In December 1906, readers opening the holiday issue of the juvenile monthly magazine The Children’s Realm encountered an unusual royal romance. Traditional nursery tales routinely delivered helpless maidens waiting for a dashing prince on horseback, yet this particular winter story offered a sharp twist on folklore conventions. Titled The Bean Princess, the narrative introduced Princess Faba, an enterprising heroine who armed herself with botanical knowledge, culinary patience, and a steadfast refusal to play the passive damsel.
The story opens with a prince imprisoned in an enchanted garden by an ogre. Stupefied and blinded by the heavy, sinister feasts served by his captor, the young man wanders aimlessly in captivity, unable to perceive reality or locate an escape. Rescue arrives from Princess Faba. Working over years with persistent determination, she sets out to break the ogre’s hold through the healing power of wholesome plant food. She draws upon the herbal remedies passed down by her mother, dedicating her own toil, inventiveness, and even a drop of her blood to concoct a curative meal. Under Faba’s careful culinary regime, the prince renounces the ogre’s meat dishes, adopts a vegetarian diet, and slowly begins to recover his physical strength and mental clarity.
When the prince finally regains his vision, the fairy tale delivers its sharpest comedic critique of courtly romance. Looking upon his rescuer, the prince immediately launches into standard flattery regarding her beauty, only to be promptly rebuffed. Faba tartly informs him that she did not restore his sight merely so he could pay empty compliments to her appearance. When he proceeds to ask for her hand in marriage, her response is equally unsentimental and matter-of-fact, asking what else they ought to do now that the work is finished.
The publication of this playful fable was no accident. The Children’s Realm, founded under the auspices of the Vegetarian Federal Union to carry forward the humanitarian legacy of activist Frances Boult, served as a regular platform where dietary reform intersected with progressive social ideals. During the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, Britain’s food reformers increasingly recognized that long-term cultural transformation began in the nursery. Through stories, poetry, and regular correspondence columns, young readers were taught that kindness to animals and mindful eating were foundational steps toward a more equitable world.
Within this lively print culture, traditional genres were frequently overhauled. Writers reworked familiar nursery rhymes, stripped out references to animal cruelty, and drafted allegorical adventures where plant-based champions triumphed over oppressive customs. The Bean Princess took this pedagogical impulse and infused it with the spirit of the early twentieth-century New Woman. Rather than presenting the kitchen as a domestic trap, the story positioned food preparation and herbal study as active, life-saving sciences. Wisdom passed down through a matrilineal line became the ultimate tool of liberation, breaking the sensory blindness caused by conventional appetites.
By stripping the prince of his traditional role as active conqueror and casting him as the patient being nourished back to awareness, the tale challenged the prevailing association between meat consumption, physical superiority, and heroic masculinity. In the pages of reform periodicals, heavy meat dishes were frequently tied to aggression and moral numbness, while simple plant foods were credited with sharpening the mind and fostering compassion. Faba’s legumes functioned both as wholesome sustenance and as an instrument of clear-sighted agency.
More than a century later, The Bean Princess remains a striking example of radical Edwardian storytelling. By fusing dietary ethics with female autonomy, the narrative demonstrated how imaginative children’s literature could quietly rewrite cultural scripts, replacing antique notions of chivalry with a witty, enduring blueprint for equality and empathy.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Children’s Vegetarian Culture in the Victorian Era
- Subtitle: The Juvenile Food Reformers Press and Literary Change
- Author: Marzena Kubisz (Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia, Poland)
- Series: Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media (Series Editor: Thomas Bristow)
- Publisher: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York)
- Publication Year: 2025
- Edition: First Edition (Simultaneously published in Hardback, Paperback, and eBook)
- ISBN:
- Hardback (hbk):
978-1-032-50868-9 - Paperback (pbk):
978-1-032-50870-2 - eBook (ebk):
978-1-003-40004-2 - DOI:
10.4324/9781003400042
- Hardback (hbk):
- Historical Period Covered: The long nineteenth century and early twentieth century (specifically spanning from the 1830s/1840s communitarian movements up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, with comparative frameworks extending to 2020s vegan culture).
- Main Subject Areas: Cultural History of Vegetarianism and Veganism, Victorian Periodicals and Print Culture, Children’s Literature, Childhood Studies, Human–Animal Studies / Animal Ethics, Gender Studies, Ecocriticism / Environmental Humanities, Foucauldian Power and Subjectivity.
(Ch. 4, pp. 118–119)