The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Despite such defamatory remarks, however, Ritson’s moral philosophy was seriously challenging, and it clearly seemed important enough for his contemporaries to spend a great deal of energy refuting it. If it did nothing else, Ritson’s case for moral abstinence from meat injected another direction into the debate about humanity’s relationship with nature. In the Edinburgh Review, Henry Brougham called his republicanism and atheism ‘nauseous and contemptible’; but he nevertheless agreed to tackle Ritson’s arguments on their own secular terms. Like Southey, Brougham did not have a problem with reasonable arguments in favour of vegetarianism – its improvement of human health and enlightening of morality – but Ritson’s claim that man’s consanguinity with animals made it a crime to kill them was an untenable position. Brougham dedicated his review to showing that Ritson’s animal rights argument defeated itself when viewed from the wider ecological point. Irrespective of his benevolent intentions, Ritson would never be able to extract himself from the ecological war in nature of which every human is a part. Ritson was himself guilty, Brougham pointed out, of starving calves by drinking milk, aborting chickens by eating eggs, and murdering whole ecologies of microscopic organisms every time he washed his armpits. Even while Ritson was in the act of writing his vegetarian arguments, he was using a quill from a plucked goose, ink made from crushed insects, and even the whale-tallow candle he used to light his study ‘is a damning proof of the long-protracted torments and inhuman butchery of the great leviathan, the lord of the deep’. ‘His harangues against destroying animal life,’ concluded Brougham, ‘are ushered into the world on the spoils of the slain.’

  Even if Ritson were able to disentangle himself from the animal products that compose the fabric of human existence, Brougham showed, he would still not be able to avoid the crime of killing his ‘fellow-creatures’:

  Every drop of water that quenches our thirst, or laves our bodies, contains innumerable insects, who are sacrificed to our necessities or comforts; each simple that forms a part of the most humane and scrupulous Pythagorean or Brahmin’s vegetable fare, conveys to a cruel and inevitable destruction thousands of the most beautiful and harmless of created beings. The ground on which we press to succour a wounded animal, or to adore the God of tender mercy, is by those actions necessarily turned into a scene of torture and carnage. From the first to the last gasp of our lives, we never inhale the air of heaven, without butchering myriads of sentient and innocent creatures.22

  By killing animals to eat them, said Brougham, we merely ‘swell, by an imperceptible voluntary addition, the catalogue of necessary enormities’. As Buffon and Darwin pointed out, living inextricably within the great chain of life also meant submitting to the great chain of death. This argument had frequently been used against Eastern vegetarians:23 it was a lethal criticism. Not only was it unnatural to try to prevent killing, it was actually impossible.

  There remained another essential element to Ritson’s vegetarian argument which Brougham and other critics of Ritson’s vegetarianism were also keen to refute: the idea that eating meat made men savage. Brougham himself acknowledged that killing animals accidentally was different from those murders that we commit voluntarily. As George Cheyne had pointed out in 1724, it was intentional slaughter of animals that made men violent, rather than inadvertent mass-murder of microscopic organisms.24

  But this again did not stand up to the facts, and Brougham presented Ritson and Oswald as prime examples: they were both vegetarian, but both total savages. Ritson was renownedly irascible, venomous and intractable with anyone who disagreed with him. Like Oswald, his gentleness to animals was contrasted to his truculence to humans. Nares mocked this by sardonically remarking that Ritson’s ‘tranquility of soul, which has led him to maintain a restless and envenomed warfare with the whole human race, and chiefly with the most respectable part of it, cannot be too strongly pressed on the reader’s notice, as one of the happy effects flowing from a total abstinence from animal food’.25 Ritson was being framed as the archetypal misanthropic animal-lover; he had sided with the animals, making it easy to portray him as a beast himself. As early as 1783 Sir Harris Nicholas had satirised Ritson in his poem ‘The Pythagorean Critic’, which pointed out his incongruous cannibalistic viciousness towards his intellectual rivals:

  By wise Pythagoras taught, young Ritson’s meals

  With bloody viands never are defil’d;

  For quadruped, for bird, for fish he feels,

  His board ne’re smoaks with roast meat, or with boil’d.

  In this one instance pious, mild, and tame,

  He’s surely in another a great sinner,

  For man, cries Ritson, man’s alone my game!

