THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: HUMANITARIAN REFORM AND THE ORIGINS OF ANIMAL RIGHTS IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES, by Gary K.

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1 THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: HUMANITARIAN REFORM AND THE ORIGINS OF ANIMAL RIGHTS IN BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES, by Gary K. Jarvis A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in History in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa May 2009 Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Douglas Baynton

2 Copyright by GARY K. JARVIS 2009 All Rights Reserved

3 Graduate College The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL PH.D. THESIS This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of Gary K. Jarvis has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in History at the May 2009 graduation. Thesis Committee: Douglas Baynton, Thesis Supervisor H. Glenn Penny Jeffrey Cox Malcolm Rohrbough Mary Trachsel

4 To the memory of my sister, Jennifer Tara Jarvis ii

5 Writing is so unnatural & hard for me that I have a good deal of difficulty in getting myself to undergo the hardship. It's a good deal like "sweating blood" for me. And unless I am driven by terrible feelings or convictions, I am inclined to go on & do nothing. I hate writing. It is the greatest hardship of my life. It seems to me I might be reasonably happy if I weren't everlastingly nagged by the obligation to perpetuate literary things on people. J. Howard Moore to Henry Salt, October 2, 1906 iii

6 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation is an assessment and analysis of the Humanitarian movement in Britain and the United States from the 1880s until the end of the first World War, with particular attention to its origins and its relationship to both contemporaneous reform movements and the broader realm of science. My primary argument is that Humanitarianism a central tenet of which was a cogent and comprehensive call for acknowledging the rights of non-human animals was, paradoxically, not really about animals at all. Instead, I contend that the Humanitarians' novel interpretation of the historical and cultural relationship between humans and animals resulted from a complex set of factors, including a lingering understanding of the natural world in Romantic terms and the ramifications of more recent Darwinian evolutionary theory. The determination of many Humanitarians to curtail the human use of animals for labor, entertainment, medical experimentation, and food, I argue, was the product of neither an overweening sensitivity on the part of reformers nor a sentimental affection for animals themselves. It was rather the visible, outward manifestation of an ethical system of beliefs born from attempts to reconcile divergent and rapidly shifting understandings about the nature of humanity and the role of humans in the natural world. Citing The Descent of Man, Humanitarians argued that Darwin's revelation of a shared evolutionary heritage between humans and non-human animals negated or even superceded millennia of religious dogma and cultural convention. They therefore sought to redefine the animal-human relationship in terms of objective biological similarity 1

7 2 rather than subjective and culturally contingent difference, concluding that any rational and modern system of normative ethics must necessarily be extended to include most non-human animals as well as all humans. When Humanitarians criticized the exploitation of animals, in other words, they did so not because the victims were animals, but because they believed that the exploitation of one living being by another, regardless of species, was fundamentally wrong. Humanitarianism, despite the existence of groups like the Humanitarian League in Britain and a number of vocal advocates in Europe and the United States, was never an especially organized or broadly popular movement. It was more of a loose confederation of likeminded individuals, reformers and intellectuals who coalesced around a shared set of values that informed their understanding of both the root causes of social injustice and the most effective strategies for combating it. It was at times diffuse and amorphous, its contours shifting over time and across space, the finer points of its doctrines or literature dependent on who was speaking or writing in its name. Though they lacked any overarching organizational structure beyond the Humanitarian League, however, most Humanitarians saw themselves as participating in a broad, transnational, and progressive coalition, pulled together by common interests and united by similar arguments for pragmatic, ethically consistent reform that included concerns about non-human animals. While Humanitarianism failed to achieve the sort of critical mass necessary to become a widespread or particularly influential movement, it remains of special historical interest a century later because its core values questioned the traditional cultural assumptions that had defined human relationships with non-human animals, and even attempted to rewrite them. Through what they believed was a rational, consistent and thoroughly modern 2

8 3 approach, Humanitarians introduced a competing vision of these relationships, one that promised to first cut through the thicket of moral and ethical questions surrounding them and then sketch a roadmap pointing the way toward a peaceful and enlightened future for animals and humans alike. The literature produced by Humanitarians allows a glimpse at that path not taken, a snapshot of a late-nineteenth century, post-darwinian crossroads at which humans could choose either to acknowledge their own animality and expand the moral community to include non-human animals on equal terms, or to allow existing constructions of human-animal difference to strengthen and harden into near-universal orthodoxy. Welfare Versus Rights Advocates of Humanitarianism understood they were living in a period of social and scientific flux. They were aware that research in comparative anatomy and physiology was combining with evolutionary theory to challenge the accepted Cartesian model of animals as insensate automatons, and they participated as the increasingly blurred boundaries separating humanity and animality were actively discussed and contested within both scientific and social reform circles. For many members of the established animal protection organizations and other individuals outside the Humanitarian orbit, these developments appeared only to reinforce the dominant discourse of animal welfare, in which the human use of non-human animals for nearly any purpose was morally acceptable provided that overt cruelty or mistreatment was avoided. 1 As the scientific evidence mounted that mammals and other animals shared 1 The basic outline of the welfare paradigm sometimes called "stewardship," especially in a religious context is an ancient one, essentially a synthesis of a long dialectic between biblical 3

9 4 with humans the ability to feel pain or experience stress, groups like Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals focused on the human duty to treat individual animals with kindness and sympathy, but otherwise did little to question the status quo. Humanitarians, on the other hand, generally rejected the welfare model as morally untenable and obsolete given new developments in the natural and social sciences, and their assertion that non-human animals possessed fundamental rights the alternative road forward was fundamentally at odds with the existing welfare paradigm. "Have the lower animals 'rights?'" Henry Salt asked in the opening of his 1892 treatise on the subject, answering "[u]ndoubtedly if men have." Salt the guiding hand behind the London-based Humanitarian League for nearly three decades after helping to organize it in 1891 devoted the rest of his book's first chapter to a careful explication of his animal rights thesis, borrowing ideas from both a close reading of Benthamite utilitarianism and William Lecky's theory of the expanding circle of moral consideration. 2 Salt agreed that allowances of human "dominion" over animals (Genesis 1:26) and injunctions regarding human obligations to act responsibly and to "replenish the earth" (Genesis 1:28). The term "animal welfare" itself is more recent, however, and although it has frequently been used interchangeably with "animal rights" since the 1970s, many scholars of the human-animal relationship have stressed the substantial theoretical and practical differences between the welfare and rights perspectives. Among the more vocal is legal scholar Gary Francione, who summarizes the distinction by writing, "[t]o oversimplify the matter a bit, the welfarists seek the regulation of animal exploitation; the rightists seek its abolition." I have adopted these definitions of "animal rights" and "animal welfare" in this dissertation. It should probably be noted that while Francione strongly supports the "rights" argument, by this he means "legal personhood" for animals an extension of the fundamental right not to be property and not granting to animals the entire range of acknowledged, legally-protected rights enjoyed by humans (the right to vote, for instance, or the right to drive a car). See Gary L. Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 1; and Gary L. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). Italics are in the original. 2 In 1869 William Lecky proposed the theory that human morality progressed over time in a series of ever-widening circles, with each expansion bringing more and more individuals into the 4

10 5 rights do indeed exist for all humans, but went a step further and warned that "they cannot be consistently awarded to men and denied to animals, since the same sense of justice and compassion apply in both cases." Salt underscored his claims by drawing parallels to other groups including women, children, and especially African slaves that also had endured, until recently, long histories of presumed non-personhood. "[L]ook back, and you will find in their case precisely the same exclusion from the common pale of humanity," Salt pointed out, "the same hypocritical fallacies, to justify that exclusion; and, as a consequence, the same deliberate stubborn denial of their social 'rights'." 3 Determined to prevent any more of these historical moral failures, Salt and his moral community. Although it would first circumscribe "merely the family," he writes, "soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world." Not surprisingly, Lecky's predictions about the ultimate inclusion of animals was cited with some frequency by historical advocates of animal welfare and animal rights. See William Edward Hardpole Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1869), especially Jeremy Bentham was also a favorite of nineteenth century animal advocates, and a handful of quotations from his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation remain in wide circulation among animal activists even today. Bentham's philosophical theory of utilitarianism determined the morality of an action by weighing the collective suffering it might entail against the collective pleasure or benefit that might result. Bentham thus argued against most forms of social oppression (including slavery and the subjugation of women) since any putative benefit to society would be countered by the inherent suffering and pain caused by these systems. Bentham speculated that this calculus of pain versus pleasure would supercede all other criteria for determining any individual's moral worth, and would eventually be extended to animals. "[T]he question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk?" he writes in a footnote, "but, can they suffer?" Indeed, this is one of the most oft-cited sentences in the history of nineteenth and twentieth century animal advocacy. Most of those who employ it, however especially vegetarians generally fail to also note that Bentham's utilitarian equation regarding the use of animals for food appears on the same page. "[T]here is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of them [animals] as we like to eat: we are the better for it, and they are never the worse." As long as animals are slaughtered with a minimum of attendant pain, in other words, Bentham claims that the human happiness effected by savoring their flesh outweighs any minor suffering they might experience. Beyond his introductory references to Benthamite utilitarianism, however, Salt primarily employs an argument grounded in theories of natural rights. See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne, 1789), Henry S. Salt, Animals' Rights: In Relation to Social Progress (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892), 1, 24, 21. The rest of Salt's book applied the rights argument within the context of most of 5

11 6 fellow Humanitarians produced a new interpretation of the animal-human relationship, one rooted equally in Romantic ideals and Darwinian theory and drawing from contemporary movements emphasizing rationalism, secularism, and socialism. In their attempts to counter the commonly-held belief that non-human animals existed only to serve, feed, or entertain humans, Humanitarians argued instead that animals were in fact their biological siblings and evolutionary traveling companions, and thus clearly entitled to many of the same moral and legal considerations as all humans. With this new case for animals' rights especially its suggestion of non-human moral subjectivity Humanitarians explicitly rejected the longstanding tradition of animal welfare, and positioned their own ideas in direct opposition to it. The Humanitarian argument for rights led to strong positions on a number of prominent late-victorian issues related to animals. Most Humanitarians were fiercely opposed to the use of non-human animals in medical or scientific research, for instance, and maintained a special contempt for various forms of hunting and other bloodsports. Some Humanitarians opposed zoos and menageries, and at one point Henry Salt even criticized the keeping of domestic dogs and cats as pets. 4 Others advocated for the the contemporary ways in which animals were used for human ends, including sport hunting, food, fashion, and medical experimentation. The title sold well enough that a slightly revised US edition was published by Macmillan in Additional revised British editions followed in 1905 and Henry S. Salt, "Literae Humaniores: An Appeal to Teachers," in Henry S. Salt, ed., Humanitarian Essays: Being Volume III of "Cruelties of Civilization" (London: William Reeves, 1897), 10. Claiming that pet ownership only reinforced the cultural construction of an animal as a "thing," Salt argued that "a pet, however carefully it is petted, can hardly be respected; and it is precisely this lack of respect for animals as intelligent beings that is at the root of so much brutality and roughness." In his 1921 autobiography, however, Salt writes touchingly of having to send his own 15 year-old pet cat to the "chloroform-box" after it developed a terminal illness. A photograph of Salt at home with a cat appears in Stephen Winsten's 1951 Salt biography. See Henry S. Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), 130; and Stephen Winsten, Salt and his Circle (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1951), 94, photograph. 6

