The modern vegetarian movement emerged in Britain not from secular dietary trends or twentieth-century countercultures, but out of the radical sectarian Protestantism of the early nineteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, reform-minded groups engaged with pressing spiritual and physical questions, linking social reform, bodily health, and moral renewal. The institutionalization of vegetarianism developed primarily from two religious communities influenced by Christian mysticism and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg: the Bible Christian Church of Salford, established by the Reverend William Cowherd, and the Concordium at Alcott House, established by the followers of James Pierrepont Greaves.
The theological association between Christianity and vegetarianism existed well before the nineteenth century. Dualist traditions such as Manichaeism, Bogomilism, and Catharism treated the material world and bodily flesh as corrupt, viewing abstinence from meat as an ascetic discipline to liberate the spirit. In early modern Europe, mystics such as Jacob Boehme and Thomas Tryon defended fleshless diets, drawing on Pythagorean ideas regarding the kinship of living beings. By the early nineteenth century, changing perceptions of animals and nature in industrializing Britain reinforced these ideas. As rural workers moved into expanding factory towns, they became separated from the daily practices of animal husbandry and slaughter. At the same time, expanding commercial markets offered options beyond bare subsistence, allowing the choice of a meatless diet to function as a conscious practice.
In Salford and Manchester, specific local circumstances facilitated the growth of Cowherd’s movement. Lancashire was long characterized by religious nonconformity, Roman Catholicism, and dissent, while the Church of England possessed relatively few parishes in the region. Rapid population growth outpaced church construction, and high pew rents alienated poorer inhabitants. When Cowherd, a former Anglican curate who embraced Swedenborgian teachings, formed the Bible Christian Church in Salford in 1809, he established vegetarianism and total abstinence from alcohol as strict conditions of membership. His theology held that the consumption of meat and alcohol stimulated animal passions, corrupted human nature, and created an obstacle between the soul and God.
Cowherd’s church made a distinct appeal to the respectable artisan and working classes. In industrial factory settings, workers sought endurance, dexterity, and health rather than the brute physical strength associated with agricultural labour. Proponents argued that a simple vegetable regimen improved stamina, sharpened mental faculties, and offered protection against digestive disorders caused by the enclosed atmosphere of cotton mills. The diet also served an economic purpose. Poor urban populations often had limited access to butcher meat, which was expensive and frequently adulterated. A frugivorous diet provided an affordable, pure alternative. Under the leadership of figures such as Joseph Brotherton, who later became Salford’s first Member of Parliament, the Bible Christians linked private dietary practice with civic engagement, establishing schools, free libraries, burial grounds, and welfare initiatives.
South of London, a parallel movement took shape around the philosophical circle of James Pierrepont Greaves. Greaves was a former London merchant who, following bankruptcy during the Napoleonic Wars and a spiritual revelation in 1817, abandoned conventional evangelicalism to pursue a life of ascetic simplicity. Calling himself a sacred socialist, Greaves advocated personal spiritual renewal, interior love, and celibacy, rejecting Robert Owen’s focus on material conditions. Greaves became a strict vegetarian and by the end of his life consumed an entirely raw diet of fruits and vegetables.
Following Greaves’s death in 1842, his followers William Oldham, Charles Lane, and Henry Gardiner Wright maintained the Concordium at Alcott House on Ham Common in Surrey. Supported by wealthy patrons such as Sophia Chichester, the Concordium operated as an experimental community and school. The Concordists adhered to a strict regime that excluded meat, dairy, eggs, tea, coffee, and even woollen clothing, following a pattern that would later be defined as vegan. In 1843, the community formed the short-lived British and Foreign Society for the Promotion of Humanity and Abstinence from Animal Food under Chichester’s presidency.
The word “vegetarian” originated in these circles during the 1840s. Early appearances occurred in Alcott House publications, including their journal The Healthian in December 1841. While common medical and domestic usage spoke of a “vegetable diet,” Concordists used “vegetarian” to designate an individual who avoided all animal foods.
The consolidation of these initiatives into a national body occurred through collaboration between the southern Concordists and northern Bible Christians. On 8 July 1847, Oldham hosted a physiological conference at Alcott House, where dairy products were served to accommodate individuals transitioning from animal foods. The delegates then met on 30 September 1847 at Northwood Villa, a hydropathic establishment operated by William Horsell in Ramsgate, Kent, where they founded the Vegetarian Society.
To build a broad movement, the founders defined vegetarianism around abstinence from the flesh of animals, fish, and fowl, while permitting the consumption of eggs and dairy products. This concession reflected the dietary practice and greater numbers of the Salford Bible Christians, who quickly came to dominate the administration of the fledgling organization. James Simpson, a prominent Bible Christian, was elected the first president, while Oldham served as treasurer. The Truth Tester, a journal devoted to temperance, hydropathy, and physiology, was reorganized as the Vegetarian Advocate under Horsell’s editorship to provide an official print forum for the society.
Vegetarianism operated within a wider network of nineteenth-century reform movements. It maintained a close functional relationship with temperance and teetotalism. Many early vegetarian leaders were also active in the United Kingdom Alliance, viewing a fleshless diet as an extension of physical and spiritual purity that suppressed cravings for intoxicating drinks. Vegetarian banquets served plain water rather than alcohol. Adherents regularly participated in movements for the abolition of capital punishment, international peace, anti-vivisection, and alternative therapies such as hydropathy and medical herbalism. Detractors frequently dismissed this overlapping reform agenda as physical puritanism.
Women occupied an influential position in this culture, even though leadership roles in churches and national committees were dominated by men. The practical daily demands of vegetarianism placed domestic labour at the center of the movement’s success. Wives and domestic managers were responsible for sourcing unadulterated grains, milling flour, baking bread, and preparing nutritionally sufficient meals without animal products. Middle-class women supported the cause by circulating literature, presiding over tables at annual banquets, and publishing domestic manuals. Martha Brotherton published Vegetable Cookery in 1812 under the pseudonym A Lady, and Elizabeth Horsell issued The Penny Domestic Assistant to guide working households in plant-based cooking.
The Concordium dissolved in 1848, but the Bible Christian Church sustained the Vegetarian Society through its formative years. The society established its headquarters in the north of England, holding executive meetings in the library of the King Street Chapel in Salford and concluding its annual gatherings with a vegetarian sermon from the Bible Christian pulpit. The sect also extended its influence internationally, establishing an American branch in Philadelphia through the Reverend William Metcalfe, which led to the creation of the American Vegetarian Society in 1850.
Through these institutions, the theological vision of the Bible Christians was adapted into secular educational and physiological advocacy. What had begun as an ascetic discipline in a nonconformist chapel became an organized public campaign, establishing the structural foundations of the modern vegetarian movement.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Eden’s Diet: Christianity and Vegetarianism 1809 – 2009
- Subtitle: N/A (Doctoral Thesis)
- Author: Samantha Jane Calvert
- Degree / Awarding Institution: Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Department of Theology and Religion, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham
- Supervisor: Professor Hugh McLeod
- Submission Date: June 2012
- Historical Period Covered: 1809–2009 (with historical contextual references dating from c. 570 BCE [Pythagoras] to the Early Modern period, Enlightenment, and contemporary 21st century)
- Main Subject Areas: History of Vegetarianism, Christian Sectarianism, Animal Theology, British and American Social History, 19th-century Reform Movements, Temperance and Teetotalism, Secularisation Theory, Physical Puritanism, Prosopography.
(Ch. 1a, pp. 64–77)