Edward Carpenter's first significant works, Towards Democracy, England's Ideal and Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, appeared in the 1880s and from the 1890s the second two – above all Civilization: Its Cause and Cure – and later titles were selling extremely well. By 1919 16,000 copies of England's Ideal had been printed and 21,000 of Civilization: Its Cause and Cure, and by 1921 no fewer than 30,000 of the complete edition of Towards Democracy, which had been published only as recently as 1905, while Love's Coming-of-Age of 1896 reached 14,000 with Allen & Unwin by 1916 and had gone into a cheap edition with another publisher. Besides American editions of almost all Carpenter's books, there were translations into French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Russian, Bulgarian and Japanese. It has been estimated that Love's Coming-of-Age had worldwide sales of at least 100,000; and its translator believed that no other modern English book had been so successful in Germany. By 1916 four books discussing his oeuvre had been published in English and one in French, as well as many articles.

Although Carpenter himself lived (and published) for another ten years, all this changed drastically with the ending of the First World War; and after the publication of a fine memorial volume in 1931 and Tom Bell's interesting pamphlet the following year there was not a single book or pamphlet about him – with the partial exception of the indispensable bibliography produced by Sheffield City Libraries, to which he had bequeathed his books and papers – for nearly forty years. Carpenter's reputation had collapsed for the same reasons, and even more completely than those of Ruskin and Morris. Then, in 1970, a lecture by a unrelated namesake appeared in print, closely followed by Emile Delavenay's important and persuasive study of Carpenter's unacknowledged influence on D.H. Lawrence (who never once mentioned Carpenter's name in his copious published output – and on only one occasion in a letter), Sheila Rowbotham's long and original biographical essay, and at last, in 1980, Chushichi Tsuzuki's excellent, albeit too short, biography, amazingly the first and still the only one.