A quiet lane in Surrey, 1842. A shoemaker works at his bench, stitching without leather. A tailor measures cloth, working only with materials free of wool. In the kitchen, Graham bread studded with raisins comes hot from an oven, destined for a table that has never once held a cut of meat. Out in the walled garden, the beds are turned and composted without the contribution of a single animal body. The soil is kept clean, in every sense the community understood the word.
This was the Concordium at Ham Common, and the word “vegan” was still a century away from being coined.
The Unsung Pioneers of Surrey
Long before oat milk and “plant-based” became the vocabulary of a generation, a small group of radical thinkers assembled at a house in Ham Common, Surrey, a place they called Alcott House Academy, and quietly constructed a lifestyle that would be recognizable to any committed vegan today. The community was founded in July 1838, ran a school with around thirty pupils, baked its own bread, and rejected animal products not just from the dinner table but from clothing, footwear, and agriculture. Its members called their philosophy “sacred socialism,” and they were, by almost every measure, a hundred years ahead of their time.
The word “vegan” was coined in 1944 by Donald Watson, who wanted to distinguish those who rejected all animal products from vegetarians who still consumed dairy and eggs. But the distinction Watson drew in 1944 had already been lived out in practice at Ham Common in the 1840s. The Concordists refused leather shoes, rejected woolen clothing, and declined to manure their fields with animal waste. They were, in substance if not in name, vegans, and they were also, as historian James Gregory demonstrates in Of Victorians and Vegetarians, the people who gave the word “vegetarian” to the English language.
These “sacred socialists” have been largely written out of popular history. But their influence on what would become the Victorian vegetarian movement, and through it, on the modern vegan movement, was foundational.
The Mystic and the Patron
The intellectual center of the Concordium was James Pierrepont Greaves, a former merchant who had experienced a spiritual awakening in 1817 and spent the rest of his life working out its implications. His followers were advised to think of him as “an inspired man, or at least as a man who truly believed himself inspired.” Whether or not one accepted that framing, the practical consequences of his inspiration were remarkably consistent. Greaves had been vegetarian since roughly 1817, initially for mystical and humanitarian reasons. The physiological arguments, he felt, had been well made by others. What interested him more was what flesh eating did to the spirit: how it inflamed desires, blurred the line between human and animal, and obstructed the development of what he called the “love-spirit,” the divine capacity for selfless action.
His philosophy of “sacred socialism” placed individual moral reformation squarely before political reform. Robert Owen and his followers had argued that reshaping the institutions of society would reshape the human beings within it. Greaves turned this on its head. The person had to be transformed first. The body had to be cleansed, the diet simplified, the appetites disciplined. Only then would the ground be ready for meaningful social change. In this vision, dietetic reform became the central political act, providing the essential foundation for broader social transformation.
From his salon at 49 Burton Street in London, Greaves held weekly meetings of his “Aesthetic Institution” and drew in an eclectic crowd of radicals, writers, and spiritual seekers. Among them, the most consequential female supporter was Sophia Chichester, a wealthy aristocrat who provided the financial bedrock for the entire enterprise and quietly funded several other theosophers and radical reformers besides. In July 1838, Greaves and Chichester established Alcott House school at Ham Common, modeling its educational approach on the Swiss reformer Pestalozzi and placing vegetarianism at the center of daily life.
A third significant figure was William Oldham, an Owenite who had found his way to Greavesian principles and served as the community’s practical organizer. After Greaves died in 1842, the community continued to function under shifting arrangements, and it was Oldham who convened the physiological conference at Alcott House in July 1847, hoping to channel the community’s energies into a formal national vegetarian organization. The Concordium dissolved the following year. But the ideas had already traveled much further than Surrey.
The Daily Grind at Alcott House
The prospectus for the Concordium’s 1841 reorganization is a document worth sitting with. The diet, it specifies, consisted of oatmeal, porridge, bread, fruit, and water. Graham bread (a dense wholegrain loaf following the principles of the American dietary reformer Sylvester Graham) was baked on the premises, sometimes enriched with raisins. The garden was cultivated without animal manure, a practical, principled, and labor-intensive commitment to keeping the entire enterprise free of animal exploitation. A shoemaker and a tailor were recruited to serve the community’s material needs, working without leather or wool.
