This article accompanies the fable
Splendour in the Grass



The rise of Vegetarianism as a class issue

Shelley and Byron defended and practiced vegetarianism. At the time they were called "Pythagoreans" (the word “vegetarian” appeared in the 1840s). They integrated their vegetarianism into a broader philosophy inherited from the Enlightenment, where eating meat was associated with aristocratic gluttony and consumerism, as well as Europe's encounter with India, which spread awareness of a successful vegetarian culture.

These Romantic poets, however, were reacting against the fact that the aristocracy could afford meat and the working classes could not. The poor got by on enforced vegetarianism - potatoes and vegetables. Shelley wrote A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) during his first marriage to Harriet, and his second wife, Mary, made Frankenstein’s monster a vegetarian. Byron seems to have believed that meat had a negative physical effect on him.

They were not the first to say these things. Yet, over the centuries, very few have turned vegetarian for ethical reasons. That’s a modern thing. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, John Locke (who promoted a vegetarian diet for children, in 1692), Alexander Pope (who wrote the essay, Against Barbarity to Animals in 1713), Samuel Richardson (who became vegetarian late in life for health reasons), Rousseau himself (Émile contains a defense of vegetarianism) were all in favor of meat-eating as long as the killing was humane.

The caricature above is A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion by James Gillray around 1792. It shows George, Prince of Wales, later George IV, who was a known glutton. Such frank satire of the royal family surprised foreign visitors, but freedom of speech was well recognized.