During the final decade of the eighteenth century, ethical vegetarianism in Britain shifted from philosophical reflection to direct practice. While earlier eighteenth-century thinkers frequently expressed sympathy toward animals without altering their daily conduct, reformers influenced by the political upheavals of the 1790s insisted that moral principles required personal consistency. The French Revolution challenged established social hierarchies and undermined the traditional assumption that human inequality and animal oppression were permanently ordained. Influenced by European writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, British advocates increasingly viewed dietary reform as an extension of universal justice. Even after the British government enacted repressive measures such as the Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Bills of 1795 to suppress radical agitation, the connection between democratic ideals and the ethical treatment of animals persisted.
This practical turn in dietary ethics developed alongside broader shifts in natural philosophy and Enlightenment thought. Naturalists increasingly recognized common physiological structures across different species, drawing on earlier anatomical studies such as Giovanni Borelli’s seventeenth-century treatise on animal locomotion. Thinkers such as Henry More and John Ray had already rejected the ancient belief that nonhuman creatures existed solely for human benefit. Despite these intellectual developments, most educated Europeans continued to consume meat. In the early nineteenth century, social reformers extended these concepts into practical programs. Industrialists like Robert Owen proposed vegetarianism for workers in cooperative communities such as New Lanark, reflecting an ideological link between early socialism and animal protection. Even orthodox figures such as the Anglican theologian William Paley acknowledged that causing pain or death to animals required moral justification, although Paley ultimately relied on religious sanction to defend flesh eating.
The Scottish writer and soldier John Oswald was among the earliest figures to combine revolutionary politics with ethical vegetarianism. After serving as an army officer in India, where he observed Hindu dietary customs, Oswald concluded that human beings could sustain health and vigor entirely on a plant-based diet. This direct experience challenged the common Western assumption that abstaining from flesh was unsuitable for human biology. Upon his return to Europe, Oswald aligned himself with radical republican factions in London and Paris, becoming a member of the Jacobin Club. In 1791, the liberal 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 argued that the consumption of meat blunted natural human sympathies, suggesting that the slaughter of animals encouraged cruelty toward other people. He also condemned scientific vivisection on the same moral grounds. Oswald died in 1793 at Thouars during the Vendee campaign while commanding revolutionary troops, exemplifying a philosophy that combined an objection to animal slaughter with an embrace of armed political struggle.
Oswald’s insistence on aligning ethical belief with dietary conduct stood in contrast to many contemporaries who voiced sympathy for animals while continuing to consume them. The classical scholar Thomas Taylor translated Greek philosophical texts on vegetarianism by Porphyry and Iamblichus and published a defense of animal rights, yet he maintained that a vegetarian diet was feasible only for people leading sedentary lives. The poet William Blake shared revolutionary sympathies and believed in the transmigration of souls, but he did not adopt a vegetarian diet. Later, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer praised compassion toward nonhuman life while remaining an omnivore. Similarly, English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed reverence for the unity of living things, yet both consumed meat when their economic circumstances permitted. While indigent populations and rural laborers often lived primarily on bread and root vegetables out of necessity, deliberate moral abstinence remained confined to a small group of reformers.
In 1797, the Manchester printer George Nicholson published On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals, which he expanded in 1801 into On the Primeval Diet of Man. Nicholson compiled classical and modern arguments against cruelty, incorporating passages from ancient authors such as Plutarch alongside contemporary medical and humanitarian writings. He structured his work around five main propositions, maintaining that human physical history indicated a natural plant diet, that vegetarianism supported long-term health, that animals possessed essential similarities to human beings, that existing treatment of animals was unjust, and that reform required both public education and legal statutes. Nicholson also drew upon the observations of the traveler John Stewart, who argued that abstaining from animal flesh and alcohol prevented physical illness. Applying a version of the Golden Rule to animals, Nicholson maintained that consumers who ate meat were morally responsible for the actions of the butcher. He viewed animal welfare as inseparable from broader reform causes, including popular education, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery.
The antiquarian and radical scholar Joseph Ritson contributed to the movement in 1802 with An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty. Ritson had abandoned meat in his youth after reading Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. His open atheism, abrasive personality, and outspoken sympathy for the French Revolution made him a controversial figure who faced political suspicion in Britain and harsh criticism in conservative periodicals like the Edinburgh Review. In his treatise, Ritson drew upon comparative anatomy and the writings of Lord Monboddo to argue that human physiological structures were suited to fruits and plants rather than flesh. He cited the physical strength of Cornish miners, whose diet consisted largely of potatoes, to demonstrate that animal food was unnecessary for manual labor. Ritson also asserted that nonhuman animals had an independent right to life. This argument countered the prevailing view that killing animals was morally acceptable as long as it was conducted without pain.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century, medical arguments gained prominence through the work of Dr. William Lambe. A fellow of the College of Physicians who delivered the Croonian lectures, Lambe adopted a strict vegetable regimen and advocated the use of distilled water, publishing his findings in Additional Reports on Regimen. His medical practice influenced John Frank Newton, who credited Lambe with restoring his health. In 1811, Newton published Return to Nature, arguing that adopting a plant-based diet would eliminate common diseases and significantly extend human lifespan. Newton also challenged Thomas Malthus’s theories of population, calculating that agricultural land devoted to plant crops could sustain far more people than land used for animal farming. Newton’s residence in Bracknell became a regular meeting place for a circle of reformers that included Lambe, William Godwin, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, forming an informal network dedicated to discussing dietary reform and radical politics.
