Transatlantic Dialogues in Sustainability: Edward Carpenter, Henry David Thoreau, and the Literature of Simplification

This chapter explores the ways in which Henry David Thoreau's Walden came to bear on Edward Carpenter's writings on simplicity in the 1880s and shaped his vision of a society forged through a sustainable relationship with the nonhuman world. It suggests that Thoreau's influence on Carpenter's writing, but in paying particular attention to Carpenter's reading, or misreading, of Walden, it is possible to chart how Carpenter actively recontextualised and reformulated Thoreau to meet the demands of Victorian socialism. The chapter analyses how Carpenter's approach to materiality and materialism both draws upon and enacts a severance with Transcendentalist ways of thinking about nature and, in doing so, transgresses conventional, and even contemporary, notions of sustainability. Continuous with Carpenter's transatlantic refashioning of Thoreau's ideas on social and economic sustainability was an interest in Transcendentalist notions of the natural world.