The community thought of itself as a gathering of “united individuals … desirous, under industrial and progressive education, with simplicity in diet, dress and lodging, to retain the means for the harmonic development of their physical, intellectual and moral natures.” There is something almost strikingly contemporary in that formulation. The idea that diet, dress, and the methods by which food is grown are all part of a single ethical statement, that the personal and the political are inseparable, is the core argument of modern ethical veganism. Ham Common was making it in the 1840s.
The house was open to visitors, particularly on Sundays when lectures were held. Hundreds may have passed through over the years, encountering these ideas firsthand. A press was established to carry the community’s thinking further afield. Tracts circulated. Two journals, The Healthian and The New Age, went out into a world that had not yet heard the word “vegetarian.”
The transatlantic dimension of the Concordium’s influence took concrete form in 1842, when Bronson Alcott visited Ham Common. The school had been named partly in anticipation of his arrival; Greaves and his disciples had long admired the American educational reformer and hoped he might one day help run the eponymous institution. Alcott arrived shortly after Greaves’s death and was charmed by what he found. When he departed for America in September 1842, he brought three Concordists with him, most crucially Charles Lane, a man who had been deeply embedded in the life of the community.
Together, Alcott and Lane established Fruitlands, a short-lived but celebrated community near Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843. It was a direct transplant of Concordist principles to New England soil, animated by the same refusal to exploit animal labor, the same rejection of animal products, the same conviction that dietary and moral reform were inseparable. Fruitlands collapsed within a year, undone by organizational difficulties and the unforgiving demands of a Massachusetts winter. But it established a transatlantic conversation about ethical communal living that would echo for decades. Alcott himself remained committed enough to join the British Vegetarian Society in 1850.
Coining the Concept
Before the 1840s, people who declined to eat meat were generally known as “Pythagoreans” (a nod to the ancient Greek philosopher who had taught the kinship of all living things) or simply described as practitioners of “the system of vegetable diet.” The word that would make a movement possible had not yet arrived.
The Concordium’s journals played a central role in changing that. The Healthian, which began publication in 1841, and The New Age, which followed from 1843, devoted substantial space to the principles of physiological reform and vegetable diet. In doing so, as Gregory’s research makes clear, they helped make the neologism “vegetarian” current, popularizing and standardizing a term that previously existed only in scattered, private usage, and giving it the public platform that would carry it forward toward the founding of the Vegetarian Society in 1847.
A movement needs a name. Without a name, dietary reformers remain scattered individuals with private convictions and no easy way to recognize one another. With a name, they become an identifiable constituency: one that can be organized, petitioned, argued with, satirized in Punch, and ultimately taken seriously enough to warrant a national society. The community at Ham Common was, among other things, the place where one of the most consequential words in the history of food reform was put into regular circulation.
The Legacy of Ham Common
By 1848, the Concordium had run its course. The house became an orphanage for girls who had lost their parents to a cholera outbreak. The grounds were given over to a strawberry garden. The journals had folded, the community had scattered, and the memory of the experiment faded quickly outside small radical circles.
But the framework the Concordists had built was more durable than the community itself. They had demonstrated, in practice and in print, that diet, clothing, and agricultural method could be organized as a unified ethical system. They had insisted that individual moral reform was not a supplement to political change but its necessary precondition. And they had given currency to the language that would organize a movement capable of lasting well beyond the Victorian era.
The modern plant-based movement, with its debates about leather shoes and animal-free farming, its arguments about the ethics of dairy, and its insistence that personal choice is inherently political, is not a twenty-first-century invention. The Concordists at Ham Common were rehearsing all of it in the 1840s, in a Surrey garden kept clear of animal use, at a kitchen table set with oatmeal and raisins and nothing that had ever suffered for the meal.
They called it sacred socialism. We might call it a preview.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Of Victorians and Vegetarians
- Subtitle: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-century Britain
- Author: James Gregory
- Publisher: Tauris Academic Studies (An imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd)
- Publication Year: 2007
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN: 978 1 84511 379 7
- Historical Period Covered: Nineteenth Century (specifically c. 1838–1901, with some ancestral references to the late 18th and early 19th centuries)
- Main Subject Areas: Social History of Victorian Britain, History of Vegetarianism and Food Reform, History of Reform Movements, Medical Unorthodoxy and “Physical Puritanism,” Human-Animal Relations and Zoophilia, Gender and Class Studies, Nineteenth-Century Radicalism and “Fadicalism.”
How the 1840s Concordium anticipated modern vegan living (Ch. 1, p. 21–25).