Percy Bysshe Shelley adopted vegetarianism through his association with Newton and subsequently formulated an influential defense of the practice. In the extensive notes to his 1813 poem Queen Mab, later published separately as A Vindication of Natural Diet, and in his unpublished essay On the Vegetable System of Diet, Shelley argued that human anatomy lacked the natural weapons of carnivorous animals. He asserted that the culinary use of fire and spices served primarily to disguise raw flesh, which natural human instincts would otherwise reject. Shelley emphasized the cruelty involved in castrating and confining domesticated livestock, while arguing that diverting grain to animal husbandry exacerbated the poverty of the working classes. Although Shelley experienced occasional dietary lapses during travel, periods of physical illness, and domestic disruption, he maintained a plant-based diet for most of his remaining life. His wife, Mary Shelley, shared these ethical concerns. Her 1818 novel Frankenstein depicted the created being as a vegetarian who sustained himself on acorns and berries and refused to harm animals for food.
Other public figures engaged with dietary reform with varying degrees of consistency and moral commitment. Lord Byron adopted periods of severe dietary restriction, consuming primarily biscuits, soda water, or potatoes with vinegar, but his motivations centered on personal temperament and physical appearance rather than animal ethics. In contrast, the publisher and London magistrate Sir Richard Phillips maintained a strict vegetarian practice from early youth. Phillips combined publishing with political reform, serving as High Sheriff of London and Middlesex and advocating for prison improvement. In his 1826 book Golden Rules of Social Philosophy, Phillips outlined sixteen ethical propositions regarding diet. He argued that because human existence was as precarious as that of any other living creature, humans possessed no right to destroy sentient life for food, especially when the plant kingdom provided abundant nutrition.
Lewis Gompertz extended these radical principles into institutional animal protection. Born into a Jewish family of German descent, Gompertz was an inventor and philanthropist who opposed human slavery, the subjugation of women, and the exploitation of animals. In his personal conduct, Gompertz adopted a completely animal-free regimen, refusing milk, eggs, leather, silk, and the use of horse-drawn carriages, while inventing mechanical improvements to reduce the labor imposed on working animals. In 1824, following Parliament’s passage of an act against animal cruelty promoted by Richard Martin, Gompertz participated in the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When the society’s first secretary, Arthur Broome, encountered insurmountable financial difficulties, Gompertz assumed the role of secretary and managed the organization for six years.
In his 1824 treatise Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes, Gompertz outlined an unusual ethical framework. Departing from other vegetarian writers of his era, Gompertz conceded that meat consumption might enhance human bodily and mental strength. However, he maintained that this potential benefit gave humans no moral entitlement to kill animals, comparing such entitlement to a thief justifying robbery on the grounds that stolen wealth provided personal advantage. Gompertz insisted that every sentient being held a prior claim to its own body and that the capacity to suffer was the only relevant criterion for moral consideration. His uncompromising stance placed him in direct conflict with the leadership of the SPCA, which included meat eaters, field sportsmen, and figures who wanted the society governed exclusively by Christian doctrines. Faced with hostility over his strict dietary practices and non-Christian background, Gompertz resigned after six years as secretary. He subsequently founded the Animals’ Friend Society, serving as its president until illness forced his retirement in 1846.
The tension between moderate animal welfare and radical dietary ethics remained evident in the late 1830s. In 1839, the astronomer and naturalist Thomas Forster, an associate of Gompertz and a founding member of the Animals’ Friend Society, published Philozoa, or Moral Reflections on the Actual Condition of the Animal Kingdom. Forster dedicated the volume to Gompertz and submitted it for a competition sponsored by the SPCA. While cautious in addressing the society’s conservative committee, Forster argued that human progress would ultimately lead to the abandonment of meat eating. The SPCA committee passed over Forster’s submission in favor of an essay by an Anglican clergyman, John Styles, which avoided vegetarian arguments. Despite institutional resistance, the writings and personal examples of reformers such as Oswald, Nicholson, Ritson, Lambe, Shelley, Phillips, and Gompertz established ethical vegetarianism as an active reform movement, preparing the ground for the founding 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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