On his return from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working-class man also from Sheffield, 22 years his junior, and after the Ferneyhoughs left Millthorpe in 1893 Merrill became Carpenter's companion. The two remained partners for the rest of their lives, cohabiting from 1898. Merrill, the son of an engine driver, had been raised in the slums of Sheffield and had little formal education. Carpenter and Merrill lived openly together as a couple, which seems remarkable given the moral panic about homosexuality triggered at the time of the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895 and the illegality of sexual acts between men for which others were paying with harsh prison sentences. Carpenter remarked in his work "The Intermediate Sex":