12 7 improved treatment of livestock and other food animals, and were especially concerned with practices related to their transport and slaughter. Humanitarians' attitudes toward animals were manifest most visibly through their diet, however, and while vegetarianism was not a prerequisite for membership in the Humanitarian League or participation in Humanitarian reforms, it was strongly encouraged and promoted. Disavowing the consumption of animal flesh was certainly not a uniquely Humanitarian practice by the turn of the twentieth century hundreds of vegetarian societies existed across Britain, Europe, and the United States, some dating back to 1847 but it played a central role in both the development of the basic Humanitarian ideology and the origins and spread of the movement itself. 5 Anyone who adopted a meatless diet for reasons of health, economy, or religion was certainly not turned away, but the Humanitarian philosophy stressed that the ethical argument for vegetarianism was by far the most compelling. It was based on a set of what Humanitarians considered unavoidable moral and biological truths, and inextricably tied not only to arguments against vivisection, hunting, and the use of feathers or fur in women's clothing, but indeed to those against slavery, imperialism, and the subjection of women. "I do not eat my fellow creatures," wrote Chicago Humanitarian J. Howard Moore in 1897, "for the same reason I do not enslave my brother and treat my sister as an appendage they have precisely a like right to existence and to the enjoyment of existence that I have." 6 5 The ethical vegetarian roots of Humanitarianism grew from the publication of Howard Williams' The Ethics of Diet in 1883, the year I use as the starting point for the movement. And though the Humanitarian League represented most Humanitarians in Britain, its influence was far less pronounced in the United States, where some ethically-oriented vegetarian societies the Chicago Vegetarian Society in particular served as de facto Humanitarian organizations. 6 J. Howard Moore, "Why I am a Vegetarian," Chicago Vegetarian 2 (Nov. 1897), 9. 7

13 8 The extent of the Humanitarian reform impulse was not limited to a discreet realm of animal and dietary concerns, however, and Humanitarians were actively involved in other causes as diverse as peace movements and prison reform. Indeed, an essential and even defining feature of Humanitarianism was a conviction that the same socio-cultural forces responsible for shaping human attitudes toward non-human animals also produced most of the social injustices that the Humanitarians and other late-victorian reformers sought to remedy. These forces were not limited by arbitrary boundaries of species any more than those of gender or class, Humanitarians argued, and were generated by deeply ingrained anthropocentric cultural assumptions that left humans incapable of seeing similarities instead of differences among those not like themselves. It was this belief in a common source of inequity for humans and non-human animals alike that informed and united both the Humanitarian demand for recognition of the rights of animals and their interest in other, ostensibly unrelated causes, from abolishing capital punishment to reforming educational and penal systems to ending imperialism. In the Humanitarian ethical calculus, the acts of hanging a criminal, enslaving an imperial subject, whipping a schoolboy, and slaughtering an ox were thus understood as deeply interrelated manifestations of the same fundamental prejudices, the same privileging of the rights or interests of one individual over those of another. Meaningful reform of the existing system could come only after these diverse issues were understood as having a common cause, Humanitarians contended, and true justice and equality would be effected only if they were addressed as a common problem. Despite Humanitarians' early optimism that their ethical arguments would be adopted before long by an increasingly secular and rational society, the alternative 8

14 9 discourse of animals' rights they offered was mostly ignored (and at times ridiculed) by the scientific establishment and the public alike, while the tenets of animal welfare continued to steadily gain wider acceptance. 7 Even the term "Humanitarianism" itself was the source of problems and confusion, and may have hindered broader acceptance of the movement and its ideals. 8 By the mid-1910s Humanitarianism was drifting rapidly 7 It could conceivably be argued that the animal rights agenda of the Humanitarians was too radical for mainstream animal advocates and thus inadvertently expanded interest in the more conservative reform platform of welfarist groups like the RSPCA (much like the assertions by "New Left" historians that the broad reforms of Roosevelt's New Deal only served to strengthen capitalism at the expense of socialist alternatives). There is little to no direct evidence of this, however, and the relatively small size and limited influence of the Humanitarians make this unlikely. 8 Originally, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, its primary usage had been theological: a humanitarian was simply an individual who denied the divinity of Christ, the term synonymous with older ones like "Socinian" and "psilanthropist." As the century progressed, however, the word became increasingly connected to the concepts of humanism or secularism in general and to Auguste Comte's Positivist "religion of humanity" specifically. By the end of the century "humanitarianism" had also taken on a pejorative meaning, however, often employed by critics of liberal politics, progressive reform, pacifism, and Romanticism to cast their opponents as overly sentimental or idealistic. Humanitarian leader Henry Salt acknowledged these problems, writing in 1889, "I am afraid the term 'Humanitarianism,' is not altogether a very happy or satisfactory compound." Though he admitted the word carried with it an "unfortunate ambiguity," Salt nonetheless defended its use, arguing that "humanitarianism" was roughly synonymous with "humaneness" and defined as "the study and practice of humane principles of compassion, love, gentleness, and universal benevolence." Also aware of the word's negative connotation, Salt added that if it was "associated in the minds of any of my readers with 'sickly sentimentality,' I ask them to divest themselves of all such prejudice." Further adding to the confusion, at least two other individuals claimed to represent "Humanitarian" movements that had little in common with groups like the Humanitarian League. One was American feminist Victoria Woodhull (by then living in Britain), who published and edited The Humanitarian, a journal primarily serving as a vehicle for her increasingly vocal support for eugenic principles. The other was New Yorker Misha Appelbaum, who in 1914 founded the Humanitarian Cult, a charity that dispensed food, clothes, and medicine on Manhattan's west side. See Review of Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character, on the several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion, by S. T. Coleridge, The Christian Examiner and General Review 14 (March, 1833), 127; The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "humanitarianism," "psilanthropism," and "Socinian."; Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1998), 45-47, ; Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: the Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 441; Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), viii, 52, 146; "History and Aims of the Humanitarian Cult," The Humanitarian 9

15 10 toward obscurity and irrelevancy, and its dying embers were finally extinguished by the social and moral exigencies of the first World War. By the time new calls for animals rights many based on arguments remarkably similar to those originally formulated by Humanitarians nearly a century earlier, despite an initial ignorance of Humanitarianism itself emerged from the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the animal welfare model had long since become an entrenched part of the Western human-animal discourse. During the intervening half-century, the cultural construction of a fundamentally binary animal-human relationship and the virtually unchallenged assumptions about animal otherness had been continuously reinforced, partly through decades of exponential growth in animal experimentation and industrial agriculture on one hand, and through an expanding sentimentality toward specific species of animals as pets, companions, or even family members on the other. Of the two roads diverging in the yellow wood of late-nineteenth century debate over human-animal difference, then, the path begun by the Humanitarians has indeed proven the one less traveled, its overgrown and barely visible outline all but obscured behind the ultimate cultural victory of the animal welfare model. Humanitarian reformers were aware of resistance to their arguments in favor of animals' rights and ethical vegetarianism, and typically displayed a willingness to compromise by supporting a number of more mainstream, welfare-based reforms. They saw these mostly as stopgap measures, practical but temporary tactics for reducing the suffering of animals while they waited for what they hoped was the inevitable, widespread adoption of their rights-centered philosophy. Regardless of any participation (New York) 2 (Oct. 1916), 4-5; "Misha Appelbaum in Vaudeville Debut," New York Times (Sept. 30, 1921),

16 11 in more socially acceptable forms of animal advocacy, however, the literature and rhetoric of Humanitarianism made it clear that its ultimate goal was nothing short of undermining existing cultural constructions of animal-human difference and redefining basic understandings of human ethical obligations to non-human animals. Despite its unique and radical position on the rights of animals and the nature of the human-animal relationship, historians who have sought to explain Humanitarianism have done so entirely in terms of its relationship with or similarity to concurrent movements for social reform, dietary reform, or animal welfare. Dan Weinbren, for instance, has situated Humanitarianism squarely within the incrementalist middle-class British socialism espoused by groups like the Fabian Society, noting both that London's Humanitarian League had its genesis in the Fabian circles of the late 1880s and that its charter membership of "prominent socialists" broke from the Fabian League only after their nascent Humanitarian ideals received little support there. 9 Christopher Shaw alternatively suggests that Humanitarianism was at least partially a response to the growing power of the scientific establishment, and the apparent willingness of scientists to either ignore or exploit the natural world in their relentless pursuit of knowledge. He advances this argument in his assessment of Edward Carpenter's late nineteenth century "socialist philosophy of science," demonstrating how prominent Humanitarians like Carpenter and Henry Salt shared a deep interest in nature and engaged in a similar "critique of Victorian Science." 10 While an ambivalent relationship with science was 9 Dan Weinbren, "Against All Cruelty: the Humanitarian League ," History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 88. Weinbren's article was the first and remains among the very few scholarly works specifically addressing the history of Humanitarianism in general or the Humanitarian League specifically. 10 Christopher E. Shaw, "Identified with the One: Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and the 11

17 12 indeed one of the defining features of the Humanitarian movement which I address in more detail in chapters four, five, and six Shaw also contends that organizations like the Humanitarian League were primarily concerned simply with "improving our treatment of animals." 11 It is true that the League had an interest in curtailing animal suffering, but Shaw's reductive explanation diminishes the impact of both the Humanitarians' rights argument and its connections to other avenues of social reform. Shaw's view is shared by others as well. Harriet Ritvo has located Henry Salt and his ideas within the broader antivivisection movement, for instance, while James Turner goes a step further and suggests that Humanitarians like Salt and his American counterpart J. Howard Moore were nothing more than oversensitive "animal lovers" who had taken to expressing their passions in a rather extreme form. 12 The nearly universal acceptance of the animal welfare paradigm in Western culture, combined with the assumption that arguments for animal rights are a relatively recent development (and the tendency of scholars and the public alike to not differentiate between the two), has led to Humanitarianism being interpreted primarily as part of the history of animal welfare, a curious footnote to the whiggish narrative of humankind's Ethical Socialist Philosophy of Science," Prose Studies 13 (1990), 45. While Shaw find a substantial overlap between the philosophies Carpenter and Salt, he notes the differences in temperament and style between the former's "sometimes histrionic denunciation of his own times" and the latter's "quiet analysis" ( 44). 11 Ibid., Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), 164; James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980),

18 13 ever-improving treatment of animals. 13 Yet Humanitarianism defies attempts at easy categorization, and its set of ideals related to nature, human and animal evolution, and moral duty were informed by a complicated set of interwoven values and assumptions that were occasionally ambivalent and at times seemingly contradictory. In the end, Humanitarianism was not nearly as much about animals themselves as it was an attempt to make sense of unprecedented challenges to the very understanding of what it meant to be human, and to define the extent of human obligation to the natural world. As the nineteenth century shaded into the twentieth, the moral relationship between humans and non-humans became increasingly more complex and ambiguous, through both the post- Darwinian acknowledgement of the innate animality of humans and the ability of nonhuman animals to demonstrate human-like behavior and emotions. Social reformers, scientists, legislators, and others continually questioned the nature of this relationship, as well as how best to address it. The tenets of animal welfare offered one clear path 13 Historical interpretations of the Humanitarian emphasis on ethical vegetarianism have likewise suffered from a tendency to reductively assume that the choice to abstain from eating animal flesh is a purely dietary one, and that the many historical reasons for adopting vegetarianism are either morally neutral or at least have equivalent moral value. This assumption that vegetarianism is characterized entirely in terms of what foods an individual chooses to consume or not consume, however, removes any moral dimension associated with eating meat it becomes just another value-neutral food "choice" and recasts vegetarianism as an abnormal act that exists only in binary opposition to the cultural norm of omnivorism. Vegetarians are thus defined by what they deliberately avoid or reject (certain categories of food, as well as the "normal" practice of eating meat) instead of why they choose to do so (especially in the case of ethical motivations) or what they may be potentially gaining (spiritual fulfillment, perhaps, or improved physical health). Ultimately, if vegetarians are simply understood as "those who do not eat meat" rather than "those who engage in an activity with potential moral implications," the history of vegetarianism is likewise absorbed into a single, oversimplified narrative. Interestingly, advocates of vegetarianism are often among the worst offenders in this department, indiscriminately aggregating any historical examples of individuals who refused to eat meat, regardless of their reasons. Perhaps this tendency of vegetarians to not differentiate between historical motivations is rooted in a desire to legitimize their own dietary practices by seeking strength or validation through sheer numbers, a strategy that produces impressive lists of allegedly vegetarian historical figures but poor history. See, for instance, "Veg Pioneers," VegNews (July/August 2007),

