Newton agreed with Lambe’s findings, and in The Return to Nature he too emphasised that his convictions were based on empirical medical evidence. He also identified echoes of this muffled ‘voice of nature’ in historical instances of vegetarian advocates – from Hippocrates and Homer to Evelyn, Cheyne and Isaac Newton. Finding a kindred spirit in Pierre Gassendi, he championed the latter’s declaration that ‘the doctrines of morality and philosophy are directed to no other object than to recall mankind to the paths of nature which they have abandoned’ (see chapter 12). According to Newton’s specialised analysis (which Shelley unquestioningly repeated in his own works), ancient myths also revealed the truth of man’s natural diet. Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden apple was really an allegory for the beginning of meat-eating, which condemned mankind to a future plagued by disease and premature death. The Greeks’ story of the demigod Prometheus giving humans the use of fire and medicine was a version of the same historical event: what else were fire and medicine for than cooking meat and curing the diseases it caused? Natural man fed only on raw vegetation – a fact Newton famously tried to prove by eating a raw potato (though he judiciously decided not to make it a staple of his diet).21 Unnatural customs like cooking and wearing clothes created barriers between humans and nature, and Newton was determined to strip them away.
Newton was most fascinated by Indian mythology, and here too Shelley seems to have followed his lead. Endorsing Sir William Temple and Voltaire’s Indophilia, Newton claimed that the ‘peaceful and respectable’ Brahmins were ‘the most ancient priests of whom we have any knowledge’ and that they quite possibly held the secrets of the world’s past and future.22 Newton specified exactly what those secrets were ten years later in his Three Enigmas (1821). Like his namesake Sir Isaac Newton, and more recently the eminent Orientalists Sir William Jones and George Faber, Newton argued that all pagan mythologies were branches of the divine body of knowledge passed down by the descendants of Noah immediately after the Flood.23 All ancient cultures from Druidic Europe through Egypt and Iran to India testified to the primeval truth that man originally lived on vegetables and that reverting to this natural diet would hasten the return of the Golden Age. Newton saw this manifested most clearly in the corresponding iconography of Indian theogony and the twelve signs of the Greek zodiac. By tortuously collating their hidden messages he found that they both signified the four ages of the world. Brahma stood for the first age of creation; Vishnu stood for the second age of balanced bliss, represented in the zodiac by Libra, the scales. The Hindu destroyer-god Siva typified the third dark age when man started hunting the animals, corroborated in the zodiac by Sagittarius the archer chasing Capricorn the goat. The arrival of Krishna and Danwantaree (god of medicine) signified the future fourth age, ‘the Satya-yuga, or Age of Happiness’, represented by the water-drinking Aquarius and Aries, the gentle herbivorous sheep. Until the coming of this prophesied Golden Age, Newton recommended that individuals should emulate the Brahmins, the Persian magi, the Druids and Daniel the prophet, whose vegetarian diets improved their physical health, illuminated their minds and helped to establish peace on earth: ‘live solely on fruit,’ Newton affirmed, ‘and you will be innocuous as the sheep.’24
Although Newton published this latter work after Shelley had written most of his ‘vegetarian’ poems, he had clearly been developing the theory over many years. It is therefore little surprise to find that Shelley, his enthusiastic young disciple, likewise proposed that ‘the mythology of nearly all religions’ testified that humans were originally vegetarian; that their consumption of meat precipitated global disjunction; and that one day they would re-establish harmony by returning to the natural diet. In the meantime, Shelley suggested, individuals could achieve this in their own domestic sphere.25
Although Newton clearly developed an arcane faith in mythologies similar to John Zephaniah Holwell, for Shelley, at least, the mythological data principally confirmed the empirical evidence. Newton, Lambe and Shelley all emphasised that the effect of meat on social dispositions was materially demonstrable. ‘In Physiological discussions,’ Newton insisted, ‘the moral and intellectual faculties should never be disjoined from the physical and organic.’ Damaging the body with a diet for which it was not suited had an inevitable impact on the moral character. Newton claimed that meat-eating depraved the physical constitution, perverting mankind from cool rationality to heated insanity, firing up ‘illiberal feelings, quarrelsome inclinations; thirst for power; inflamed eagerness to have one’s way’. By contrast, he reported that if children were protected from eating meat, ‘their irritability, and consequently their objugatory propensities will gradually subside’.26 Lambe agreed that the vegetable diet gave people a ‘milder character, dispositions more benevolent, and morals more pure’.27
Title illustration of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein: or the modern Prometheus. Frankenstein’s monster was created with an unadulterated human nature corrupted only by a hostile human environment. He started life eating berries and drinking water; he learns to cook offal, but finally declares that he will live on acorns and berries and thus live a life that is peaceful and human.
