Repost from @adamtghani • The Victorian gay rights pioneer and writer #EdwardCarpenter with his companion #GeorgeMerrill, who came together in 1891 from different sides of Britain’s class divide and lived openly as a couple near Sheffield for thirty years. Their relationship actually inspired the central love story in the novel “Maurice” written by their friend EM Forster in 1913 (unpublished for several decades, but now a classic in the canon). Concurrently championing the working class and women’s emancipation issues of the day, Carpenter and Merrill’s simplistic and clean rural lifestyle is said to have kept them from receiving the same persecution as their contemporary Oscar Wilde in London, who was the emblem of a more decadent climate. Dying within a year of each other in the late 1920s, their remains are buried together in Guildford, Surrey. https://www.instagram.com/p/CMej2BeHhXFo-bGgrMTdIZj3SkGpB5J-y6ikww0/?igshid=1fg7969zp747p
