The vegetarian movement in Britain c.1840-1901 : a study of its development, personnel and wider connections

Abstract

This thesis examines in detail the British vegetarian movement in the Victorian era. The introduction charts the various historiographic sites within which it can be situated: medical history, food history, utopian studies, the history of social movements. The thesis is organised in six parts. The first contextualizes the movement by examining its relationship with medical orthodoxy and other medical unorthodoxies, its status as an ultra-temperance movement, its relationship with zoophilism and other campaigns against violence and pain, and its religious and occult dimensions. It concludes with an examination of vegetarianism's radical and 'fadical' aspects; examining the relationship between food reform and movements such as chartists, Owenite socialists and middle class radicals in the early Victorian period; and studies the general question of the relationship between personal or bodily reform; and political reform.

The second part of the thesis provides the first detailed documentation and analysis of the vegetarian movement as a British, provincial and metropolitan reform movement. It begins with an account of activity in the decade prior to the Vegetarian Society's formation in 1847. Whilst recognising the importance of Manchester and northern England to the early movement, as emphasised in earlier historiography, vegetarianism is examined as a metropolitan phenomenon in the period c. 1847-1870, and during its late Victorian revival (from c. 1875). Chapters establish the spatial location and document the activity of local societies. Although mostly short-lived, they are more numerous than might be thought, and involved local leaders of temperance and other reform movements. There has been no study of the movement as a British phenomenon, and chapters documented analyse locations and activity in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

The third and fourth parts of the thesis further examine the spatial and social aspects of vegetarianism as a movement: its expression through restaurants and food stores; its press; class profile and class dimension, and the role of women.

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