During the early nineteenth century, individuals who abstained from animal flesh described their practice as following a vegetable diet or vegetable regimen. The word vegetarian appeared in print during the 1840s, replacing the older descriptive phrases only gradually. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the earliest written occurrence of the term in an entry from Fanny Kemble’s journal written during her residence on a Georgia plantation between 1838 and 1839. Kemble’s journal, however, was not published until 1863, by which time the word was already established in common usage. Kemble maintained ties with British social reformers, including Harriet Martineau, who corresponded with the circle around James Pierrepont Greaves, suggesting that Kemble may have encountered the word through these networks or inserted it during later revisions of her manuscript. The earliest documented appearance of the term in a contemporary publication occurs in the December 1841 issue of The Healthian, a periodical produced by the Concordium community at Alcott House in Surrey. In that issue, the word appears three times as a noun designating a person who subsisted on plant food, introduced without definition because the readership was already presumed to understand its meaning.
The Concordium had been established in 1838 at Ham Common by disciples of James Pierrepont Greaves, a religious thinker who described himself as a sacred socialist. Greaves, born in 1777 to a Cheapside merchant family, experienced a spiritual awakening in 1817 following business bankruptcy during the Napoleonic Wars. This transformation prompted him to abandon conventional evangelicalism in pursuit of interior divine guidance. His ideas drew upon earlier mystical and reformist writers, including Emanuel Swedenborg, Jacob Boehme, William Law, and Thomas Tryon, who had advocated dietary abstinence and pacifism in the seventeenth century. Greaves adopted a meat-free diet shortly after his conversion and progressively simplified his sustenance. By the end of his life, he consumed primarily uncooked fruits and vegetables, believing that cooked and heated foods exerted an inflaming influence upon human passions and distracted from spiritual renewal.
Although Greaves himself never lived permanently at Alcott House, his followers organized the community around his ascetic principles under the administrative direction of William Oldham, Charles Lane, and Henry Gardiner Wright, with financial support from Sophia Chichester. The Concordists maintained a regimen that excluded all food of animal origin. Residents consumed no meat, poultry, fish, eggs, butter, cheese, or animal milk, and they abstained from stimulants such as tea, coffee, and alcohol. Their ethical commitments extended beyond dietary intake to encompass clothing and household goods, leading them to avoid woollen fabrics in favour of plant-based materials. An exchange published in June 1843 in their periodical, the New Age, Concordium Gazette and Temperance Advocate, illustrated the practical application of these standards. Replying to an enquirer from Liverpool who sought advice on substitutes for dairy and eggs, the editor provided instructions for preparing meals without infringing upon animal life and recommended using mashed potatoes or yeast instead of butter or lard for pie crusts. In the vocabulary of the Concordium, a vegetarian was someone who rejected animal exploitation entirely, adhering to what later generations would define as a vegan diet.
A different dietary tradition developed concurrently in the industrial north of England among the members of the Bible Christian Church in Salford. Founded in 1809 by William Cowherd, a former clergyman of the Church of England who had broken away from the mainstream Swedenborgians, the church mandated abstinence from meat and intoxicating drink as conditions of religious fellowship. Cowherd argued that flesh foods stimulated animal appetites and impeded spiritual progress, while the consumption of grain and vegetables encouraged temperance, health, and moral discipline. Unlike the Concordists, however, the Bible Christians did not object to animal products that did not require slaughter. Their congregation routinely used dairy products and eggs, establishing an ovo-lacto dietary practice that was sustained by middle-class civic leaders such as Joseph Brotherton and James Simpson.
The two groups began to cooperate in the late 1840s as reformers sought to establish a national association dedicated to dietary reform. In July 1847, William Oldham hosted a physiological conference at Alcott House to discuss the formation of a formal organisation. At this gathering, the Concordists provided eggs and milk for attendees, presenting these items as a temporary accommodation intended to assist beginners transitioning away from meat. On September 30, 1847, a second conference convened at Northwood Villa, a hydropathic establishment directed by William Horsell in Ramsgate, Kent. Representatives from both the northern Bible Christian congregations and southern reform circles attended the meeting, uniting approximately one hundred and fifty delegates to establish the Vegetarian Society.
During the formation of the new society, the delegates adopted the word vegetarian to define their collective purpose, but the formal meaning of the term was altered to accommodate the northern contingent. The stated objective of the Vegetarian Society was to promote abstinence from the flesh of animals, leaving members free to consume eggs and dairy products. By 1847, the Concordium was entering a period of decline following the deaths of Greaves and Chichester and the dissolution of an affiliated utopian community at Fruitlands in Massachusetts. In contrast, the Bible Christians possessed significant financial resources, stable leadership, and an established institutional base. Historian John Davis argues that this disparity in organizational strength enabled the Bible Christians to establish their own ovo-lacto practice as the official standard of the Vegetarian Society, while the Concordists accepted the compromise to build a broader coalition.
The redefined meaning of the word remained a subject of professional and ideological debate throughout the subsequent decades. In 1850, the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review criticized the consistency of the Vegetarian Society, arguing that eggs and milk represented merely another form of animal food and asserting that genuine vegetarianism required complete abstinence from all animal derivatives. Even within the leadership of the movement, differences persisted regarding the proper scope of the term. In 1886, physician Anna Kingsford, who served as a vice president of the Vegetarian Society, wrote that she considered herself an abstainer from flesh meats rather than a vegetarian because she consumed butter, cheese, eggs, and milk. Kingsford continued to associate the word vegetarian with the comprehensive animal-free regimen that had prevailed at Alcott House forty years earlier.
Tensions between these two definitions ultimately prompted an organizational division in the twentieth century. In 1944, members of the Vegetarian Society who abstained from all animal products sought broader recognition for their principles within the parent organization. When the Society declined to endorse their position in its publications, these members formed a separate association under the name of the Vegan Society, coining the word vegan as an abbreviation of vegetarian. This linguistic creation marked the formal recovery of the dietary boundaries originally practiced by the Concordium and documented in the pages of The Healthian, completing an evolutionary cycle in which the strict definition of the 1840s was re-established under a distinct name.
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.
(Intro, pp. 47–49)