19 14 forward. Humanitarianism, regardless of any superficial parallels, offered another, very different route. Romantic Materialism As members of the first generation of British intellectuals to come of age following the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, the individuals who laid the groundwork for Humanitarianism in the early 1880s were deeply interested in the complex web of relationships that Darwin had revealed between humans, non-human animals, and the larger natural world. These men and women sought the most effective means of understanding and explaining these connections, but were unsure whether they might best be appreciated through the intuitive subjectivity of human emotion or the rational objectivity of science. They saw great value in both, however, and the fundamental tenets of the Humanitarian philosophy were forged at the intersection of two of the most significant nineteenth century cultural discourses: Romanticism and Darwinism. Although it had largely peaked during the career of Percy Shelley in the early nineteenth century, the Romantic ideal still resonated among many of the men and women gravitating toward social reform during the 1870s and 1880s. The subjective emphasis on individual feeling and emotion combined with a reverence for the beauty of nature was immensely appealing to those who looked around the urban centers of Britain and the United States and saw some of the more disturbing effects of contemporary industrial capitalism. The idea of trying to live in harmony with the natural world rather than at odds with it, as it seemed was the case in "modern" Western civilization 14

20 15 appeared to offer a viable solution to many of the social ills that worried reformers. While Romanticism was often associated with a more idealized vision of the relationship between the human and natural worlds, mid-century figures like Henry David Thoreau appeared to combine a more practical approach with the Romantic mindset, and demonstrated that humans could indeed exist harmoniously with nature. During the 1860s and 1870s, meanwhile, the impact of Darwinian theory was undermining traditional religious and cultural assumptions about humanity's place in the world, replacing them with a materialist paradigm that both privileged objective science over subjective experience and threatened long-held assumptions that humans were unique among the living creatures of the planet. When seeking a framework to both explain the causes of suffering and inequality that invariably accompanied Western "progress" and suggest potential solutions, the reformers behind the Humanitarian movement felt a strong connection to some elements of both the Romantic and Darwinian discourses, but also found them lacking in other respects. Ultimately, they borrowed the most useful features from each, cobbling together what they believed was a pragmatic and particularly modern system for understanding and correcting the more intractable problems of Western society. The broader thrust of the Humanitarian movement and its underlying ideology represented an attempt by its adherents to navigate between, or even to reconcile, these two divergent and seemingly incompatible worldviews. In her examination of the relationship between Victorian medicine and literature, literary scholar Janis Caldwell uses the term "Romantic materialism" to denote the curious form of "double vision" cultivated by mid-nineteenth century physicians and writers. These men, Caldwell explains, similarly attempted to bring together a subjective 15

21 16 interest in "consciousness and self-expression" with a strictly objective, materialistic interpretation of nature. 14 This Romantic materialist hermeneutic was also at the core of Humanitarianism, and helps to explain how the movement's ethical values developed and evolved. Many nascent Humanitarians had extensive literary knowledge and experience, and were fascinated by writers like Shelley and others who passionately extolled the beauty of nature or the morality of living in harmony with the natural world. At the same time, however, early Humanitarians were also attuned to current developments in natural history and science, particularly when new discoveries appeared to corroborate elements of their Romantic worldview or provide objective "proof" of their ethical beliefs. Charles Darwin was the very embodiment of this side of the Humanitarian creed, especially after his 1871 Descent of Man implicitly undermined traditional human claims of innate superiority over animals and nature by establishing the common biological and evolutionary origins of all terrestrial life. While Caldwell writes that the "Romantic" aspect of Romantic materialism dissipated quickly after the publication of Origin of Species in 1859 and the subsequent ascendancy of the post-darwinian scientific discourse, I contend instead that the tensions and inconsistencies contained within the Romantic materialist hermeneutic not only survived into the early years of the twentieth century, but actually found dramatic expression through the beliefs, literature, and activities of Humanitarianism between the 14 Janis McLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1-3. Caldwell cites Gillian Beer's analysis of linguistic development in Darwin's written work and George Levine's examination of Darwin's impact on literature (and vice versa) in her explication of the precise nature of Romantic materialism. See Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction (1983; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 16

22 17 early 1880s and the First World War. As products of the post-darwinian cultural environment, the leaders of the Humanitarian movement were clearly excited by the broad implications for human and non-human alike of Darwin's evolutionary theories. At the same time, they refused to abandon the idealized understanding of nature and subjective experience that they had absorbed from their education and interest in the Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These individuals were keenly aware that they were living in a period of rapid social, economic, and cultural change, and they were cognizant of the widening rift between the two sources of their beliefs as the impersonal realm of modern science threatened to overwhelm whatever lingering Romantic constructions of nature still existed. The development of the fundamental tenets of Humanitarianism during the 1880s was thus one way of negotiating the space between these two systems of interpreting the world. It represented, in other words, the synthesis of a century-long dialectic between the earlier Romantic, subjective discourse of nature and an increasingly dominant scientific discourse that derived its growing power from its own claims of objective rationality. Unable to completely reconcile these two forces as they diverged over time but unwilling to fully divest themselves of either, Humanitarians appropriated what they believed to be the most valuable elements of each to construct a new approach. Humanitarianism in Britain Humanitarianism, as both a philosophy and a movement based on a specific set of ideals related to universal reform, animal rights, and ethical vegetarianism, began to grow in the early 1880s, mostly as a result of two separate but interrelated developments. The 17

23 18 first was the publication of Howard Williams' 1883 book The Ethics of Diet, an anthology of historic writing on vegetarianism that had run in serialized form over the previous several years in the Dietetic Reformer. While organizations devoted to vegetarianism had existed in Britain since the founding of the Vegetarian Society in 1847, Williams' extensive scholarship and emphasis on ethics indicated that at least some vegetarians were rethinking the rationale for the practice. Williams later explained that he had adopted a vegetarian diet in 1873 after hearing the sounds of an animal being slaughtered, and that a reading of Percy Shelley's essay on vegetarianism shortly thereafter permanently fixed his "resolve to live for the future at all hazard, without causing bloodshed and torture." Although Williams noted that there were many benefits associated with a vegetarian diet, he stressed that the primary motive in his own conversion was ethical, and "wholly independent" of the health arguments which were most prevalent at the time. 15 In the introduction to The Ethics of Diet, Williams affirmed the importance of the ethical argument, and laid the foundation for Humanitarianism by suggesting that ethical vegetarianism was a necessary component of any consistent and comprehensive system of normative ethics. Of all the many solid arguments for vegetarianism, he wrote, "the humanitarian argument appears to be of double weight; for it is founded upon the irrefragable principles of Justice and Compassion universal Justice and universal Compassion the two principles most essential in any system of ethics worthy of the name." Quoted in Josiah Oldfield, "Vegetarian Reviews," Vegetarian Review n.s. 1 (Dec. 1896), 572. The original article appeared in The Herald of the Golden Age. 16 Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating (London: F. Pitman, 1883), vi. 18

24 19 Also during the early- to mid-1880s, a group of like-minded individuals with mutual interests in socialism and literature began to meet and discuss various programs of social reform, sketching out what would soon form the basic outline of Humanitarianism. Henry Salt was a master at Eton when he adopted ethical vegetarianism after reading Williams' The Ethics of Diet, and he soon began engaging in debates about it with other members of the Ascham Society, a select group of Eton masters who gathered occasionally to discuss matters of ethics and literature. He published his first essay on the topic, "A Plea for Vegetarianism," in 1883, and continued to hone his argument even as his relationship with Eton deteriorated. 17 Despite the bemusement and ridicule he encountered from many of his colleagues, Salt's convictions only deepened, especially after his introduction, facilitated by his brother-in-law Jim Joynes, to many of the socialists associated with Henry Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation. By the end of 1884, Salt convinced that his fellow masters "were but cannibals in cap and gown" resigned his position (and foreswore much of his middle-class respectability) to move to a small country cottage with his wife Kate and embark on a simple life of writing and social reform activism. 18 There he and Kate frequently entertained visitors connected with the Federation (and later, with the Fabian Society), and became close to Edward Carpenter and Bernard Shaw, with whom they often discussed social issues and vegetarianism. 17 "A Plea for Vegetarianism," Time 8 (Feb. 1883), Henry S. Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), 63-66; George Hendrick, Henry S. Salt: Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 18-22; Stephen Winsten, Salt and His Circle (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1951), For additional background on Salt's history with and relationship to Eton see also Henry S. Salt, "Confessions of an Eton Master," The Nineteenth Century 27 (Jan. 1885), 23; and Henry S. Salt, Memories of Bygone Eton (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1928). 19

25 20 As the 1880s progressed the Humanitarian nexus grew and refined its arguments, culminating in Salt's 1889 article "Humanitarianism." With this piece, published in The Fortnightly Review and read before a meeting of the Fabian Society, Salt eloquently stated the principles and ideas the small group of reformers had been developing, at once explicating their cause and giving it a permanent name. In the essay, Salt posited that "humanitarianism" was a set of doctrines governing the ways the humans should ideally act toward other living beings, and part of an ancient human tradition that had been undermined and corrupted by organized Christianity. Writing that the "present age is confessedly one of transition" in which old religious traditions were increasingly supplanted by secular values, Salt argued for a new and comprehensive set of ethics that would not only replace Christian teachings, but would be specifically tailored to meet the needs of a modern and industrializing world. He presented Humanitarianism as such a philosophy, explaining that rational consideration and recent scientific evidence alike demanded the expansion of the human moral community to include non-human animals. Vegetarianism was to be an integral part of this new secular religion, and Salt pointed out that "the question of flesh-eating cannot possibly be evaded by any one who wishes to take a consistent and comprehensive view of humanitarian ethics." 19 With the basic theoretical tenets of Humanitarianism thus definitively outlined, Howard Williams proposed creating an organization that would address many of the social problems the Humanitarians were concerned with and initiate programs for practical reform. In the spring of 1891, Williams, Salt, Edward Maitland, Alice Lewis, Kenneth Romanes, and a small group of other reformers met in Regent's Park and 19 Henry S. Salt, "Humanitarianism," Westminster Review (July, 1889),

26 21 formally organized the Humanitarian League, with Salt named as secretary and Lewis as treasurer. The members of the nascent organization realized that those outside the movement might take offense to their appropriation of the word "humanitarianism" for their name, and likewise anticipated that they would likely be derided by the public as "faddists" if they indeed received any attention at all. Nonetheless, they drew up a manifesto, confident that "however small a beginning might be made, much good would be done by a systematic protest against the numerous barbarisms of the age the cruelties inflicted by men on men, and the still more atrocious ill-treatment of the lower animals." 20 The League's first annual meeting was held April 9, 1892 at a vegetarian restaurant in London, during which Salt "gave an encouraging report" and noted that the organization's manifesto had already been translated into Dutch and Greek and circulated throughout Europe. 21 Later that year Salt published Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress. This was the definitive and most extensive statement of his arguments in favor of extending rights to non-human animals, providing both a systematic assessment of the various ways in which animals were mistreated by humans and an overview of potential solutions. The book received attention in both academic and popular periodicals, and an American edition followed in In the years immediately following the publication of Animals' Rights, the movement especially as represented by the Humanitarian League grew significantly. By March 1895 the League claimed roughly 300 members 20 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, See also Weinbren, "Against All Cruelty." The text of the Manifesto of the Humanitarian League is reproduced in Appendix A. 21 "With the Humanitarian League," Pall Mall Gazette (April 11, 1892), 6. 21

