| Summary: | In Towards Democracy, his major work published in four volumes between 1883 and 1902, Edward Carpenter makes a bold promise: ‘You are in prison and I can give you space.’ In this essay, I shall examine Carpenter’s emphasis on interior and exterior space in both his writing and his daily life, and the ways in which his thought differed so radically from more familiar ideas about domestic interiors and sexuality rooted in Aestheticism. An analysis of Carpenter’s conception of democracy, his antipathy to objects, and his ideas about walking reveals a distinctive understanding of spatial culture in both sexual and political terms; an understanding that associated the interior with capital and class difference, and the external world with fraternal and collective possibilities. While Carpenter’s thinking about the interior was influential in the emergent British socialism of the late nineteenth century, it has subsequently proved to be a dead end. Nonetheless, at a moment of intense commodification, when the ideal of sexual liberation has been increasingly disparaged or reduced to the equality of consumer opportunities, Carpenter might remind us of something we have lost.
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