  On him I make a most delicious dinner!26

  Sayers likewise made this a central part of his satirical cartoon of Ritson. The inkpot Ritson is dipping his (feather) pen into is labelled ‘Gall’, evoking his notoriously vituperative controversies and punning on his allegiance to revolutionary France – his ‘Gallican frenzy’ – also indicated by the frog and onions hanging near the window. His political tendencies are no doubt being alluded to with the numerous radical roots that surround him. Sayers might have known that Ritson was working on a system of etymology (more roots) in his massive dictionary which aimed to return the English language to its original purity, a system that he was confident would be adopted when the Revolution finally reached England. (The dictionary, which was never published, defined Carrion as ‘The flesh of animals, naturally dead, or, at least, not artificially murdered by man’, while a Lobster was ‘A shel-fish, which is boiled alive, by people of nice feelings & great humanity’.27)

  Ritson’s friends used to insist that he was not as vitriolic as everyone claimed. Walter Scott made a jocular couplet about Ritson – ‘As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor,/ And feeding on herbs as a Nebuchadnezzar’ – but he was cordially tolerant when Ritson came to stay with him at Lasswade and abused his housekeeper for offering him a slice of beef and viciously clashed with his guests for their mockery of his scruples. Scott was no fan of vegetarianism itself – he had been repeatedly constrained to a ‘severe regimen’ of boiled rice for his health – but he admired Ritson nonetheless, and he insisted that ‘he had an honesty of principle about him which, if it went to ridiculous extremities, was still respectable from the soundness of the foundation.’28

  This teasing respect manifested itself in a number of Scott’s novels. Ritson himself is named in The Antiquary, in which the Catholic Earl of Glenallan refuses a decent dinner in preference for ‘a small mess of vegetables … arranged with the most minute and scrupulous neatness’. Sir John Oldbuck, the eponymous antiquary, ‘attacked his noble guest without scruple on the severity of his regimen …“A few half-cold greens and potatoes – a glass of ice-cold water to wash them down – antiquity gives no warrant for it, my lord.’” One can hear the echoes of Scott’s reaction to Ritson’s strict adherence to his system while a guest at Lasswade. Again, in St Ronan’s Well, the character Cargill offers ‘a Pythagorean entertainment’ of bread and milk to his guest, while Dr Gregory, the Edinburgh physician, appears alongside Dr Cullen, as the ‘starving doctor’, Macgregor.29

  Ritson’s animal rights argument had little chance of gaining wide acceptance in early nineteenth-century Britain. His assault on God made him unacceptable to the majority, and even in secular debate the ecological rationale for hierarchy and human predation had clear pre-eminence over his egalitarian alternatives. However, Ritson’s anthology remained an important inspiration for vegetarians, and it was precisely his republican atheism that attracted the radicals. Ritson moved away from the sentimental culture that focused on the suffering of animals, and evolved an argument based on atheism: without the scriptural mandate, or even an eternal soul marking him out from the rest of the animals, what right did an intelligent ape have to claim mastery over all his fellow creatures? Despite the flaws in the rights-based argument, Ritson’s vision that humans should see
themselves as equal members of the animal kingdom proved a magnet to the next generation of vegetarians. His proposition that humans could live like a tribe of peaceful herbivores, and the massive body of travelogue anthropology he provided to showcase other cultures that had already achieved this, set the agenda for the following decades. His hope for the regeneration of humanity propelled the tradition of eighteenth-century vegetarianism into the era of Romanticism. Even among those political radicals, like Godwin, who had not joined the vegetarians by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it became de rigueur to give at least some ground to their perfect idealism. Living in harmony with nature – whether it was a contingent secular world or one governed by a benevolent creator – became an obsession among those early nineteenth-century thinkers eager to solve the world’s problems with one quick and easy dietary reformation.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Shelley and the Return to Nature

  When Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) first brought his university friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg to the home of his vegetarian companions, Shelley thrust him forward as the door opened. Hogg, who ended up writing Shelley’s biography, described what he saw as ‘a strange spectacle’: there were ‘five naked figures in the passage advancing rapidly to meet us’. ‘As soon as they saw me,’ he wrote, ‘they uttered a piercing cry, turned round and ran wildly upstairs, screaming aloud.’ These nudist enthusiasts were the children of John Frank Newton, author of The Return to Nature (1811), who was trying to return his whole family to nature by practising a combination of ‘nakedism’ and vegetarianism. ‘The custom of flesh-eating as much as that of covering our persons with clothes,’ preached Newton, was an accidental feature of human development which ‘appears to have arisen from the migration of man to the northern climates’.1

