During the late eighteenth century, British vegetarianism shifted from intellectual speculation into active personal commitment. Writers in the earlier part of the century frequently expressed sympathy for animals while continuing to consume animal food. By the 1790s, the political and philosophical upheavals associated with the French Revolution transformed this dynamic. Radical thinkers began to treat diet as a direct moral responsibility rather than an abstract ideal. Percy Bysshe Shelley later identified the French Revolution as the defining theme of the era. The replacement of aristocratic privilege and political subjection with concepts of universal citizenship encouraged reformers to question established authorities, including human dominance over the natural world. Previously, social inequality and animal suffering were widely regarded as permanent features of an ordained order. The revolutionary era fostered the belief that both human society and human relations with animals could be reconstructed through rational reform.
The earliest prominent figure to combine revolutionary politics with dietary reform during this period was John Oswald. An Edinburgh officer who had lived in India with the British military, Oswald became familiar with Hindu vegetarian practices and concluded that human beings could thrive without animal food. After returning to Europe, he joined the Jacobin Club in Paris and died in 1793 fighting for the French revolutionary army in the Vendée. In 1791, the London publisher Joseph Johnson issued Oswald’s treatise, The Cry of Nature, or An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals. Oswald maintained that human beings possessed an innate aversion to shedding blood that was suppressed only through the deadening effects of custom. He argued that society relegated the slaughter of animals to the lowest social classes because the general population harbored an instinctive revulsion toward butchery. Oswald linked dietary abstinence with opposition to vivisection, contending that scientific experimentation on living animals violated fundamental human sympathies.
In 1797, Manchester printer George Nicholson advanced the discussion by publishing On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals, which he expanded in 1801 under the title On the Primeval Diet of Man. Nicholson gathered historical, philosophical, and medical writings to present a systematic defense of vegetarianism. His central argument rested on five propositions. First, he asserted that ancient human dietary habits revealed the natural sustenance of the species. Second, he argued that a plant diet promoted superior health and greater longevity. Third, he emphasized that nonhuman animals shared essential physical and emotional capacities with human beings, which required humans to treat them with moral consideration. Fourth, he demonstrated that prevailing treatment of animals was unjust. Finally, he called for public education and legislative protections to safeguard animal welfare. Nicholson incorporated accounts from travelers such as John Stewart, who claimed that populations subsisting on vegetables and water remained free from common diseases. Nicholson also formulated two primary ethical maxims, arguing that an individual who consumes meat shares moral responsibility with the butcher, and applying the Golden Rule to animal life.
Joseph Ritson, an antiquarian and political radical, published An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty in 1802. Ritson had ceased eating meat at the age of nineteen after reading Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. In his treatise, Ritson characterized human beings as uniquely rapacious predators whose destructive habits lacked the natural boundaries seen in carnivorous animals. He examined human anatomy, citing the Scottish judge Lord Monboddo to demonstrate that human teeth, jaws, and digestive systems were designed for plant consumption rather than predation. To refute claims that animal flesh was necessary for physical strength, Ritson pointed to Cornish miners, who performed heavy physical labor while subsisting primarily on potatoes. Ritson also addressed the philosophical justification of meat consumption, arguing that every animal possesses an independent right to life. By establishing that existence itself held moral value for sentient beings, he countered the argument that painless slaughter caused no moral harm to animals.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century, medical theory began to reinforce ethical arguments. Dr. William Lambe, a fellow of the College of Physicians, adopted a strict vegetable regimen and advocated the use of distilled water to treat chronic disease, publishing Additional Reports on Regimen in 1809. Lambe’s medical ideas directly influenced John Frank Newton, who published The Return to Nature in 1811 to document his recovery under Lambe’s care. Newton argued that returning to a natural diet could preserve health and extend human longevity. He also addressed contemporary economic concerns regarding population growth. Opposing the pessimistic demographic theories of Thomas Malthus, Newton calculated that land dedicated to crop cultivation could support ten times the population maintained by livestock farming. At his residence in Bracknell, Newton hosted regular gatherings that included Lambe, Shelley, William Godwin, and members of the Boinville family. These dinners provided a social forum where radical politics, philosophical literature, and strict vegetarianism converged.
Percy Bysshe Shelley adopted vegetarianism around 1812 through his associations with Newton, Lambe, and Ritson. Shelley integrated the rejection of meat into his broader vision of political liberation and universal justice. In the explanatory notes to his 1813 poem Queen Mab, Shelley published an essay titled A Vindication of Natural Diet. He composed a second treatise, On the Vegetable System of Diet, later that same year. Shelley argued that meat consumption required the elaborate use of cooking and condiments to disguise the raw reality of dead flesh, which human instincts would otherwise reject. He also denounced the physical mutilation of domesticated livestock, citing the castration of cattle and sheep and the confinement of poultry as severe abuses inflicted by human beings. Shelley viewed cruelty toward animals as an extension of tyrannical power that corrupted human nature and fostered social violence, comparing the callousness of slaughterhouse butchery to the mentality that enabled military warfare.
Shelley maintained a diet consisting largely of bread, fruit, and vegetables, though historical records show that his adherence was occasionally disrupted. Physical exhaustion, limited access to produce during winter travel, and domestic pressure resulted in brief lapses, such as during boating excursions with Thomas Love Peacock in 1815 and a period of illness in 1817. Shelley nonetheless viewed his plant regimen as beneficial to his health and defended his dietary principles in social gatherings. His convictions also influenced his domestic circle. Mary Shelley reflected these ethical perspectives in her 1818 novel Frankenstein, in which the creature deliberately subsists on acorns and berries rather than animal flesh, expressing a natural revulsion toward slaughter.
Other contemporaries engaged with vegetarian principles in contrasting ways. Lord Byron experimented intermittently with a fleshless diet, primarily out of an interest in personal temperament and a desire to avoid aggression, though his eating habits remained inconsistent throughout his life. In contrast, Sir Richard Phillips, a radical publisher, prison reformer, and former sheriff of London, practiced vegetarianism continuously from his youth. In his 1826 work, Golden Rules of Social Philosophy, Phillips formulated sixteen ethical rules governing diet. He asserted that human mortality provided no justification for terminating the lives of other sentient creatures, arguing that nature supplied abundant nutrition through grains, fruits, roots, and seeds.
During the 1820s and 1830s, ethical vegetarianism expanded into institutional activism. Lewis Gompertz, an inventor and philanthropist of German Jewish descent, published Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes in 1824. Gompertz practiced an uncompromising form of vegetarianism that excluded milk, eggs, leather, silk, and animal traction. He served as secretary of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals until internal disagreements regarding Christian orthodoxy and animal usage prompted him to establish the Animals’ Friend Society. Gompertz introduced a distinctive moral argument by conceding that meat might provide physical vigor to humans, while insisting that such utility created no moral entitlement to slaughter animals. He compared the consumption of animal flesh to theft, maintaining that personal gain did not justify violating the rights of the original owner. In 1839, the astronomer and naturalist Thomas Forster published Philozoa, arguing that human moral advancement would eventually lead to the complete cessation of animal slaughter.
Between the 1790s and the 1830s, British vegetarian writers developed the arguments that elevated diet into an integral component of social reform. By uniting humanitarian ethics, anatomical observations, and political radicalism, figures such as Oswald, Ritson, Newton, Shelley, Phillips, and Gompertz demonstrated that dietary choice was a matter of practical moral duty. Their writings and informal networks created the ideological foundation that culminated in the establishment of the Vegetarian Society in 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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