27 22 and inaugurated a monthly journal, Humanity, offering Humanitarians a certain sense of organizational stability while also acting as a means for reaching a wider audience. The appearance of Humanity was only one sign that the mid-1890s were a time of optimism, growth, and excitement among Humanitarians, especially since the Humanitarian League seemed poised to offer precisely the type of broad reform leadership that Humanitarians sought. Further evidence included the first National Humanitarian Conference, organized by Passmore Edwards and Henry Salt and held on February 28 and March 1 at St. Martin's Town Hall, Charing Cross. Representatives from the London Reform Union, the Fabian Society, the RSPCA, the Christian Social Union, and a variety of antivivisection and vegetarian organizations attended, where they participated in discussions and heard lectures on such topics as the need to reform the British criminal code, the state of the nation's hospitals, Britain's antiquated system of private slaughterhouses, and the immorality of sport hunting. Details were printed in the first issue of Humanity, and highlights were also reported by The Times, which specifically noted MP Edward Pickersgill's calls for the immediate reform of criminal sentencing laws and the debate over the need for slaughterhouse reform. 22 After the excitement and growth of their cause during the 1890s, Humanitarians seemed optimistic that their success would continue into the new century. Although the rapidly increasing use of animals in scientific and medical experiments continued apace, there were nonetheless other indicators that reformers were making an impact. The hunting tradition represented by the Royal Buckhounds had been abolished in 1901 thanks in substantial part to Humanitarian agitation, and members of the Humanitarian 22 "National Humanitarian Conference," Humanity 1 (March, 1895), 4-8; "The Humanitarian League," The Times (March 4, 1895), 4. 22

28 23 League lobbied in support of the Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Wild Animals (which in League propaganda was called the "Spurious Sports" bill) as it was debated in Parliament during 1900 and The League's Diet and Dress committee actively campaigned against the use of birds in women's fashions, and drafted a bill to regulate "The Sale and Use of Feathers in Millinery." 24 Humanitarians also took credit for helping to defeat Lloyd Wharton's Flogging Bill, which was rejected by the House of Commons in March, 1901 and led to curtailing the use of corporal punishment on prisoners. 25 Moreover, Humanitarian League committees and members continued to issue pamphlets and give lectures elucidating the League's positions on a broad spectrum of issues, including its criticism of British military actions during the Boer War, opposition to compulsory vaccination, and demands for reform of the meat trade. 26 Also indicating the viability of Humanitarianism around the turn of the twentieth century was the announcement in January, 1900, that the official Humanitarian League organ, Humanity, would be joined by a second Humanitarian journal. The Humane Review was envisioned as a forum for extended essays and debate on a range of Humanitarian topics, including "peace and arbitration, the treatment of native races, the sweating system, the poor law, the criminal law and prison system, capital and corporal punishment, public hospitals, compulsory vaccination, and the various problems related 23 "Notes: The Royal Buckhounds," Humane Review 2 (July 1901), ; "The Spurious Sports Bill," The Humanitarian 1 (April, 1902), "Murderous Millinery," Humanity 4 (Aug. 1901), Joseph Collinson, "Criminal Law and Prison Reform: A Year's Work," Humane Review 2 (Oct. 1901), "Annual Report for the Year 1900," Humanity 4 (June, 1901), ; "Annual Report for the Year 1901," The Humanitarian 1 (May, 1902),

29 24 to the treatment of the lower animals." It was designed to allow for a much more thorough exploration of these subjects than was possible in Humanity (which was soon renamed The Humanitarian), and though ostensibly independent of the Humanitarian League the new quarterly effectively filled the gap between the short pieces that ran in the League's official monthly publication and its longer books and pamphlets. 27 The Humane Review appears to have been quite successful, attracting substantial articles from Humanitarian League stalwarts Howard Williams, Joseph Collinson, Alexander Japp, G. W. Foote, and Edward Carpenter, as well as Humanitarians outside Britain including Leo Tolstoy, Eliseé Reclus, J. Howard Moore, Ernest Crosby, and Clarence Darrow. The first edition of the new journal was mailed in April, 1900, and it was published continuously for ten years. Despite many of these encouraging developments, however, the new century also brought hints that the Humanitarian League was on tenuous financial footing, and perhaps not finding the broader support that Humanitarian reformers believed would build over time. In November, 1901, Ernest Bell reported that the League's bank balance had "shrunk to very slender proportions," and politely suggested that members might increase their support if they wished the League to continue operating. Bell reminded readers that the League's executive committee voluntarily donated their time and energy, and that except for their printing and postage costs, the entire League budget was only 120 per year. Noting that the annual cost of membership in the League was a very reasonable two shillings and sixpence, Bell pleaded for members renewing their subscriptions to include an extra five, ten, or even 100 pounds to ensure the organization's continued existence. Only a month later, Joseph Collinson reminded his 27 "A Humanitarian Quarterly," Humanity 4 (January 1900), 1. 24

30 25 fellow Humanitarians that the League's "Executive Committee are in great need of financial assistance" and likewise made a plea for an "immediate and generous response." 28 As the decade wore on, the movement in general and the Humanitarian League in particular faced a series of additional challenges, and whatever Humanitarian spark survived was ultimately extinguished by the Great War of Humanitarianism in the United States In the United States, Humanitarianism as a movement was more diffuse, and lacked a national group like the Humanitarian League to provide a centralized source of leadership and direction. As in Britain, there were numerous American societies dedicated to animal welfare, antivivisection, and vegetarianism, though for reasons of geography and demography these tended to operate at the state rather than at the national level. Moreover, without any sustained effort to unite the dozens of these individual organizations under any kind of Humanitarian banner, they were generally limited to their own specific regions and agendas. Nonetheless, as Humanitarianism gained strength in Britain during the 1880s, a number of American reformers followed the developments via magazine articles and newspaper reports, and by the early 1890s there was ample evidence of pockets of support for the Humanitarian cause in the United States. 28 Ernest Bell, "To Our Subscribers," Humanity 4 (Nov. 1901), 177; Joseph Collinson, "Criminal Law and Prison Reform: A Year's Work," Humane Review 2 (Oct. 1901), Using the Retail Price Index, the 1903 membership cost of 2s. 6d would translate to 9.62 in 2007 currency, or roughly $19. The additional donations (of 5, 10, or 100) that Bell suggested would be equal, in 2008, to about 369, 738, and 7382, respectively, or $716, $1432, and $14,

31 26 During the waning years of the nineteenth century any accounts of an American vegetarian "movement" usually centered on either John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium, with its focus on physical health and the nutritive value of a fleshless diet, or the Philadelphia-based Vegetarian Society of America, the only organization in the United States claiming a national scope and outlook. Although the latter occasionally came close, neither singled out the ethical arguments for a vegetarian diet as superior to or more important than the others. By the 1890s, however, an active group of vegetarians in Chicago were increasingly embracing ethical vegetarianism and some of the fundamental tenets of the Humanitarian philosophy. After an initial attempt to establish a vegetarian society in Chicago in 1890 had failed, budding local interest in Humanitarianism and its ethical vegetarian component received a substantial boost in 1893, when the Congress of the International Vegetarian Union was held in Chicago in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. While the Congress covered all aspects of vegetarianism, the ethical dimension received a substantial amount of attention from the Chicago contingent, with one representative from the New York Vegetarian Society praising local organizers for the work they had done "to place the humane and merciful sentiments of vegetarian advocates before the world." 29 In addition to an extensive schedule of addresses including lectures by British Humanitarians like Josiah Oldfield and Edward Maitland the Congress also provided the opportunity for a unique international cross-fertilization of ideas between Europeans and Americans, especially regarding issues of social reform. 30 William Axon, the honorary secretary of Britain's 29 "The Chicago Banquet," The Vegetarian (New York) 2 (Dec. 15, 1896), The full program consisted of six sessions spread out over three days, and included over 40 papers addressing topics such as "Vegetarianism as the Basis of All Reform," "Vegetarianism and 26

32 27 Vegetarian Society, included a visit to Hull House while in town, and was among a number of prominent vegetarians invited to attend a reception with local African American leaders, organized by Ida B. Wells and honoring their dedication to "freedom and equal rights." It was there that Axon was introduced to "many negro clergymen, physicians, lawyers, journalists, poets, and novelists," but was particularly moved by the "stormy eloquence" of the seventy-five year-old Frederick Douglass. 31 By the mid-1890s interest had grown to the point where several prominent Chicago vegetarians tried to organize again, with greater success. The Chicago Vegetarian Society was founded in 1895 as a semi-autonomous branch of the Vegetarian Society of America, and soon began to evince a particularly Humanitarian outlook, often through the influence of a local high school biology teacher, J. Howard Moore. Insisting on the importance of ethical vegetarianism, animal rights, and the interrelated nature of all life, Moore espoused his views in numerous addresses given before vegetarian audiences and through regular contributions to Chicago Vegetarian, the monthly journal of the Chicago Vegetarian Society that began publication in During the first decade of the new century, Moore began a correspondence with Henry Salt in Britain, and the two exchanged articles, books, and encouragement about the state of Humanitarianism. In 1906 Moore published one of the centerpieces of Humanitarian literature, The Universal Kinship, followed by The New Ethics in He also Humanity," "The Food of the Orient," "Vegetarianism and Progress," and "Cutaneous Diseases and Vegetarian Practice." For the complete program see "Talks Against Meat," The Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), June 5, 1893, William E. A. Axon, "A Vegetarian Visit to Chicago," Vegetarian Review (July 1895),

33 28 contributed frequently to the publications of the Humanitarian League and a number of other organizations. While outside of Chicago there was less indication of any cohesive movement dedicated to Humanitarianism in the United States, there were still visible signs of its influence, especially regarding attitudes toward non-human animals. During the 1890s a number of American organizations published articles and essays hinting that animal welfare groups and vegetarian societies were finding common ground based on vaguely Humanitarian arguments for animal rights, and often cited well-known Humanitarian figures. The New England Anti-Vivisection Society, for instance, printed excerpts from Henry Salt's The Logic of Vegetarianism, and routinely ran pieces advocating the antivaccination movement, slaughterhouse reform, ethical vegetarianism, and other causes usually included under the Humanitarian umbrella. 32 The New York Vegetarian Society also published Humanitarian-related material at times, especially articles related to ethical vegetarianism. One 1897 issue of the Society's journal featured a reprint from the Vegetarian Review emphasizing the Humanitarian aspects of a meat-free diet, and referred specifically to the Humanitarian League's 1891 manifesto. At other times the editors included articles on related topics including antivivisection and the use of feathers in women's fashions, and at one point printed a pointed critique of Theodore Roosevelt's affinity for both sport hunting and American imperialism. The New York Vegetarian 32 "Extracts from The Logic of Vegetarianism by H. S. Salt," The New England Anti-Vivisection Society Monthly 9 (Jan. 1904), 16. The NEAVS frequently included other material that evinced sympathy with the Humanitarian ethic, at least among the editors of its journals. In 1901 it printed a poem that equated human dominion over animals with imperialism, and it often published updates on Humanitarian League activity, particularly its animal-related work. See, for instance, "The Imperialist," The New England Anti-Vivisection Society Monthly 6 (Feb. 1901), 16; and "The Humanitarian League," The Anti-Vivisection Review 3 (May-June 1912),

