The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Educated in Edinburgh (though he did not graduate), and resident in Bath, Graham acknowledged his debt to the great progenitors of vegetarian medicine, Cullen and Monro.11 Like Cullen, he believed that nervous disorders were caused by the irritating qualities of luxurious diets and lifestyles. ‘The ground of all our diseases, and the shortening of life,’ he said, echoing Cheyne, ‘is from the excessive eating of flesh and other meats, and from drinking inflammable and inflammatory liquors.’12 In this respect, Graham’s advice differed very little from many of his contemporary doctors; but Graham radicalised the medical tradition into a revolutionary critique of modern corruption and a holistic vision for the rejuvenation of the cosmos (though this, of course, was only marginally more extreme than Cheyne’s outlandish theories).

  Considering the scientific support Graham had on his side, Brissot was perplexed by the doctor’s failure to acquire a larger following for his diet. ‘Graham had a beautiful figure, an admirable form, a noble and majestic countenance, and looks which seemed to command respect,’ wrote Brissot in his Mémoires. Graham followed ‘with the most rigorous scruple the abstinence from flesh ordered by the reformer of Crotona [Pythagoras]. It was to this regime, proved and undertaken during twelve years, that he attributed his brilliant health; I do not know how, with so many means of succeeding, he made so few proselytes.’ Brissot sympathetically concluded that it was not because his vegetarian arguments were intrinsically nonsensical; on the contrary, they were extremely virtuous and people only failed to heed them because society was already so irreparably corrupt. In London, Scotland and the United States, where people were too habituated to ‘the most succulent substances, and where Pythagoreanism is nearly treated as a fable’, Brissot explained, Graham was inevitably treated as a charlatan rather than a philosopher. Repeated imprisonment for debt had not improved Graham’s reputation, but even this provided Brissot (who had himself been jailed for debt in England) with an excuse to eulogise him. While in prison, Brissot proclaimed, Graham continued to deliver lectures through the bars of his cell – not to accrue profit to himself, but solely to repay his creditors.

  Graham’s doorway to fame had been opened wide in 1778 when his brother William (aged twenty-one) shocked the world by marrying Brissot’s friend, the eminent republican historian Catherine Macaulay (aged forty-seven). Macaulay – who was also friends with Benjamin Franklin – consulted Graham for his healing powers and she in turn advocated compassion to animals in her widely read treatises on radical social reform.13 Macaulay’s Letters on Education, published in 1790, a year before her death, opened by castigating the clergy for having failed to inculcate ‘the necessity of extending our benevolence to the dumb animals’, which, she argued, God had created with souls in order to be happy. She warned that bringing up children as ‘devourers of animal substances’ – especially rare bloody meat – could ‘tend to weaken that sympathy which Nature has given to man’, and that rather ‘Milk, fruit, eggs, and almost every kind of vegetable aliment, ought to be the principal part of the nourishment of children.’ Anxious to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, she was less extreme than Rousseau, and allowed that children could be fed meat up to three times a week; but she went beyond the usual stance by presenting the avoidance of animal suffering as a motive for reducing meat-eating ‘within as moderate limits as the present state of things will admit’.14

  Through Macaulay, these sentiments were incorporated in a diluted form into one of the most influential radical works of the era, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft, who called Macaulay ‘the woman of the greatest abilities that this country has ever produced’, also avoided the vegetarian position: she denied animals reason and she seems to have considered unscientific Rousseau’s denial that man is ‘a carnivorous animal’. But she nevertheless took the robust stance, in line with Graham and Williams, that ‘Humanity to animals should be particularly inculcated as a part of national education’ because ‘Justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it extend to the whole creation.’15

  That Brissot – de facto leader of France for a few critical years – gave such a sympathetic assessment of Graham and collaborated with several other vegetarians, indicates how centralised the movement was in the years of the Revolution. Pythagoras’ legendary opposition to tyranny appealed to revolutionaries (just as it had to the seventeenth-century republican deists), and it was easy for the likes of Brissot to read into Pythagoreanism their own ideas of extending the ‘social circle’ to include all of humanity and even other species.16 Graham, Williams, Oswald, Valady and Pigott no doubt represent the tip of an iceberg now hidden by the passage of time. Many revolutionaries, without actually practising it, could see the point of a diet that claimed to cleanse the corruption of the modern age. It was a harmless opinion in itself, and if it instituted a gentle temperament and was based on principles of egalitarian sympathy, what could be said against it?