  The beneficial effects of Newton’s Rousseauist educational experiment were apparent to all who encountered his offspring. Newton’s vegetarian ally Dr William Lambe (1765–1847) opined that ‘For clearness and beauty of complexion, muscular strength, fulness of habit free from grossness, hardiness, healthiness, and ripeness of intellect, these children are unparalleled.’2 Lambe’s membership of the Royal Society of Physicians and fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge lent such claims scientific clout. Shelley agreed that ‘His are the most beautiful and healthy creatures it is possible to conceive; the girls are perfect models for a sculptor; their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating.’3 They were, it seemed, perfect specimens of the uncorrupted human animal: fit, healthy, clever and temperamentally gentle. In this cult of physical perfection, vegetarianism, teetotalism and nudism formed a united front in freeing mankind from the unnatural elements of civilised life.

  Newton’s wife Cornelia and her sister Harriet de Boinville also liked to ‘nakedise’ occasionally, and their men associates responded with candid appreciation. Shelley passionately confided to his friend Thomas Love Peacock that he thought Mrs Boinville ‘the most admirable specimen of a human being I had ever seen’; his lamentation that the ‘extreme subtlety & delicacy’ of her affections made it impossible for her to be ‘quite sincere & constant’ could imply an emotional involvement.4 Lambe’s daughter and Boinville’s son Alfred fell in love and retreated to the country to live a bucolic dream, in Hogg’s words, ‘tilling the earth, the innocent occupation of our first parents’.5

  This group of nature-loving purists also flirted with the idea of free love, seeing wild animals as exemplars of natural procreation. Among their close friends they counted the Chevalier James Henry Lawrence, who notoriously suggested that European ladies should emulate the Nair Brahmin women by winning the right to inherit property, liberating themselves from the shackles of monogamy, choosing their own lovers and shedding all their clothes. Once women had thrown aside their sexual and sartorial inhibitions, Lawrence fantasised, ‘Love … would rekindle that open and generous fire that would make the world a paradise.’

  This sort of ‘peace and love’ nudist perfectibilism was exactly what Shelley had been yearning for. He was an idealistic youth – growing his long straggling hair in the fashion of radical activists, and keeping ‘the temple of his body’ pure by abstaining from sex and grazing on frugal fare like raisins and dry bread which he carried around in his pocket. Born to an ennobled family in Sussex, he had the leisure to espouse radical liberal causes. A shy, sickly child, Shelley’s experience of being bullied at school inspired him to sharpen his pen against oppression, which he came to believe was rooted in people’s oppression of their own bodies under the burden of an unnatural diet. Purifying his own body, he hoped, would liberate his mind for the higher pursuit of poetry. In March 1812 Shelley, along with his first wife Harriet Westbrook, officially renounced meat. Apart from a few reported lapses, he remained a vegetarian for most of the rest of his brief adult life. In November 1812 he met Newton campaigning for a working-class land reclamation project in North Wales, and soon afterwards Harriet and he moved in with Newton’s budding vegetarian community at Bracknell in Berkshire.6 Over their meals of vegetables, washed down with distilled water, the families of Newton, Lambe and Shelley forged a broadly cohesive ideology in which diet played a central role.

  Hogg joined them in 1813 and recalled that Shelley’s ‘Pythagorean, or Brahminical, existence, and his intimate association with the amiable and accomplished votaries of a Return to Nature was perhaps the prettiest and most pleasing portion of his poetical, philosophical, and lovely life’. As late as 1832 – a decade after Shelley’s drowned body had been washed up on the Italian coast – Hogg was still nostalgically reminiscing with the elderly Newton over their shared ‘bloodless dinner’.7 Although Hogg maintained an ironic distance, while he was at Bracknell he adhered to the canons of ‘the bloodless regimen’ and dubbed their community ‘the gentle, tolerant, bloodless church’, or ‘the vegetable church of Nature’, casting Newton as its great patriarch leading the way to ‘the true Eden, the earthly Paradise’.8 During this period, Shelley was writing his famous radical poem Queen Mab to which he appended an adapted version of his polemic, A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813). Shelley’s charged works brought rhetorical concision and political insight to the collaborative manifesto of his vegetarian community.9