34 29 Society was furthermore well aware of the recent written output of prominent Humanitarians, reporting on and publishing work by J. Howard Moore, Josiah Oldfield, and Henry Salt. 33 Besides these suggestions of Humanitarian interest or influence among some of the mainstream animal welfare and vegetarian groups, the clearest evidence of American Humanitarianism was found in the work of a handful of individuals committed to the cause despite the lack of any overarching Humanitarian organization. The Chicago Vegetarian Society's J. Howard Moore was undoubtedly the most outspoken (and most widely published) advocate, but three others also made significant contributions to the movement. Ralph Waldo Trine, an author aligned with the New Thought movement, is remembered mostly for writing the 1897 metaphysical bestseller In Tune With the Infinite, an early motivational self-help book that emphasized philosophical idealism and the oneness of the individual with the divine. 34 Two years later he published Every Living Creature, a short volume encouraging respect and humane treatment for animals. Trine condemned sport hunting, vivisection, and the use of fur and feathers in women's fashions, but his Humanitarian sentiments were most visible in the several pages devoted to the consumption of animal flesh as food. Trine noted that he spoke from "several 33 "Tore Feathers from their Hats," The Vegetarian (NY) 3 (Dec. 15, 1897), 89; "Roosevelt," The Vegetarian (NY) 3 (April 15, 1898), ; "The Vegetarian Eating Club, of Chicago University," The Vegetarian (NY) 1 (Sept. 15, 1895), 42-44; "A Few Words to Those Who Believe in the Restriction of Vivisection," The Vegetarian (NY) 3 (April 15, 1898), ; "A Vegetarian's Dream," The Vegetarian (NY) 4 (Jan. 15, 1899), ; Henry S. Salt, "The Logic of Vegetarianism," The Vegetarian (NY) 4 (Feb. 15, 1899), Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite, or Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty (New York: Dodge, 1897). Trine's book was in print for most of the twentieth century; various sources claim it has been translated into over twenty languages and has sold anywhere from 1.25 million to 2 million copies. 29

35 30 years experience with its non-use," and though he never used the word "vegetarian," he stressed that the "only really consistent humanitarian is the one who is not a flesh-eater." Realizing "the essential oneness of all life," Trine writes, will both broaden human ethics and energize existing religions, and he expressed his optimism that Western society was finally on the verge of adopting these values. 35 Trine also had a direct connection with British Humanitarianism he met with the leaders of the Humanitarian League on several visits to London, and it was League member Ernest Bell who published the British edition of Every Living Creature. Henry Salt called Trine's book "practically a Humanitarian treatise in a new garb," and noted with some admiration that it had sold "by hundreds of thousands." 36 New York physician Albert Leffingwell was another American loosely connected with the Humanitarian movement. A particularly vocal critic of vivisection, he emphasized ethical arguments based on a consistently applied form of utilitarianism. He made his case in a series of articles and five books on the subject, and the 1894 American edition of Salt's Animals' Rights included Leffingwell's essay "Vivisection in America," which strongly condemned animal experimentation as part of college or medical school curricula. 37 Interestingly, Leffingwell did not call for the complete prohibition of animal 35 Ralph Waldo Trine, Every Living Creature: Heart-Training Through the Animal World (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1899), 30, Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, Albert Leffingwell, "Vivisection in America," in Henry S. Salt, Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1894), Leffingwell included an appendix compiling the responses from a number of prominent colleges and universities that another physician a Dr. Ballou from Providence had written to and asked to provide specific information on their policies regarding vivisection. Citing the need for academic freedom and faculty autonomy, nearly all the schools replied that they had little or no restrictions on the practice. These included California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Harvard, Yale, Grinnell, Syracuse, Stanford, Tufts, Northwestern, Oberlin, Cornell, Williams, and Bowdoin, among others. 30

36 31 experimentation he even refused an honorary vice presidency from the American Anti- Vivisection Society in 1896 because the organization officially supported its abolition but he continued to support strict regulation on experiments conducted at colleges and medical schools until his death in While Leffingwell's connections to Humanitarianism came mostly from his insistence on reasoned ethical arguments against vivisection and his association with Salt's book, his fellow New Yorker Ernest Crosby was more aligned with the broad reform platform of the British Humanitarians. Perhaps best known for his 1906 satirical novel Captain Jinks, Hero, Crosby was an attorney who served as a representative in the New York State Assembly from before being nominated by President Harrison for the position of Judge of International Tribunals in Egypt. Although the appointment was for life, while in Egypt Crosby began reading Tolstoy and resigned after five years to embrace a simplified lifestyle, write poetry, and advocate for social reform. He was particularly active in the American peace and anti-imperialism movements around the turn of the century, and adopted a rigorously ethical vegetarian diet. In a 1899 profile in Food, Home, and Garden, Crosby explained that not only did he believe that the ethical argument was the most cogent, but that vegetarians who emphasized other aspects when trying to win converts were actually being counterproductive. "My only reason for not eating meat is that I dislike the cruelty of it," he wrote. "That seems to me the strongest argument to use, and I think that Vegetarians often injure the cause by assuring healthy looking meat-eaters that they are swallowing poison when their 38 Craig Buettinger, "Women and Antivivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Social History 30 (Summer 1997),

37 32 appearance proves that the assertion is at least doubtful." 39 Crosby met with Henry Salt and other British Humanitarians on numerous occasions, and it was Crosby who wrote the letter of introduction that Clarence Darrow carried when he first met Salt in London in Salt professed a thorough admiration for Crosby and his convictions, and especially praised his commitment to opposing "the brute force of what is known as 'imperialism' the exploitation of one race by another race, of one class by another class, of the lower animals by mankind." 40 Chapter Outline and Main Themes This dissertation is divided into three main sections. The first, comprising the two chapters following this introduction, explains how the Humanitarians' Romantic materialist hermeneutic informed the basic tenets of their philosophy, and explores the literary, scientific, and cultural roots of the Humanitarian ethos. In Chapter Two, "Romanticizing Nature," I argue that many of the core doctrines of Humanitarianism were grounded in the deep reverence that its founders felt for both the Romantic naturalism of Shelley's poetry and Henry David Thoreau's emphasis on living in harmony with the natural world. Moreover, I show how the shared literary backgrounds of those who were directly involved in establishing the Humanitarian agenda and guiding the movement's early progress figures like Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and Alexander Japp informed the development of Humanitarianism, especially through their extensive knowledge of the written word and their collective experience as literary critics, poets, 39 "Ernest Howard Crosby, B. LL.," Food, Home, and Garden, n.s. 3 (Dec. 1899), Henry S. Salt, Company I Have Kept (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.),

38 33 and authors. Finally, I note the influence and contributions of other writers favored by the early Humanitarians, including James Thomson, Richard Jefferies, and Thomas De Quincey. Chapter Three, "Establishing the Universal Kinship," delves into the other primary influence on the Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian movements: the science and culture of Darwinism and evolutionary biology. While reformers derived many of their essential beliefs about the proper relationship between humanity and the natural world from literary sources, I argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory provided the rational and materialist underpinnings for these ideas. The 1871 publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man was especially crucial to the development of Humanitarian thought, since it appeared to offer objective confirmation that animals, humans included, shared a common ancestry and were thus interrelated. By removing the special status humans had long assigned themselves, Darwin also provided the most convincing argument yet for toppling the cultural anthropocentricism that reformers saw at the root of all inequality and injustice. In this chapter I demonstrate how several other evolutionary theories particularly Ernst Haeckel's explanation of ontogenetic recapitulation and George Romanes' research on mental evolution made significant contributions to the Humanitarian beliefs. The chapter also analyzes the ways in which evolutionary theory influenced the work of J. Howard Moore, a melancholy high school teacher from Chicago who became one of the most eloquent and outspoken advocates of both Humanitarianism in general and ethical vegetarianism in particular. The second of the three main sections is devoted to examining one of the defining elements of the Humanitarian movement: a deep and profound ambivalence regarding 33

39 34 science and its place in Western culture. Frequently, Humanitarians relied on the practice and rhetoric of science to provide objective support for many of their beliefs. In Chapter Four, "Vegetal Shoes and Hydrocarbonaceous Substances," I explain how contemporary science seemed to offer further validation of the Humanitarian cause in a variety of ways. These included work in comparative anatomy and physiology that further highlighted the physical similarities between human and non-human animals, for example, as well as developments in organic chemistry and the new field of nutritional science that allowed vegetarians to counter longstanding claims that a meat-free diet was unhealthy or harmful. Furthermore, I show how Humanitarians watched with excitement as scientists and engineers appeared to be on the verge of reducing perhaps even of ending the human exploitation of non-human animals through a series of rapid technological advances in transportation, machinery, textiles, and the introduction of inexpensive but nutritious meat substitutes. Yet even as Humanitarians embraced the work of scientists whose research offered apparent validation for their ideology, many reformers remained wary. Chapter Five, "Deep Suspicions," maintains that Humanitarians were alarmed by the exponential growth of medical and scientific experiments involving live animal subjects, and were intensely suspicious of the science surrounding the controversial practice of vaccination. Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians were further troubled by the proliferation of social Darwinist ideas emphasizing struggle and competition, which they believed to be a misappropriation and corruption of Darwin's evolutionary theories. In Chapter Six, "Toward a Humane Science," I argue that, in response to their own ambivalence and internal conflict regarding these various scientific and medical 34

40 35 developments, prominent Humanitarians developed and advocated a new conception of science that combined a basic materialist rationality with a more holistic and naturalistic system of ethics. Humanitarian reformers understood that the public was resistant and occasionally hostile to many of their ideas; this chapter also describes the Humanitarian arguments for integrating their ideals especially kindness, non-violence, and respect for animals into the educational curricula of schools on both sides of the Atlantic. The final section consists of two chapters that analyze the way in which Humanitarians, mostly as evidenced through the actions and policies of the Humanitarian League in Britain, thought about and interacted with other contemporary organizations and reform movements. Many Humanitarians saw their interest in animal rights and ethical vegetarianism as but one component of a larger social reform apparatus, and sought to effect change by uniting their energies with those devoted to other but aligned concerns. Yet an often unyielding privileging of theoretical matters over practical ones, an insistence on ethical consistency, and the fundamental radicalism of their positions regarding non-human animals frequently placed them at odds with larger, mainstream organizations, even those that were ostensibly committed to similar goals. Chapter Seven, "Of Beagles and Butchers," looks at the complex and often contentious relationships between Humanitarians and some of their contemporaries who also engaged in various forms of animal advocacy. In particular, I contend that the issues espoused by Humanitarians often differed substantially from the prevailing concerns of mainstream "animal lovers," and I demonstrate how the rights-based philosophy of the Humanitarians led to frequent clashes with the much more conservative animal welfare agenda of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, Britain's largest and oldest 35

41 36 animal protection organization. Articles in Humanitarian publications regularly accused RSPCA leaders of hypocrisy, especially for their refusal to condemn the use of animals in sport hunting or as food. This chapter also explains how Humanitarians' involvement in the turn-of-the-century movement to replace the antiquated British system of local, private slaughterhouses with modern, municipally-regulated abattoirs also caused friction. Some Humanitarians believed that any changes that reduced animal suffering represented progress, while others worried that supporting reform was nothing more than a tacit endorsement of meat eating that would only lead to the more efficient slaughter of ever-increasing numbers of animals. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Humanitarian ambivalence regarding the Jewish ritual slaughter of Shechita. Finally, in Chapter Eight, "Friends and Enemies," I detail how Humanitarians approached several reform causes generally not concerned with non-human animals. The chapter begins with the Humanitarians' ties to anti-war and peace movements, and explains how conflicts like the Spanish-American and Boer Wars affected them. Next, I argue that despite the occasional legislative victory, the Humanitarians' specific prison and penal code reform agenda more frequently resulted in enmity between Humanitarian leaders and mainstream prison reform groups like the Howard Society. This chapter also details Humanitarian opposition to capital and corporal punishment, and the sustained campaign against the use of flogging as punishment in schools. I conclude by examining how Humanitarianism fit into the broader spectrum of humanist movements, including Secularism, Positivism, and the Ethical Society movement. 36

