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Queer Heritage · Millthorpe, Derbyshire

Millthorpe (Edward Carpenter & George Merrill)

The market-garden home where the socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter lived openly with George Merrill decades before decriminalisation — sandal-making, vegetarianism and 'the intermediate sex' in the Derbyshire hills. A touch on the backside from Merrill, E.M. Forster said, conceived 'Maurice' on the spot.

StatusDocumented history
DateCarpenter at Millthorpe 1883–1922; with Merrill from 1898
The peopleEdward Carpenter, George Merrill, E.M. Forster (visitor)
The siteCarpenter's smallholding, Millthorpe, near Holmesfield
Coordinates53.28417, -1.53278 (confidence 3/5)

The story

Edward Carpenter left Cambridge, the Church and Victorian respectability behind him and in 1883 bought a seven-acre smallholding at Millthorpe, near Sheffield, to live by hand — growing food, making sandals, writing. In 1891 he met George Merrill, a working-class man from the Sheffield slums; in 1898 Merrill moved in, and the two lived openly as a couple for nearly forty years, through the panic of the Wilde trials, when other men hid. Officially Merrill was the servant. No visitor believed it.

And the visitors came in droves — socialists, poets, suffragists — for Carpenter had argued in print, in Homogenic Love (1894) and The Intermediate Sex (1908), that same-sex love was natural, decades before the law agreed. In 1912 E. M. Forster visited, and Merrill touched him just above the buttocks — a touch Forster said "seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas." He went home and wrote Maurice, its lovers modelled on the Millthorpe household. Then he locked it away. Written in 1913–14, it was published only in 1971, after his death, fifty-seven years on, because its happy ending was the thing the age would not forgive.

More stories at this spot

The handcart in the blizzard

When George Merrill moved into Millthorpe in February 1898, he arrived in a snowstorm, trundling everything he owned over the hills in a handcart with the help of two boys. Carpenter marked the arrival with a poem, "Hafiz to the Cupbearer," folded into his long work Towards Democracy. It was the beginning of a partnership that lasted until Merrill's death thirty years later.

The novel that fed another novel

D. H. Lawrence read the manuscript of Maurice, and Carpenter and Merrill's cross-class household — the gentleman and the gamekeeper — is widely thought to have helped shape Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which a lady of the manor takes her gamekeeper as her lover. Two of the century's frankest novels of desire trace back to one Derbyshire smallholding.

Sources

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Fact & fiction

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