‘True Ownership’
The third chapter focuses on the work of Edward Carpenter, the socialist poet, cultural critic, and early queer activist. Seeking to keeping open a middle ground for people who could accept some role for the state while regarding full centralization askance, Carpenter’s thinking about the ends of state-action in the 1880s and 1890s crystallized around the question of land reform. Key to his reformist vision was the attempt to re-signify the language of capitalist society by advocating an ethos of proprietary care and concern (what Carpenter calls ‘true ownership’), a form of custodial attention that is supported by the state but that cannot be reduced to purely legal entitlements. The chapter explores Carpenter’s writing as well as his experience of rural living in Derbyshire. Carpenter, I argue, hoped to turn poetry itself into the ground where a collective desire for comprehensive, non-revolutionary social change might take root.