42 37 CHAPTER 2 ROMANTICIZING NATURE: SHELLEY, THOREAU, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE HUMANITARIAN IDEAL Our toil from Thought all glorious forms shall cull. To make this earth, our home, more beautiful, And Science, and her sister Poesy, Shall clothe in light the fields and cities of the Free. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Laon and Cythna" Introduction In his 1817 narrative poem "Laon and Cythna," Percy Bysshe Shelley envisioned an ideal, enlightened civilization free from the political and social injustices he saw around him, informed by both the rationalism of scientific inquiry and the humanism of the arts. Inspired by intellectual predecessors like Montaigne and Rousseau and energized by the political possibilities represented by the French Revolution, Shelley frequently visited this theme of a perfectible society, and believed that broader issues of equality and justice could be achieved through aggressive social reform and, ultimately, humankind's return to a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. Not content with mere literary speculation, Shelley also explored these ideals in his personal life, and at various points was a vocal advocate for early forms of environmentalism, feminism, and socialism, while strongly condemning slavery, capitalism, and homophobia There is an enormous amount of scholarship devoted to Shelley and the historical and cultural ramifications of his Romanticism and naturalism. For general biographical background on Shelley and the evolution of his beliefs and politics, see Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young 37

43 38 While Shelley's imagined Golden Age never materialized, many of the underlying beliefs informing his vision proved remarkably durable. Decades after his death, numerous writers, intellectuals, and activists were adopting and expanding upon his ideas about the need for political, social, and environmental reform, as well as his suggestion that living a "natural" or "simplified" life was the best way to effect these changes. Some scholars have traced Shelley's impact on various strains of British socialism, especially during the middle of the nineteenth century, while others have noted his influence (direct or otherwise) on historical figures as diverse as Friedrich Engels and Mohandas Gandhi. 42 Although appreciation for Shelley, his ideals, and the particulars of his habits and lifestyle went in and out of vogue within the mainstream of British academic and public culture during the Victorian era, his appeal to radicals, socialists, anarchists, and others on the fringes of society appears to have remained more or less intact throughout. 43 Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982); Darby Lewes. ed., A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003); James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Youth's Unextinguished Fire, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004); James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); and Timothy Morton, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). 42 Bouthaina Shabaan, "Shelley and the Chartists," in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, eds., Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), ; Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 105; and Art Young, Shelley and Nonviolence (The Hague: Mouton & Co,), Engels once called Shelley "the genius, the prophet" when discussing his influence on socialism. See Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England: From Personal Observations and Authentic Sources (1845; Chicago: Academy, 1984), Understandings of Shelley's works, the meaning of his legacy, and the contours of Romanticism itself were contested and often in conflict during much of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, however, this tension had come to a head, as a new generation of respectable academics and public figures embraced a "declawed Shelley" as something of a national emblem while socialists and other reformers attempted to reclaim (and remind the public of) the poet's 38

44 39 It was Shelley's enduring legacy alongside that of a handful of other poets and essayists, most notably Henry David Thoreau that provided much of the literary framework for the first half of the Romantic materialist hermeneutic through which the progenitors of Humanitarianism viewed their world. Under the collective literary influence of Shelley and the others, the early Humanitarians developed a worldview that deemphasized the centrality of humans within the natural world and began producing a new discourse of activism and reform that sought both to negate traditional anthropocentric cultural assumptions and interpret all sources of social injustice and inequality as being interconnected and interdependent. Because the natural, non-human world (including both domestic and wild animals) was a crucial aspect of this complex web of interrelated causes and interests, Humanitarians began using this larger framework to devise powerful new arguments for the rights of non-human animals, as well as methods for integrating them into a broader social reform agenda. Moreover, since many of the writers favored by the Humanitarians were highly critical of contemporary economic and political policies, they appealed to reformers by offering specific solutions often built around simplicity of living, attempts to reconnect with the natural world, and the value of direct individual action. By the 1880s, many of the basic theoretical and philosophical elements of Humanitarianism and its dietary corollary of ethical vegetarianism were thus in place, many of them derived from literary sources. Nineteenth century literature, especially the works of this small group of specific writers and thinkers, also provided a fertile common ground for the development and dissemination of ideas among the early reformers. Recurring themes among the later radicalism. See Mark Kipperman, "Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, ," Nineteenth-Century Literature 47 (Sept. 1992),

45 40 memoirs and other autobiographical works by Humanitarians of the 1880s, for instance, included how they introduced one another to various authors or cemented lasting friendships through the bond of a shared literary interest. In Britain, at least, most of the individuals at the center of the Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian movements were literate and well-educated, and a substantial number were themselves essayists, poets, playwrights, critics, or other writers, well-versed in literary matters and experienced in using the written word to both analyze the various societal problems they observed and articulate potential solutions. Finally, and on a more personal level, Humanitarians often interpreted Shelley, Thoreau, and other writers not simply as intellectual forbears but as kindred spirits, occasionally visionary thinkers who were often misunderstood and sometimes even ridiculed by contemporaries, but later vindicated by history in ways that made them seem almost prescient. The reformers' own work often evinced a strong sense of identification with the writers they admired, even to the extent that they at times appeared nearly as interested in erasing what they interpreted as entrenched public misconceptions regarding their literary heroes as in explaining the relevance of their ideas. Nonetheless, the Humanitarian literature from the 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century revealed not only the inspiration reformers drew from writers like Thoreau, Shelley, Richard Jefferies, and James Thomson, but the indelible literary mark they left on the development of Humanitarianism. 40

46 41 Literary Influences: Shelley Of all the literary influences on the early British ethical vegetarian and Humanitarian movements, none was more deeply felt nor widely professed than that of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although Shelley died at the age of 29 in 1822 fully 25 years before the formation of the first Vegetarian Society in Britain the imprint of his ideas and works was evident among Humanitarian reformers six or seven decades later, with a number of prominent figures specifically claiming the poet as a critical source of inspiration. Howard Williams, for instance, wrote in 1883 that of all the "great intellectual and moral luminaries," it was Shelley who could "claim more reverence from humanitarians" than any other. 44 Edward Carpenter also recognized his legacy, and counted Shelley next to Walt Whitman and Plato as his three most significant influences. 45 Henry Salt and George Bernard Shaw were members of the Shelley Society, founded in 1886 by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, and were among its more enthusiastic participants throughout its seven-year existence. 46 Salt alone wrote several articles, pamphlets, and books devoted solely to critical analyses of Shelley's work and the veneration of his ethical ideals. G. W. Foote, publisher of The Freethinker and president of the National Secular Society, was likewise active in both Humanitarian circles and the 44 Williams, The Ethics of Diet, Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, Salt wryly observes that Furnivall had claimed to be a vegetarian for twenty years at one point, but had "relapsed into cannibalism" when a friend sent him a turkey during a period of convalescence from an ankle injury. 41

47 42 Shelley Society, and had given lectures and participated in public discussions about the poet. 47 Shelley's poetry and essays frequently explored themes related to the corrupting influence of contemporary social and political structures, as well as the redemption offered by a return to humankind's harmonious (but long lost) relationship with nature. This was, in of itself, nothing particularly new or daring he drew on a long literary and philosophical tradition that can easily be traced back through Rousseau and Montaigne to Classical thinkers like Plutarch but Shelley also famously sought to integrate his ideals into his day-to-day living. This willingness to visibly and substantially alter his lifestyle and actions in order to make them more consistent with his ethical philosophy proved especially appealing to later Humanitarian reformers, as did his insistence that all aspects of social injustice were interrelated and rooted in an anthropocentric, hierarchical culture. Shelley's Impact on Humanitarians At least five major Shelleyan themes were especially revered Humanitarians and were incorporated into their wider agenda for social reform. First, there was his general radicalism, his willingness to substantially transgress the social norms of his era in order to pursue his ideals. Even if Shelley was not particularly "ahead of his time," as some Humanitarians believed, he unquestioningly existed outside the mainstream of early nineteenth-century British social mores. His religious views were notably 47 Ibid., 95; "Pioneers of Humanitarianism," Humanity 4 (Dec, 1901), 186. Salt wrote in his autobiography that the executive committee of the Shelley Society was comprised primarily of wealthier individuals who admired the poet's work but "seemed quite unaware of the conclusions to which his principles inevitably led," and he recalled their reaction to an address Foote delivered once on Shelley's religious views. During the lecture, Salt fondly reminisced, the committee "marked their disgust for the lecturer's views, which happened also to be Shelley's, by the expedient of staying away." 42

48 43 unconventional, and though Shelley called himself an atheist, some Humanitarian reformers argued that he was more of a "pantheist," noting that his use of the word "God" in poems like "Queen Mab" seemed to refer not to the traditional Christian deity but instead to "signify rather the soul of the universe." 48 Regardless of the existence of a supreme being, Shelley appealed to Humanitarians by suggesting that humanity itself was responsible for its own descent into corruption and injustice, but also that humans were agents of their own redemption, and solely responsible for reversing this course. Reformers also admired Shelley's ambiguous sexuality and willingness to disregard sexual norms. Edward Carpenter, for example, later cited the poet's "Essay on Friendship" while discussing the value of homosexual relationships among schoolboys in his influential The Intermediate Sex. 49 Many Humanitarians were intrigued by his advocacy of feminism, especially as evidenced through his views on marriage and gender roles. These positions not only placed Shelley outside the cultural mainstream of his day, but distanced him from some of his contemporaries like Byron as well. 50 Still others simply appreciated Shelley's ability to act on principle alone, even if his actions violated widely practiced social conventions. George Bernard Shaw, for one, openly praised Shelley for adopting vegetarianism based solely on his own belief in its self-evident 48 Henry S. Salt, A Shelley Primer (London: Reeves and Turner, 1887), Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), Gary Kelly, "From Avant-Garde to Vanguardism: The Shelley's Romantic Feminism in Laon and Cythna and Frankenstein," in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, eds., Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996),

49 44 moral logic, instead of any of the extant (but, as Shaw would argue, less persuasive) arguments grounded in religion, hygiene, or economy. 51 Second, Humanitarians viewed Shelley as a pioneer of socialism, especially because of his conviction that many societal ills were not discreet, unrelated occurrences but rather interconnected phenomena that could be addressed and resolved through a systematic program of political and social reform. The leaders of the Chartist movement of , for example, claimed Shelley as a significant source of inspiration, and the writing of Shelley's friend and contemporary Leigh Hunt was responsible for popularizing some of his political philosophies among other socialist groups. 52 In an influential 1888 article, Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor and her husband Edward Aveling argued that Shelley remained a substantial and lasting influence on socialist thought, primarily due to his "singular understanding of the facts that to-day tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery." The poet also seemed to fully comprehend and anticipate a number of concepts that were crucial to the development of socialism, including anarchy, freedom, property, and "the cruelty of the governing classes." 53 The Shelley-socialism connection was well known to Humanitarian reformers, and Henry Salt, for instance, sometimes corresponded with Eleanor Marx and even received a visit from her and Aveling at his Surrey cottage on at least one occasion. 51 Roland A. Duerksen, "Shelley and Shaw," PMLA 78 (March 1963), 115. Duerksen also notes that Shaw's atheism and socialism were strongly influenced by his reading of Shelley. 52 Bouthaina Shabaan, "Shelley and the Chartists," in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, eds., Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, "Shelley and Socialism," To-Day (1888),

