throw yourself in her arms – submit to her destinies.” In the summer of 1880 he moved from Sheffield to the hamlet of Totley, where he lived with a scythe maker named Albert Fearnehough. His companion had a wife and two children, but he seems to have satisfied Carpenter’s sexual needs as well.
    In 1883 Carpenter published his first major book,
Towards Democracy
, and set up a utopian community at Millthorpe, on the edge of the Derbyshire moors. Attracting a stream of curious visitors, Carpenter made his home into a potent centre of propaganda. Like Arnold’s Rugby, Millthorpe was the work of a dominant, single-minded, magnetic personality. Its ideal was summed up in the phrase the “Simple Life.” Carpenter supported himself by growing vegetables and by writing; he proclaimed his comradeship with manual workers; he dressed in tweeds and homemade sandals (he called shoes “leather coffins”); he sunbathed, swam nude in the river at the end of his garden, and denounced the evils of the town and the factory. His remedy for Britain’s ills was socialism, rural self-sufficiency, and sexual reform. The Millthorpe colony fascinated middle-class young men who suffered from the classic late-Victorian anxieties: worries over sexual identity, dissatisfaction with politics, or simple “neurasthenia.” That Carpenter had found the courage to leave Cambridge made him an oracle for those who remained there, such as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and E.M. Forster, and for the many other intellectuals who were fretted by modernity.
    Carpenter had left the educational system in disgust; Cecil Reddie did so too, but then went back to try and renew it. Reddie came from the Anglo-Scottish middle class and went to school at Fettes, where Parker Brooke would have been one of his teachers. In 1885 he returned to Fettes to teach, and soon became a thorn in the side of his headmaster. Reddie was an eager socialist and member of the Fellowship of the New Life – the utopian society from which the Fabian Society was born. After only two years at Fettes, Reddie moved on to Clifton College, another satellite of Rugby. Here, he lasted only a year. He could not take orders from a superior and he loudly disagreed with every existing plan of education, especially in the public schools:
    Listen to the four maxims of a great English school perpetually dinned into the boy’s ears. Be industrious; that is, try and get above your comrades. Be self-restrained; cork up your feelingsand be cold, formal, and “moral.” Be modest; that is, be prudish and affected, be “gentlemanly” instead of natural and healthy. Be pure; that is, conquer and kill one lust . . . but never a word against lust of money, lust of power, lust of comfort.
    These are the “moral” maxims of an immense school; but, as one boy, starved on these husks, said: “But, oh, sir, affection is foreign to the whole spirit of this place.” 19
    Close to a breakdown, Reddie fled to Carpenter’s Millthorpe for refuge. As he