In the final decade of the eighteenth century, the character of ethical vegetarianism in Britain underwent a fundamental transformation. While earlier thinkers had often praised the virtues of a bloodless diet in theory without adopting it in daily life, the period following the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 saw advocacy closely joined to practice. The general assault on established authority and hereditary privilege encouraged radical thinkers to reconsider long-standing assumptions about the treatment of animals. For an articulate group of British reformers, justice came to be viewed as indivisible, uniting opposition to political tyranny and human subjugation with the moral necessity of abandoning animal slaughter.
John Oswald stood among the earliest of these militant figures. A Scottish journalist and army officer who observed vegetarian traditions during military service in India, Oswald embraced radical republican politics in France and eventually fell in battle during the Vendée campaign in 1793. In 1791, he published The Cry of Nature; or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals. Oswald argued that an innate human repugnance to the shedding of blood was corrupted only by custom, and he explicitly connected the practice of butchery with wider forms of violence. For Oswald, living without flesh was not an impossible ideal relegated to antiquity, but a practical obligation directly bound to the cause of universal justice and an opposition to vivisection.
This fusion of historical argument and animal protection expanded through the work of George Nicholson, a printer whose 1797 work On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals was expanded in 1801 as On the Primeval Diet of Man. Nicholson compiled a vast array of classical and modern texts, incorporating passages from Porphyry, Plutarch, Michel de Montaigne, and Oswald himself, while providing vegetarian recipes to demonstrate the economic and physical viability of the diet. He asserted that earliest human history demonstrated an original frugivorous nature, that a fleshless regimen promoted longevity, and that animals possessed moral claims against arbitrary human destruction. Nicholson emphasized that individuals who consumed meat bore direct responsibility for the acts of the slaughterhouse, formulating a version of the Golden Rule that extended moral duties across species.
Shortly after Nicholson’s expanded treatise, the antiquarian Joseph Ritson published An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty in 1802. An ardent supporter of the French Revolution whose aggressive criticisms of literary contemporaries and professed atheism drew severe public hostility, Ritson maintained that human physical anatomy was naturally adapted to vegetable matter rather than prey. Drawing upon historical, anatomical, and geographical evidence, including the strength of Cornish miners who subsisted primarily on potatoes, Ritson argued that meat consumption fostered societal cruelty and barbarous sports. Significantly, he rejected the common defence that painless slaughter caused no moral harm, asserting that nonhuman animals held an inherent right to life that humans had no legitimate warrant to extinguish.
Medical and philosophical circles reinforced these humanitarian arguments during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The London physician William Lambe adopted a strict vegetable and distilled-water regimen at the age of forty, presenting his conclusions in medical publications such as his Additional Reports on Regimen. Lambe contended that animal food was fundamentally unsuited to the human constitution and that the medical profession profited from diseases generated by conventional diet. His patient John Frank Newton adopted these principles and published The Return to Nature in 1811. Newton attributed his restoration to health to Lambe’s regimen and maintained that an agricultural shift away from animal husbandry would support far larger human populations while eliminating both cruelty to animals and economic distress among the poor.
These reformers established regular social and intellectual associations. At Newton’s home, figures such as Lambe, the philosopher William Godwin, and Percy Bysshe Shelley gathered for shared vegetarian meals and discussions. Shelley emerged as the most prominent literary advocate of the movement. Influenced by Newton, Lambe, and Ritson, Shelley incorporated arguments for vegetarianism into the philosophical notes to his 1813 poem Queen Mab, subsequently published separately as A Vindication of Natural Diet, and composed an essay titled On the Vegetable System of Diet. Shelley argued that human anatomy lacked the natural weapons of carnivores, requiring fire and culinary seasonings to disguise the reality of raw flesh. In his analysis, the exploitation and breeding of animals created artificial misery, fostering wider social violence and oppressing the human poor by diverting land from grain cultivation to animal husbandry.
Shelley maintained his vegetable diet with considerable consistency, despite periodic illnesses, the scarcity of winter produce in Britain, and occasional lapses during times of travel or physical exhaustion. Similar sympathies touched other figures within his circle, including Mary Shelley, who reflected these ethical concerns through the vegetarian diet of the creature in her novel Frankenstein, and Lord Byron, whose intermittent abstention from meat was driven primarily by personal discipline and dietary experimentation rather than systemic ethics.
Other reformers approached the issue through political and institutional engagement. Sir Richard Phillips, a radical publisher, newspaper founder, and former high sheriff of London, had abstained from meat since his youth. In his 1826 work Golden Rules of Social Philosophy, Phillips codified sixteen ethical rules governing diet, resting his principles on the common mortality of sensitive beings, the natural abundance of plant agriculture, and an explicit refusal to base human sustenance on the slaughter of sentient creatures.
The movement reached an uncompromising ethical formulation in the writings of Lewis Gompertz. A philanthropist, inventor, and founding member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, Gompertz practiced what was essentially veganism, refusing all animal foods, leather, silk, and the use of horse-drawn carriages. Unlike his contemporaries, Gompertz conceded the possibility that animal flesh might confer strength to the human body, but he maintained that this utility provided no moral right to deprive another sentient being of life. His insistence that nonhuman animals owned their bodies and should not be made instruments of human convenience led to friction with the more conservative leadership of the SPCA, prompting him to resign the secretaryship and establish the Animals’ Friend Society. His arguments influenced later writers such as Thomas Forster, who addressed the cruelties inherent in culinary customs in his 1839 study Philozoa.
By moving beyond abstract sentimentality to personal adoption, these radical writers and reformers redefined vegetarianism as an active moral duty. Their writings and informal associations laid the intellectual and practical foundations that led directly to the establishment of organized vegetarianism in Britain during the late 1840s.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Sins of the Flesh
- Subtitle: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought
- Author: Rod Preece (1939–2021)
- Publisher: UBC Press (University of British Columbia Press)
- Publication Year: 2008
- Edition: First Edition
- ISBN: 978-0-7748-1509-3 (bound); 978-0-7748-1510-9 (pbk.)
- Historical Period Covered: Prehistory to the late 20th and early 21st centuries
- Main Subject Areas: Animal Ethics, History of Vegetarianism, Intellectual History, Environmental Philosophy, Comparative Religion, History of Science and Medicine
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