Shelley extended this physiological explanation of moral depravity into a political vision in which he identified meat-eating as the principal cause of violence. Without eliminating the primary ingress of violence into society, there was no hope of social reform, let alone utopian perfection. Like the disappointed Cromwellian vegetarians, Shelley claimed that revolutions in France and elsewhere in the world had always failed because the people had continued to make themselves into ferocious beasts by eating meat. In the Vindication of Natural Diet Shelley argued that the only solution was a vegetarian revolution:
Who will assert that, had the populace of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre?… It is impossible, had Buonaparte descended from a race of vegetable feeders, that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons.
Shelley also introduced a parallel economic theory that eating meat and drinking alcohol increased the demand for international luxury goods: ‘On a natural system of diet we should require … none of those multitudinous articles of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is rifled, and which are the causes of so much individual rivalship, such calamitous and sanguinary national disputes.’28 Echoing the seventeenth-century Diggers, he suggested that if the poor stopped aspiring to the luxuries of the rich and lived instead on the products of a garden, they would be free from the enforced labour that currently maintained social inequalities. Shelley carried these convictions into his poems with such sweeping rhetoric that, more than a century later, Mahatma Gandhi found in them an inspiration for a real bloodless revolution which combined vegetarianism and pacifism in the successful eviction of the British from India.
Shelley’s belief in the power of his vegetarian lifestyle therefore revolved around a medical and economic social theory which was not entirely at odds with the dominant scientific understanding of his period. He used scientific theories to defend himself from the accusation of being romantically deluded by unrealistic ideals. The fact that Shelley grounded his arguments on this anthropocentric foundation, rather than an altruistic animal rights basis, is significant and has not been fully appreciated. The anthropocentric argument constituted one of the main thrusts of Shelley’s and his friends’ articulation of their position, and ensured that their ideology could be used by generations of environmentalists within the framework of ‘enlightened self-interest’. To illustrate their point, Lambe, Newton and Shelley emphatically distanced themselves from the radical animal rights arguments of Joseph Ritson. Shelley and the Bracknell vegetarians were well aware of Ritson; he was a close friend of their regular visitor, Shelley’s father-in-law, William Godwin, and they shamelessly plundered material from his Essay on Abstinence without ever mentioning hi
s name.29 The scholar David Clark has demonstrated that Shelley based the overarching structure of his Vindication of Natural Diet on Ritson’s work; still more revealing, however, are those aspects of Ritson’s work that Shelley chose to leave out. The Bracknell vegetarians had seen how unpopular Ritson had made himself with his embittered attack on humanity in defence of animals – and how easily the animal rights argument could be refuted. It was far more effective, they realised, to defend vegetarianism from an anthropocentric viewpoint; even if they did think an animal had a right to life, they had reasons to play this down.
The Romantic poets have been held up as the pioneers of the modern sensibility to nature; Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge and many others were gripped with awe for the natural world. This chapter and the next will re-examine this theme, analysing what exactly Shelley’s idea of ‘nature’ was, and questioning some of the assumptions made by recent scholars. In his groundbreaking book, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, Professor Timothy Morton showed how Shelley’s figuration of the body as an interface with the natural world embodied economic and social ideals. But despite Morton’s engaging discussion about Shelley’s interest in ecosystems, the extent to which Shelley’s thoughts can be considered ‘ecological’ remains unclear. Where did Shelley position himself in the furious debate between Ritson’s attempt to bring humans down to the level of equality with animals, and Erasmus Darwin and Buffon’s argument that predation was a desirable dynamic in the system of nature? Did he credit natural ecosystems with intrinsic value like modern ‘deep ecologists’, as some recent scholars have suggested, or was he interested in ecosystems mainly insofar as they provided a context for social harmony? Was his vegetarianism an altruistic forbearance towards animals, or was it based on human self-interest; indeed, to what extent was human agency involved in establishing what he claimed to be a law of nature?
Lambe, Newton and Shelley all appealed to sympathy for animals in their defence of vegetarianism, but they presented this sympathy not so much as a moral reason for abstinence in itself, but rather as a piece of anatomical evidence that killing animals was repulsive to man’s herbivorous nature. Lambe even pronounced that it was an ‘error’ to abstain on ‘a principle of humanity, and a conscientious feeling’. Hogg explicitly contrasted the Bracknell vegetarians’ dietary experiments with those of Ritson, who had, he said:
some reputation as an antiquary; but as a feeder on vegetable substances, he put forward his theories with such vehemance and wild extravagance, as to be stigmatised, perhaps unjustly, as a wretched maniac. He called sheep, oxen, and pigs ‘our fellow creatures,’ as undeniably they are in a certain sense; and he inferred from that appellation, that we ought not to eat their flesh, or put them to death. A flea, a bug, a louse, or a tapeworm, is a fellow creature; and what then? So likewise is the cabbage.