50 45 She described to Salt not only the "Shelley-worship of the Chartists," but quoted Friedrich Engels' remark that "'we all knew Shelley by heart'" in the early days of socialist agitation. 54 Ultimately, according to literary scholar Julie Dugger, Shelley earned "his credentials as an activist not only because he wrote poetry, pamphlets, and essays on political issues, but perhaps more importantly for the ways his writing redefined poetry and history in order to legitimize political activism both for himself, in his role as poet, and for later political reformers." 55 With the exception of his explicit arguments in favor of vegetarianism, the Shelleyan theme that most completely captured the imagination of Humanitarians was his exploration of the proper relationships between humankind and the natural world. On the most obvious level, the poet's works were rife with vivid descriptions of lush plants, green landscapes, wild animals, and even meteorological phenomena. In one poem, for example, Shelley tried to find fitting analogies to a soaring bird's song among other scenes of natural beauty, while in another, Shelley wrote from the point of view of a cloud, describing everything around him from the "thirsting flowers" below and the "great pines" of the forest to the "sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes." 56 Much of his 54 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, "Shelley and Socialism," To-Day, April 1888, Henry S. Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1921), 80-81, 91. Eleanor Marx quoted in Henry S. Salt, Company I Have Kept (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930), Salt recalled that during one visit Aveling gave a remarkable dramatic reading of the last act of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," a performance in which he "gave effect to chorus and semi-chorus, and to the wonderful succession of spirit voices in that greatest of lyrical dramas, he trembled and shook in his passionate excitement, and when he had delivered himself of the solemn words of Demogorgon with which the poem concludes, he burst into a storm of sobs and tears" (Seventy Years Among Savages, 81). 55 Julie M. Dugger, "A Political Poetics: Percy Shelley's Utopian Activism," in Darby Lewes, ed., A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), Percy Bysshe Shelley, "To a Skylark" and "The Cloud," in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1846), One Shelley scholar suggests that the 45

51 46 writing revealed an understanding that the natural world as opposed to the built environment of industrial civilization had both moral worth and inherent value, and was free of the injustices and suffering prevalent in the cities. The corollary to this message was that humankind itself could achieve freedom from the demoralizing and corrupting influences wrought by modern civilization only by returning to what he believed was the natural order of things. 57 Although historians like Keith Thomas have argued that the nature-fetishizing "cult of the countryside" during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented either a sentimentalized longing for a mythical, pre-urban past or failed politicians' attempts to rationalize their de facto banishment to rural areas, nature had intrinsic value and appeal for Humanitarian reformers, providing not only an occasional respite from urban life, but a viable alternative to it. 58 Several among the Humanitarianism inner circle, including Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and William Jupp, had full-time rural addresses for a considerable portion of their lives, and appreciated them as places to enjoy their natural latter poem was influenced by a contemporary interest in clouds spurred by Luke Howard's wellknown essay on the subject first published in See Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work (London: Macmillan, 1960), ; and Luke Howard, "The Modifications of Clouds, and on the Principles of their Production, Suspension, and Destruction; being the Substance of on Essay read before the Askesian Society in the Session ," Philosophical Magazine 16 (1803), Shelley argued that animals, too, were victims of the degrading influence of human disregard for nature. "Man and the animals whom he has infected with his society, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased," he wrote. "The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence or natural old age. But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog are subject to an incredible variety of distempers; and, like the corrupters of their nature, have physicians who thrive on their miseries." See Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, new ed. (London: F. Pitman, 1884), Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Thomas also suggests that the English "nostalgia" for country living was partially driven by the sheer "distaste for the physical appearance of the town," particularly during industrialization. 46

52 47 surroundings and restore balance to their lives. Salt in particular went on to become an outspoken advocate for the preservation of Britain's natural landscape from development, publishing essays and books with titles like On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills (1909) and The Call of the Wildflower (1922). Moreover, Shelley's fascination with nature led him to advance a kind of secular premillennialism, a fundamental belief not only that humankind's currently degraded state was a result of its willful rejecting of nature in favor of "civilization," but that an unending era of peace and happiness would ensue once the proper relationship between humans and the natural world was restored. 59 In the past, he believed, all living things coexisted in Edenic paradise, though this state was soon vitiated by the inequalities that accompanied civilization and organized religion, and finally deteriorated rapidly with the ascendancy of Western industrial capitalism. "[A]t some distant period," Shelley wrote in 1813, "man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites." 60 In several of his major poems, including "Queen Mab," "Prometheus Unbound," and "The Cenci," Shelley specifically alluded to this theme. This allowed him, as Timothy Morton has pointed out, to integrate a "conception of the 59 Some scholars would argue here that Shelley was a "utopian" rather than a "millenniarian," since the future perfect state he envisioned would be arrived at gradually and incrementally rather than via any apocalyptic cataclysm. Michael Henry Scrivener, for instance, writes that Shelley's revised version of political anarchism "establishes a political ideal, a utopia, toward which society is moving in stages; it rejects a millenarian logic whereby utopia could be achieved immediately; it accepts politics as a process of gradual reforms and compromise." My intent by referring to Shelley's "secular millennialism" is not to downplay his understanding of the gradualist nature of the political and social reform necessary to effect the envisioned utopia, but rather to emphasize the ultimate goal of returning humanity to a prelapsarian state of oneness with nature, regardless of the means or the timeframe. See Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), xii. 60 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet (London: J. Callow, 1813), 9. 47

53 48 unnaturalness of a flesh diet and the imbalance between humanity and nature mythologized in Fall narratives like the myths of Eden and Prometheus" into his work. 61 The latter was especially appealing to Shelley, and he explained the fire-stealing figure of Prometheus metonymically as a representation of the specific point at which humanity effected its own Fall the moment when humans first "applied fire to culinary purposes" and discovered they could prepare animal flesh for consumption by cooking it. Through learning to disguise the "disgust and horrors" of slaughter by physically altering the bodies of dead animals over a fire, Shelley suggested, humanity divorced itself not only from its original, natural state on the earth, but its own inherent tendency toward peacefulness and love. 62 Shelley's Promethean allegory for humankind's fall prefigured the view adopted by reformers within ethical vegetarian and Humanitarian circles. The problems that accompanied "civilization" poverty, warfare, imperialism, inequality, exploitation 61 Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 88. This is among the more thorough scholarly treatments of Shelley and the ways his poetry and prose reflected his attitudes toward (and the contemporary cultural discourse surrounding) the relationship between humans and nature, especially regarding diet. Morton argues that Shelley drew on the existing rhetoric of vegetarianism and "refashioned taste, in revolt against what he conceived to be the hierarchical powers which controlled consumption, production, and culture" (1). For other examinations of this topic see also Lisbeth Chapin, "Science and Spirit: Shelley's Vegetarian Essays and the Body as Utopian State," in Darby Lewes, ed., A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2003), ; Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Morton, Timothy, "Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism," Romanticism 12 (2006), 52-61; and Onno Oerlemans, "Shelley's Ideal Body: Vegetarianism and Nature," Studies in Romanticism 34. (Winter 1995), Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from Zeus in order to give it to mortals; as punishment he was chained to a rock where he endured a vulture eating his liver every day only to have it grow back each night. Shelley acknowledged that the story was allegorical, but suggested it had "never been satisfactorily explained." Paraphrasing Hesiod, he wrote that "before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt from suffering [and] enjoyed a vigorous youth," but that "[a]ll vice arose from the ruin of healthful innocence." 48

54 49 would only be alleviated, they believed, by eliminating the unchallenged anthropocentrism that was at the philosophical and religious core of human dominion over nature. Reformers railed at the apparent ethical inconsistency lurking behind human contempt for (and exploitation of) non-human species, despite the evidence of their biological and even psychological similarities. "There are no beings in the universe, according to human beings, except themselves," Howard Moore lamented in "All others are commodities." 63 This "egoism," he believed, was the single greatest impediment to the development of the harmonious future world that reformers envisioned, and could only be negated by the acceptance of animals as equals within a global, extended "family." Other Humanitarians offered more explicit allusions to Shelley's Edenic vision. In an 1896 article W. J. Jupp described a more perfect time when people "dwelt together in peace and gentle fellowship," and in which the "fruits of the earth sufficed for food" in a pre-promethean paradise. Although human civilization had subsequently lapsed into discord and chaos, Jupp maintained, "[b]eneath our dislikes and antipathies the eternal friendship of Nature and Spirit dwells." Only a return to nature and the application of true, universal "humaneness" toward children, prisoners, other races, workers, the poor, and animals would allow this potential to flourish, ultimately ushering in a second Golden Age J. Howard Moore, The Universal Kinship (London: George Bell and Sons, 1906), 274. Later in the same book, Moore takes on the topic even more directly: "Anthropomorphism, which drifted down as a tradition from ancient times, and which for centuries has shaped the theories of the Western world, but whose respectability among thinking people has now nearly passed away, was, perhaps, the boldest and most revolting expression of human provincialism and conceit ever formulated by any people" (314). 64 W. J. Jupp, "The Humane Life," Humanity 2 (Aug. 1896), Jupp was a co-founder of The Fellowship of the New Life, the forerunner to the Fabian Society. Edward Carpenter, an early member, recalled the "hopeful enthusiasms" regarding simplified lifestyles, democratic 49

55 50 The poet's secular millennialism also informed the fifth and most obvious Shelleyan theme embraced by Humanitarian reformers, that vegetarianism was an integral aspect of social reform and crucial to the ultimate redemption of the human race. Shelley saw a vegetarian diet not merely as directly connected to and entwined with the other ideals he espoused, but as a transformative act in of itself, one that would allow humankind to reestablish its connection to the antediluvian paradise it had arrogantly rejected. According to Shelley, civilization had been in decline ever since humans discovered that fire could obscure the "bloody juices and raw horror" of a meat-based diet. By adopting a vegetarian diet, on the other hand by symbolically returning the fire stolen by Prometheus humans would become reacquainted with the "intolerable loathing and disgust" they instinctively experienced at this sight, allowing them to avoid or negate its corrupting influences and once again live harmoniously with the natural world. 65 At the same time, individuals who renounced animal flesh as food would also be implicitly rejecting the economic and social structures which facilitated and ideals, and "a humane diet." Henry Salt credited Jupp with introducing him to the works of Henry David Thoreau. See Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), 225; Henry Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), 76; and George Hendrick, "Henry S. Salt, The Late Victorian Socialists, and Thoreau," New England Quarterly 50 (Sept. 1977), Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, 13. To some extent Shelley's insistence on revealing the ways in which culture works to hide the essential animality of humans presages some of Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1960s work on mythology, especially the ways in which myths develop in order to make sense of the seemingly irreconcilable observations that humans are at once both animal and not animal. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest (New York: Basic Books, 1963). More recently, a number of scholars have used various semiotic, sociological, and anthropological approaches in order to unpack the cultural meanings of meat and the rhetorical processes in which living animals are transformed into a consumable product. See Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist- Vegetarian Critical Theory, Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Continuum, 2000); Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991); Keith Tester, Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991); and Noelie Vialles, Animal to Edible, trans. J. A. Underwood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). 50

56 51 normalized the consumption of meat in the first place. The deliberate disavowal of both the slaughterhouse and its products, in other words, was at once both an overtly political statement and an essentially practical method for guiding the human and natural worlds back into the realignment necessary for the future age of peace and brotherhood. For early Humanitarians already predisposed to vegetarianism, this argument was nearly irresistible. Shelley's 1813 essay Vindication of a Natural Diet, not surprisingly, was held up by Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians as a nearly visionary statement. Howard Williams excerpted several pages in his 1883 The Ethics of Diet, lauding Shelley for his role in linking vegetarianism with the desire to "unbarbarize and elevate human life by arousing feelings of horror and aversion from the prevailing materialism of living." 66 In 1884 the Vegetarian Society (UK) reprinted Shelley's essay, adding a preface cowritten by William Axon, then vice president of the organization, and Henry Salt. Although they readily admitted that most of the points in Shelley's case for vegetarianism were neither particularly original at the time he was writing nor based on precisely the same principles espoused by the ethical vegetarian movement then beginning to take shape, Axon and Salt nonetheless praise Shelley for highlighting both the connections between vegetarianism and social reform and the "intimate connection" between morality and food. Despite differences about which argument was the most compelling, the Humanitarians agreed that Shelley's essay was "perhaps the most powerful and eloquent plea ever put forward in favour of the vegetarian cause." Williams, The Ethics of Diet, 218. Italics are in the original. 67 W. E. A. Axon and Henry S. Salt, "Prefatory Notice," in Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet (London: J. Callow, 1813; reprint, London: F. Pitman, 1884), 3-6. In 1929, a 51