  Even Robert Southey, soon to be poet laureate, who had been a sympathiser of the Revolution but turned into a vehement Tory, did not have a problem with vegetarianism per se. In his fictionalised Letters from England (1807), he expressed his detestation for the radical vegetarian Joseph Ritson; but this was for Ritson’s shameless blasphemies rather than for actually abstaining from meat. He had also found Valady ridiculous when he came over to England during the Revolution ‘dressed in white like an aspirant’. Southey wasn’t particularly impressed by Graham either; but again, this was for his eccentric antics rather than his diet. ‘This man,’ said Southey, ‘lived upon vegetables, and delighted in declaiming against the sin of being carnivorous, and the dreadful effects of making the stomach a grave and charnel-house for slaughtered bodies. Latterly he became wholly an enthusiast, would madden himself with ether, run out into the streets, and strip himself to clothe the first beggar whom he met.’ It was Graham’s involvement in the subversive tradition of millenarian radicalism that raised Southey’s deeper suspicions of his character.17

  While the mature Southey was very keen to distance himself from the radicals with whom he had happily associated in the 1790s, he acknowledged that ‘The principle of abstaining from animal food is not in itself either culpable or ridiculous, if decently discussed … There is therefore nothing irreligious in the opinion, and certainly it is favourable in some of its consequences of morality.’ Indeed, back in the 1790s, Southey had written several poems about sympathising with animals. The problem, he mused in agreement with Brissot, was not the principle of vegetarianism in itself, but with modern society’s addiction to meat, and, even more importantly, the political significance of beef as a symbol of British patriotism. ‘A certain Thomas Tryon attempted to form a sect of such about a century ago,’ but he was bound to fail, said Southey, because the idea of living on lentils ‘would hardly become popular in a country where Beef-eater is a title of honour, where the soldiers march to battle with a song about roast-beef in their mouths, instead of prayer, and where the whole nation personify themselves by the name of John the Bull’. Meat-eating was a litmus test of political affiliation, and Southey deftly implied that hesitating even for a moment over a plate of beef could be construed as a deeply suspect assault on the nation. In the role of his imaginary Portuguese interlocutor, he remarked drily that ‘I have more than once been asked at table my opinion of the roast beef of Old England with a sort of smile, and in a tone as if the national honour were concerned in my reply.’18

  It was the national honour with which the anxious state authorities were concerned: and they had had enough of the likes of Oswald starting with murmurings against roast beef and ending up trying to invade England with 60,000 demented Frenchmen. The government was determined to put the leading radicals behind bars and in the 1790s scores of them were imprisoned, some of them on their way to the scaffold or Botany Bay, and many of those who survived the judicial process were conveniently picked off by jail typhus and other delights of
prison life. Somewhat unwisely, groups of them were locked up together in London’s Newgate Prison where they could socialise with each other and the outside world. As the historian Iain McCalman has shown, this had the counter-productive effect of bringing together numerous disparate figures and uniting them in their plight. Causes célèbres would be an understatement for the status that the Newgate martyrs of freedom attained; they became a hive of dissenting activism and a pilgrimage for all budding radicals. Incarceration at Newgate became a more or less mandatory entry on the curriculum vitae of anyone wishing to be admitted into the hard core of the radical networks. In the light of the new material on Brissot and Pigott’s vegetarian fraternity and on the prominence of vegetarianism in revolutionary France, it is worth revisiting the Newgate experience to see how it helped to form a more cohesive radical vegetarian tradition than might otherwise have emerged. In particular, it fostered the construction of a tradition that linked them with their radical forebears in the seventeenth century, who had similarly been crushed by a powerful state determined to block the universal suffrage and land redistribution demanded by the radicals.

  At the end of the eighteenth century many movements that had flourished in the seventeenth century were revived. Radicals harked back to the republicanism and democracy of the Cromwellian era. Catherine Macaulay saw her own republicanism as a parallel to that advocated by the radical parliamentarian opponents of Oliver Cromwell. The French regicide had only one precedent – the execution of Charles I; the communism of the Cercle Sociale echoed earlier experiments in communalism; the utopian agrarian communities dreamed of by Brissot, Pigott, Valady and Saint-Pierre resembled the digging communities of the 1640s and 1650s. The battle of democracy against tyranny was seen as an attempt to instate what the radicals had tried and failed to accomplish 150 years earlier.