Hogg explained that Shelley, by contrast, took up vegetarianism as a ‘calm, deliberate choice, and a sincere conviction of the propriety and superior salubrity of such food’.30
Shelley was renownedly sympathetic to animals; he once hurled himself into a dispute in defence of an abused ass like Mr Graham in Richard Graves’ Spiritual Quixote, and he famously attacked Wordsworth for including in The Excursion a ‘description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonising death of a number of trout’.31 But Shelley conceded that the counter-vegetarians were right to suggest that if eating meat benefited humans, this would outweigh the suffering inflicted on the animal. However, he always insisted that meat-eating was harmful to humans, not beneficial. Furthermore, he repudiated the idea – articulated by Archbishop William King, Frances Hutcheson, David Williams and Jeremy Bentham – that animals profited from being eaten because their assiduous human husbandmen looked after them so nicely. Echoing Ritson, Lambe, Newton and indeed Samuel Johnson, Shelley pointed out that the common practice of castration deprived farm animals of everything worth living for, and concluded that ‘It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.’32 Thus, while the theodicists and Utilitarians had seen animal husbandry as a win – win situation enjoyed by both consumer and consumed, Shelley recast the equation as a lose – lose scenario in which both man and animal suffered. In the closing paragraph of his unpublished essay ‘On the Vegetable System of Diet’, Shelley explained that subjecting animals to misery was ‘unwarrantable’ because meat-eating was ‘subversive to the peace of human society’:
The mere destruction of any sentient being abstractly considered, is perhaps an event of exceedingly minute importance … It is because a malevolent and ferocious disposition is generated by the commission of murder that this crime is so tremendous and detestable.33
Shelley was deliberately aligning himself with the traditional anthropocentric objection, articulated by Locke, Hogarth, St Clement of Alexandria and innumerable others, that wanton cruelty to animals was objectionable because it nurtured a vicious temperament. This dovetailed neatly with the notion that meat-eating made men courageous, assertive and even aggressive – a sentiment that was widely accepted at the time, and still remains a common preconception today.34 Shelley merely pointed out that meat-eating was the most obvious source of cruelty in society. Shelley’s contemporaries strenuously emphasised that this anthropocentric perspective made his views more acceptable than Ritson’s. When Horace Smith met Shelley in 1817, he reported favourably that Shelley objected to meat-eating ‘not upon the Pythagorean or Brahminical doctrine that such a diet necessitates a wanton, and, therefore, a cruel destruction of God’s creatures, but from an impression that to … chew their flesh and drink their blood, tends to fiercen and animalize both the slaughterer and the devourer’.35
Despite the anthropocentric motives, however, Shelley imagined that taking up vegetarianism would re-establish ‘equality’ between man and the animals, which has led some commentators to suggest that Shelley sought to replace Judaeo-Christian anthropocentrism with a more ‘biocentric’ value system.36 A closer examination of the poetic scenes of harmony with animals reveals the dynamics of Shelley’s struggle with contemporaneous ecological debates, and provides insight into some of the assumptions that underlie modern conceptions of nature and the place of humanity within it.
In a string of early poems, Shelley developed his fantasy that converting to vegetarianism would reverse malignancy throughout the world. Queen Mab (1813) portrays the earth in three ages – past, present and future. During the first two, the ‘Earth groans beneath religion’s iron age … Making the earth a slaughter-house!’ But the future promises a ‘bloodless victory’ in which a social revolution ushers in an age of harmony so profound it extends to all creatures and the whole of the universe:37
no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,
Which, still avenging Nature’s broken law,
Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,
All evil passions, and all vain belief,
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.
No longer now the winged habitants,
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away,–
Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
And prune their sunny feathers on the hands
Which little children stretch in friendly sport
Towards these dreadless partners of their play.
All things are void of terror: Man has lost
His terrible prerogative, and stands
An equal amidst equals:38
The first part of this passage shows how ‘no longer’ eating meat physiologically reverses nature’s retributive cycle by re-establishing natural health and freeing humanity from the cause of disease, violence and crime. This was a dramatic claim, but by this time Shelley felt he had sound empirical evidence to support his prognosis. In 1812–13, while
writing Queen Mab, Shelley and his then wife Harriet convinced themselves that, despite an initial sense of lassitude which made them temporarily revert to meat-eating, their health was ‘much improved’ by the vegetable diet. In the Vindication of Natural Diet, which Shelley inserted as a footnote to this passage, he reported that ‘Seventeen persons of all ages (the families of Dr. Lambe and Mr. Newton) have lived for seven years on this diet without a death, and almost without the slightest illness.’ He confidently asserted that by the following year this number would be augmented to ‘sixty persons’ all having lived healthily for three years;39 and when Dr Lambe later heard about William Cowherd’s vegetarian Bible Christians in Salford, the specimens jumped to over 400 who ‘enjoy at least as good, if not better health than their fellow townsmen’. Six years earlier, Robert Southey had challenged the vegetarians to provide empirical evidence for the healthiness of their diet: ‘It is to be wished that the Pythagoreans in England were numerous and philosophical enough to carry on a series of experiments … upon the physical effects of their system.’ Shelley, who read Southey’s challenge with close attention, believed that he was fulfilling those requirements to the letter.40
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