  In the same year that he converted to vegetarianism, Shelley adopted Lawrence’s anti-marital principle of Nairism, and this no doubt influenced his callous decision in 1814 to break off the marriage with his heavily pregnant wife, Harriet, and elope with Mary, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.10 While Harriet later drowned herself in the Serpentine, Percy and Mary evaded ostracism by travelling to Switzerland, where they continued their domestic vegetarian experiment in the Alpine heartland of Rousseauist rusticity.11 On a later journey in 1816 they joined Lord Byron near Lake Geneva (bringing with them Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, who had just become Byron’s lover). Decades later, their friend the Hinduphile phrenologist, Thomas Forster (1789–1860), wrote to Thomas Love Peacock, reminiscing that ‘You will recollect than in or about 1814 Shelley, Byron, Lawrence & myself began the Cibo di latti et del frutto [Diet of milk and fruits]’. This recently discovered letter shows that Byron adopted vegetarianism, albeit temporarily, along with Shelley’s physician Sir William Lawrence (1783–1867).12

  Following this period of conviviality and intellectual stimulation, all five authors inscribed vegetarianism into their works. In the summer of 1816 in Geneva, Mary started Frankenstein: or the modern Prometheus, which climaxes with the monster vainly pleading for his life, assuring Frankenstein that he and his mate would be rendered ‘peaceful’ and harmless by their primitive herbivorous diet: ‘My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food.’13 The idea of stripping humanity down to its primeva
l natural origins – benevolent, harmless and herbivorous – remained a constant point of reference for writers in the Romantic era. Byron later mocked both the windy vegetable diet of his companions and simultaneously the savage implications of counter-vegetarian arguments by employing Buffon’s anatomical opinions to justify the cannibalistic instincts of shipwrecked sailors in Don Juan (1819): ‘man is a carnivorous production … like the shark and tiger, must have prey:/ Although his anatomical construction/ Bears vegetables in a grumbling way’.14 For Byron, the flatulent and political ‘grumbling’ of peasants forced to live on vegetables drowned out the cry of nature articulated by his naïve young friend Shelley. Sir William Lawrence likewise turned against Shelley’s vegetarianism with a vengeance. Forster, by contrast, went on to found the Animals’ Friend Society with Lewis Gompertz and remained a convinced Pythagorean for the rest of his life. He had only one lapse into meat-eating in the aftermath of which he said that the ‘cursed animal Food acted like a slow poison and brought on a vitiated state of the nervous system, dyspepsia & melancholy … double Vision, headache, giddiness & debility’.15

  Newton and Lambe, meanwhile, had been publishing the results of their own experiment in alternative living. Newton originally converted to vegetarianism in 1806 after successfully using a vegetable diet to alleviate his lifelong asthmatic complaint; and this had convinced him, Dr Lambe and both their families that vegetables were man’s natural diet.16 After a three-year trial, Lambe declared in his Reports on The Effects of a Peculiar Regimen (1809) that ‘I am at length convinced, that man is in his proper nature strictly to be ranked among the herbivorous animals; and that the use of flesh of animals is a deviation from the laws of his nature, and is universally a cause of disease and premature death.’17 This became the medical mantra of Shelley’s vegetarian community. By 1815 Lambe had compiled the most extensive defence of vegetarianism yet written, using his medical notes on numerous patients to substantiate the long tradition of medical vegetarianism which he traced back from Cheyne and Cocchi through to Sir William Temple in the seventeenth century.18 Since the natural physiological state of all animals was health, it followed that diseases were caused by unnatural habits. Thus Lambe explained that diseases as acute as cancer could be cured or prevented by avoiding meat and other impurities such as lead deposits in water. Returning to the natural diet, he promised, could extend human life by one-sixth or even double it.19 New statistical evidence that abstinent monks had a longer than average life expectancy lent extra credit to the traditional claim that ‘the Bramins, who abstain most scrupulously from the flesh of animals, attain to the greatest longevity.’20 Lambe warned that, at the very least, it was essential to eat a daily portion of fruit and vegetables, preferably lightly cooked or raw.