  Just as in the seventeenth century, violent turmoil was imagined to augur the coming of a new global epoch. On both sides of the political spectrum, the cataclysmic events in France were seen as portents of apocalyptic proportions. To the radicals it promised the coming of perfect egalitarianism; to the conservatives it seemed like a coming of the kingdom of Satan – personified by Robespierre and later Napoleon. Just as in the seventeenth century, these patterns of thought were not restricted to religious extremists. Radical atheists had their own utopian equivalents to the Christian myth of the millennium and they looked forward to a world of harmony built on the progressive achievements of mankind.

  Intriguingly, these developments were coupled with a new wave of Indophilia. In the seventeenth century mystics like Tryon had been mirrored by Indophile deists like the Turkish Spy; in the eighteenth century religious fanatics believed that Indian scriptures revealed hidden secrets about the cosmos, while to unbelievers like Oswald, Hinduism represented a secular natural law of mutual respect.

  It seems less surprising, therefore, that there was a resurgence of vegetarianism along with these other movements. As in the seventeenth century, vegetarianism was part of a radical critique of mainstream culture, and it latched onto the multifarious significances of diet. Luxury was a sign of inequality and a cause of economic oppression; killing animals was a symbol of cruelty in society; and anthropocentrism was the legacy of a power-hungry Judaeo-Christian priesthood – all of which the vegetarians of both periods claimed they could resolve.

  Many of the precedents from the previous century were well known: Thomas Tryon, for example, enjoyed a revival. His attack on slavery struck a chord with the new liberals; his puritanical edicts shared a common pedigree with later temperance movements; even some of his wackier ideas survived a hundred years of Enlightenment science. Other parallels with the seventeenth century were not the result of direct debt or deliberate revivalism; they seem rather to point to shared impulses and more pervasive cultural continuities. Both eras saw a reshuffling of constitutional affairs, wider democracy and pluralism, and a surge of expansion in Britain’s exposure to global cultures (in the 1770s to 1790s Britain was gaining decisive ascendancy over the major European powers in India and other colonies). Radicals were keen to see their struggles as the latest chapter in an eternal, natural fight for freedom, and differences between their times and the past were often deliberately ignored.

  Just as in the seventeenth century, the radicals did not constitute a total break from the rest of their social milieu. Sympathy – a universally espoused virtue – was now radicalised into a mandate for rights-based national constitutions, and the relevance to animals was inescapable. Moderate Indophilia and even abstinence from meat were endorsed by mainstream figures, like William Cullen, who did their best to keep the radicals nervously at arm’s length. But, in the end, the extremists had to be suppressed.

  In the 1790s Southey was still an enthusiastic republican and it was no doubt as a pilgrim to the Newgate radicals that he first encountered some of the newly allied vegetarians he later mocked. It was in Newgate that James Graham became involved with the millenarian radicals, particularly the infamous convert to Judaism, Lord George Gordon, whose libels against the Queen of France and the British legal system had earned him a long-held place behind bars. Gordon’s followers were convinced that he was Moses risen from the dead, and like the seventeenth-century philo-Semites Traske and Tany, he took his Judaism to the extent of cutting off his foreskin and exhibiting it in his prison cell, and abominating non-kosher food. Gordon styled himself as a biblical prophet living on an ascetic diet, and this gained him the esteem of medical purification-enthusiasts like Graham. Gordon formed a partnership with the notorious continental heretichealer Count Cagliostro (1743–95) who shared Gordon’s interest in mystical Judaism and rejuvenation through ascetic fasting. The dietary strictures would have been an extra attraction for Gordon’s disciple and visitor at Newgate, Martin van Butchell, a revolutionary vegetarian healer who also hooked up with Count Cagliostro by publishing extracts from the vegetarian Turkish Spy on the wandering Jew, whom Cagliostro – originally a street urchin from Palermo – claimed to be. When Gordon perished in prison in 1793, van Butchell – who had by then been incarcerated for hailing Thomas Paine as a prophet-healer – used his prophetic powers to assist a wholesale shift of allegiance from Gordon to another Newgate inmate, Richard Brothers (1757– 1824), who pronounced himself the ‘nephew of the Almighty’ and promised to restore the lost Hebrews to a ‘New Jerusalem’. The comparison with seventeenth-century radicals was irresistible and van Butchell drew a direct line from the Fifth-Monarchy Men through to Gordon and Brothers.19

