In the 1790s, ethical vegetarianism underwent a fundamental shift from speculative sentiment to direct practice. Eighteenth-century thinkers had frequently written on sensibility toward animals without altering their own dietary habits. With the political and social upheaval that accompanied the French Revolution, a growing circle of British radicals began to treat vegetarianism as an immediate moral requirement and an essential component of universal justice.
The questioning of traditional hierarchy after 1789 encouraged the view that the social order was not divinely fixed, but capable of deliberate transformation. This shift in outlook helped establish the early groundwork for the organized movement that eventually produced the Vegetarian Society in the mid-nineteenth century. For the radical intellectuals who linked dietary abstention with republican politics, the emancipation of animals was seen as inseparable from the emancipation of human beings.
The first prominent figure in this militant phase was John Oswald, a Scottish writer and former army officer from Edinburgh. After serving in India, where his direct contact with Hindu culture convinced him that human beings could live healthily and innocently without consuming animal flesh, Oswald returned to Britain and became deeply involved in revolutionary politics. In 1791, the liberal London publisher J. Johnson brought out Oswald’s treatise, The Cry of Nature; or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals.
On the title page, Oswald identified himself as a member of the Jacobin Club, signaling his rejection of existing political, religious, and social institutions. In The Cry of Nature, Oswald argued that human anatomy and moral sentiment are naturally averse to the shedding of blood. He maintained that the slaughter of animals blunts human sympathy, serving as a direct precursor to violence against fellow humans. In addition to condemning the consumption of flesh, he argued strongly against vivisection, maintaining that scientific curiosity did not justify the violation of animal life. Oswald later returned to France, where he was made an officer in the revolutionary armed forces. He was killed in 1793 at Thouars during the Vendée campaign, and his two sons subsequently died in the revolutionary wars.
The connection between radical politics and the rejection of meat remained prominent in the work of George Nicholson, a printer based in Manchester. In 1797, Nicholson published On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals, which he expanded in 1801 under the title On the Primeval Diet of Man. Nicholson compiled classical, Enlightenment, and contemporary texts into a comprehensive case against animal consumption. He argued that humankind was naturally frugivorous, that an abstention from meat promoted health and longevity, and that the physical similarities between humans and other animals demanded reciprocal moral treatment. Nicholson also addressed the political dimensions of the question, arguing for legal protections for animals alongside causes such as democratic reform, popular education, the abolition of slavery, and women’s rights.
A comparable political radicalism characterized Joseph Ritson, an antiquarian whose 1802 work, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty, adopted an uncompromising stance against human dominion over nature. Ritson, who had adopted a vegetarian diet at nineteen after reading Bernard Mandeville, combined atheism and support for the French Revolution with an absolute defense of animal rights. In his treatise, he rejected the conventional theological assertion that animals were created for human use, asserting that every creature possessed an inherent right to life. He argued that the practice of slaughter hardened the human character, producing social cruelty, blood sports, and political tyranny. Ritson’s radicalism and temperament brought heavy criticism from conservative journals such as the Edinburgh Review, yet his writings helped sustain ethical vegetarianism among the radical literary circles of the period.
By the early nineteenth century, vegetarian thought had gained additional medical and literary advocates. Dr. William Lambe, a London physician and Fellow of the College of Physicians, adopted an entirely vegetable regimen in his forties and promoted it in his 1809 work, Additional Reports on the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen on Scirrhous Tumours and on Other Peculiar Diseases. Lambe primarily focused on physiological benefits, including the use of distilled water, but his circle included dedicated ethical reformers. Lambe converted John Frank Newton, who in 1811 published The Return to Nature; or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen. Newton viewed the adoption of a plant diet as the remedy for human physical degeneration. He also raised economic and environmental arguments, pointing out that land devoted to arable agriculture could sustain far more people than land reserved for livestock, thereby alleviating human poverty while sparing animals from slaughter.
Newton’s home in Bracknell became a regular gathering place for an informal network of radicals who shared vegetarian meals and republican ideas. Among these figures was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who adopted the diet after meeting Newton. Shelley synthesized the moral, medical, and political arguments of his predecessors in his notes to Queen Mab (1813), later issued as A Vindication of Natural Diet, and in an unpublished 1813 essay, On the Vegetable System of Diet. Shelley argued that human physiology lacked the predatory equipment of carnivores, and that meat could only be made palatable through cooking and seasoning to disguise the reality of the slaughterhouse. For Shelley, the exploitation of animals was inextricably tied to broader systems of human oppression. He maintained that ending the consumption of flesh was necessary to eliminate social cruelty and establish a peaceful order.
Other prominent figures of the period engaged with the vegetarian principle with varying degrees of consistency. Sir Richard Phillips, a radical publisher, prison reformer, and former high sheriff of London, published sixteen dietary maxims in his 1826 book Golden Rules of Social Philosophy, presenting meat eating as an indefensible violation of the shared vulnerability of sentient beings. In contrast, Lord Byron practiced vegetarianism sporadically, driven primarily by concerns regarding personal health and demeanor rather than ethical obligations to animals. Similarly, many literary figures of the Romantic generation expressed profound sympathy for nature in verse while continuing to consume flesh in daily life.
The philosophical development of the movement culminated in the 1820s with Lewis Gompertz, a philanthropist and inventor who served as an early secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In his 1824 treatise, Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, Gompertz outlined a thorough ethical position that anticipated modern veganism. He avoided all animal products, including dairy, eggs, leather, and silk, and refused to use horse-drawn transport. Unlike earlier writers who claimed that a plant diet was naturally optimal for human health, Gompertz conceded that human beings might derive physical vigor from animal food, yet insisted that bodily interest gave humans no moral right to deprive another sentient being of life.
Following disputes with colleagues in the SPCA over his strict principles and non-Christian ethical framing, Gompertz resigned to establish the Animals’ Friend Society, later supported by the Catholic vegetarian naturalist Thomas Forster. Through the contributions of Oswald, Nicholson, Ritson, Lambe, Shelley, Phillips, and Gompertz, vegetarianism developed across five decades from an isolated philosophical musing into an integrated movement that combined personal dietary practice with a universal conception of moral justice.
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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