  Brothers dismantled Gordon’s Jewish food laws, and supplanted them with a revival of the paradisian diet enjoined by seventeenth-century prelapsarian millenarians.20 Although Brothers did not uniformly call for vegetarianism,21 in his utopian Description of Jerusalem … with the Garden of Eden in the Centre (1801), he declared that ‘To eat also of fish, flesh, or fowl, clean and unclean, ever was and ever will be lawful, when distress or hunger requires it for human preservation. But if there was, or is, not any necessity to do such things, then indeed the crime becomes presumptuous and the sin of the blackest nature.’22

  This no doubt helped to attract Brothers’ most prominent disciple, the eminent Orientalist Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–1830). Halhed had started off like Holwell, a respected pioneer in the discovery of Hindu culture, and his Code of Gentoo Laws, which endorsed Holwell’s discoveries, was used by the colonial administration in Bengal. But like Holwell (whose famously beautiful daughter, Elizabeth, he fell in love with while staying with her and her husband in Calcutta), Halhed drifted further and further from the scholarly mainstream, until he had convinced himself that the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, revealed the same prophetic truths as the Bible. Halhed was a Member of Parliament and in 1795 he defended Brothers from the charge of treason, and tried to convince the House that his prophecies were of national importance. Amid hoots of laughter and outraged sensibilities, Halhed resigned his seat; his political career was over and there were moves t
o have him sectioned in the mad hospital at Bedlam.23 Southey had a jibe at this pair, though his claim that Brothers believed in a kabbalistic system of reincarnation seems to be belied by Brothers’ derisive comments about the doctrine.24

  Newgate served as a melting pot for these millenarian radicals, and gave them greater opportunities to make alliances. The prison diet, however, put the cat among the pigeons. The jailers’ masterstroke was giving these prisoners a choice: eat beef or starve. Brothers’ resolve broke immediately: he claimed that the remainder penny loaf was not enough to live on, and this no doubt informed the starvation get-out clause in his vegetarian edict. If Gordon was as strict an adherer to kosher laws as everyone claimed, he too, like the Traskes a century and a half earlier, was presumably not eating prison meat. Graham, however, rose in triumph: he was quite content to forgo eating beef and let everyone know it; Brissot recalled with admiration that a few potatoes was all Graham required.25

  The principal medium for political dissent was the printed word, and thus when the authorities started imprisoning publishers with the radical authors, new publishing deals were struck. When the republican Daniel Isaac Eaton was locked up he had the opportunity to spend some time with Robert Pigott’s revolutionary brother Charles (who died in 1794 within months of Robert’s demise). In the following year, Eaton published Charles’ Political Dictionary, which defined ‘Adam’ as ‘a true Sans Culottes, and the first revolutionist’; the East India Company as ‘chartered robbers, licensed murderers’; and reaffirmed the links between oppression of humans and animals in his provocative definition of ‘Brutality’.26

  James Ridgway (who published the works of John Oswald and the vegetarian John Stewart) was incarcerated in Newgate with another radical publisher, Henry Symonds. Working in close collaboration, these two operated with Brissot, Bonneville and the Cercle Sociale; they printed van Butchell’s prophecies on Gordon and Brothers and other works espousing the polygamous practices of certain Indian Brahmins. The radical Sampson Perry joined them for a two-year stint in Newgate, where he no doubt took the opportunity to reminisce with Ridgway over their mutual friends, Stewart and the recently killed Oswald. The liberal writer, actor and ex-stable boy Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) (who represented his friend Joseph Ritson as a hopelessly idealistic Jain-like guardian of injured creatures in his novel Alwyn (1780)) joined the Newgate coterie on a treason charge in 1794, which earned him a job doing translations for Symonds. Symonds’ and Ridgway’s association with the anarchist William Godwin – a devout pilgrim to Newgate – helped to bring Ritson’s and Oswald’s vegetarianism to the attention of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, thus ensuring that their legacy stretched well beyond the end of the eighteenth century. Another of Holcroft and Godwin’s radical friends, John Tweddell (1769–99) became a vegetarian after travelling through revolutionary France in 1798.27