57 52 Defending Shelley In 1888 Henry Salt affirmed the role of Shelley's ideals among the fundamental underpinnings of Humanitarianism, writing that the poet "anticipates in his ethical teaching the next period of social and moral evolution; his gospel of humanity is the creed of the new era that slowly but surely, is dawning on mankind." 68 Later, in an 1891 article about socialism, Salt hailed Shelley as one of "the true prophets of English democracy," along with William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Robert Burns, and (the decidedly non-english) Walt Whitman. 69 A year later, Salt pointed out that Shelley had anticipated and inspired the Humanitarian argument that all social injustice was interconnected, and commended him for speaking out against "the savagery of modern warfare, the scarcely less savage competition of commerce, the inhumanities of our penal code, and the legalised murder known as capital punishment." Salt similarly praised the poet as a free-thinker, an advocate of free love, a "pioneer of communism," a "revolutionist," a "humanitarian," and added that, through his "condemnation of fleshsecond and previously unpublished essay titled "On the Vegetarian System of Diet" appeared in an appendix in a volume of The Complete Works of P. B. Shelley (London: Ernest Benn, 1929). It was reprinted by the London Vegetarian Society in 1947, and is both more forcefully worded and cogently argued than "Vindication." While conceding that pregnant sows were no longer routinely stomped to death or suckling pigs roasted alive, Shelley observed that lobsters are routinely boiled alive, that "chickens are mutilated and imprisoned until they fatten, calves are bled to death that their flesh may appear white: and a certain horrible process of torture furnishes brawn for the gluttonous repasts with which Christians celebrate the anniversary of their Saviour's birth." See Percy Bysshe Shelley, "On the Vegetarian System of Diet" in Two Essays on Vegetarianism (Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975), Henry S. Salt, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Monograph (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowry & Co., 1888), Henry S. Salt, "The Socialist Ideal: III Literature," New Review 4 (1891), 27. Salt's essay was one in a three-part exploration of the "socialist ideal" that included William Morris addressing art and George Bernard Shaw on politics. Burns, from Scotland, was not English either, though it is clear by the context that Salt is referring to Western democratic principles in general, not just those practiced within England itself. 52

58 53 eating, Shelley was a precursor of a vital and growing reform." Ultimately, according to Salt, the entire Shelleyan ideal could be reduced to a single, Golden Rule-like sentence: "'To live as if to love and live were one.'" 70 Bernard Shaw, too, spoke and wrote frequently of his intellectual and ideological debt to Shelley, especially as it related to his strict vegetarian diet and his Humanitarian and socialist ideals. One early biographer wrote that it was the poet who "first called Shaw's attention to vegetarianism," and described how Shaw had announced, at the first large meeting of the Shelleyan Society in 1886, that he was "like Shelley, a Socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian." 71 In several of his autobiographical writings Shaw credited the poet with introducing him to vegetarianism, and in his introduction to Stephen Winsten's 1951 biography of Henry Salt, Shaw characterized himself and Salt simply as "Shelleyans and Humanitarians." 72 After the death of Salt's wife Kate in 1919, Shaw 70 Henry S. Salt, Shelley's Principles: Has Time Refuted or Confirmed Them? (London: William Reeves, 1892), 54-55, Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd Company, 1911), 49-50, 135; Stanley Weintraub, ed., Shaw: An Autobiography (London: Max Reinhardt, 1970), 113. Henderson wrote that "While the most of men in their boyhood have walked about with a cheap edition of Shelley in their pockets, it is a tiresome trait in Shaw, someone has slightingly remarked, that he has never taken this cheap edition out" (49). 72 George Bernard Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949), 53; George Bernard Shaw, "An Aside," in E. J. West, ed., Shaw on Theater (New York: Hill & Wang, 1958), 219; and George Bernard Shaw, introduction to Stephen Winsten, Salt and His Circle (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1951), 14. In Sixteen Self Sketches, Shaw wrote that it "was Shelley that first opened my eyes to the savagery of my [pre-vegetarian] diet," while in "An Aside" he stated simply that "[i]t was Shelley who converted me to vegetarianism." Shaw, however, credited Shelley with more than persuading him to forswear meat. In the lengthy introduction to his 1903 Man and Superman, Shaw counted Shelley as one of the twelve artists "whose peculiar sense of the world I recognize as more or less akin to my own." The other eleven were John Bunyan, William Blake, William Hogarth, J. M. W. Turner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Henrik Ibsen, William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, and Friedrich Nietzsche. See "Epistle Dedicatory to Arthur Bingham Walkley" in Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (New York: Brentano's,1903), xxvii. 53

59 54 lamented the end of his own relationship with her, writing that "it was the Shelleyan nexus that bound us." 73 While admiration for the Shelleyan ideal was widespread among British Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians, many within these movements were becoming wary of Shelley's increasing respectability within certain academic and political circles during the 1880s and 1890s, and were especially irritated by the commensurate diminution of his more radical principles. Shelley was being refashioned as a sentimentalized avatar of romantic love, in other words, while his forays into nudism, socialism, vegetarianism, and bisexuality were played down or ignored. As a result, during the last two decades of the century Humanitarians displayed an especially proprietary attitude toward the poet, and expressed considerable resentment regarding the way Shelley and his values were being co-opted or misinterpreted by the academic, literary, and political establishments. 74 On the August 4, 1892 centennial of Shelley's birth, for example, two separate meetings of Shelleyans were held to celebrate the occasion. With obvious frustration, Henry Salt later complained that the first, an afternoon gathering in the conservative town of Horsham, was a "very hollow affair" in which "Sussex squires and literary gentlemen from London united in an attempt to 73 Shaw to Salt, February 25, Shaw and Kate Salt seemed to have had a particularly close emotional relationship, and he sometimes called himself her "Sunday husband." Salt biographer George Hendrick suggests that, since Kate was a lesbian, Shaw was "relieved of the urge to philander" and thus able to achieve a closer bond with her than he would have been able to with a heterosexual woman. See George Hendrick, Henry Salt: Humanitarian and Man of Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), Mark Kipperman, "Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, ," Nineteenth-Century Literature 47 (Sept. 1992), Kipperman argues that literary-minded academicians during the 1880s and 1890s were beginning to "codify" British literary history, making it "possible, in the Foucauldian sense, to discipline Shelley, creating an idealized image of the poet which could then be absorbed into bourgeois institutions like universities, museums, the funded appreciation societies, and scholarly libraries." 54

60 55 whitewash Shelley's character." 75 Bernard Shaw, typically, was more pointed in his observations about the apparent desire to beatify the poet, and sarcastically suggested that perhaps a bas-relief could be built in Horsham, depicting Shelley leading children to the parish church with a bible in his hand. 76 A meeting more to the liking of Shelley's Humanitarian, vegetarian, and Fabian followers was held that evening in London. Salt was particularly vexed by the failure of mainstream British culture and academia to understand Shelley in the nearly religious terms that he did. Clearly aware that there was a renewed public interest in Shelley at the time, Salt doubted there was a corresponding appreciation for the poet's Humanitarian message, and contended that the increased attention merely represented a transitional period between the "old, abusive view of Shelley, as a fiend incarnate" and an "equally irrational apologetic view." 77 In an effort to reclaim Shelley's radical Humanitarian and vegetarian ideals, Salt penned several pieces during the 1880s and 1890s in which he tried to either further explicate his own views on the subject or demonstrate that many of the poet's other critics were simply wrong. Acknowledging that contemporary criticism of Shelley represented "the views of a large class of critics and readers," Salt used an 1883 article to suggest that these individuals were completely missing the point by "applying the ordinary rules of literary 75 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, George Bernard Shaw, "'Shaming the Devil About Shelley," Albemarle Review (Sept. 1892), reprinted in Pen Portraits and Reviews (London: Constable, 1932), 241. Salt, who closely followed the shifting cultural understandings of Shelley, noted that the poet's centenary year marked the "climax of the cult" surrounding him. Salt also referred to Shaw's assessment of the Horsham meeting in Seventy Years Among Savages, Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages,

61 56 criticism to the etherial subtleties of lyric poetry." 78 Six years later Salt criticized Thomas Jefferson Hogg's well-known 1858 biography of Shelley, not only castigating Hogg for his "sense of self-importance" and his "egotism, gluttony, and digressive tendency," but for missing completely the significance behind Shelley's vegetarianism. 79 In the second of his four books devoted to the poet, Salt wrote that he was deliberately working to dispel the "common notion" of Shelley as "merely an impassioned singer and wild-hearted visionary, full of noble though misdirected enthusiasm," and instead argued that Shelley was "charged with a sacred and indispensable mission, which was seriously undertaken and faithfully fulfilled." 80 A recurring theme in much of Salt's writing depicted Shelley in almost messianic language, as if the poet was an outsider dispatched to a specific set of geographic and temporal coordinates in order to offer humanity a fleeting vision of a more peaceful and humane future. In his work Salt repeatedly referred to Shelley as a "prophet-poet," the same term that Howard Williams used in his 1883 The Ethics of Diet, and one that clearly was not foreign to Humanitarian an ethical vegetarian reformers. 81 In an 1882 article, 78 Henry S. Salt, "On Certain Lyric Poets, and their Critics," Temple Bar 67 (1883), Henry S. Salt, An Examination of Hogg's "Life of Shelley" (London: private printing, 1889), 15. Hogg's book was an "official" biography that had been commissioned by Mary Shelley's son and daughter-in-law, Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, after Mary's death in Salt was especially offended by Hogg's casual statement that he, too, found vegetarianism agreeable, but only "'now and then, for a day or two, as a change, for the mere gratification'" ( 14-15). Salt, of course, was not alone in his criticism of Hogg. Upon publication in 1858 Lady Shelley complained that Hogg had reduced the poet to a "fantastic caricature," and in the introduction to a 1906 reprint Edward Dowden writes that, despite the value of his first-hand account, Hogg's "offences as a biographer are grave." See Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1906), xviii. 80 Salt, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Monograph, References to Shelley as a "prophet" date back at least to the 1830s, though usually in a more limited context. One 1844 American article did describe Shelley as being "anointed by the hands 56

62 57 Salt extended the religious analogies to their natural limit and even suggested that, while no one would consider Shelley a Christian, it could be argued that "no more truly Christlike character has appeared in the world during the last eighteen centuries." 82 In his second book on Shelley, Salt called him "a prophet and forerunner of the higher intellectual development, a soul sent on earth before its due season." 83 At one point, he went so far as to supplement the religious imagery with a portrayal of Shelley as someone so morally advanced, so completely supra-human, that he had taken on a quality of alien otherworldliness: Shelley's life and writings were a mirror held up to our present social system from without; he came like a messenger from another planet to denounce and expose the anomalies that exist on this terrestrial globe, to show the glaring contrast between might and right, law and justice, ephemeral custom and essential piety. 84 Further evidence of Salt's continuing and nearly religious devotion to Shelley came at the end of a lecture given on November 5, 1901 at London's Essex Hall. Addressing Shelley's influence as part of the Humanitarian League's "Pioneers of of Liberty as the Prophet of humanity," though probably more typical is the 1839 critic who called him merely a "prophet of poetry." Other mid-century prophetic references included attempts at playing down his atheism and posthumously integrating him into a more traditional Judeo-Christian worldview. See T. H. Chivres, "Shelley. (Extract from a Lecture on the 'Genius of Shelley')," Southern Literary Messenger 1 (Feb. 1844), 105; George Nash, The Drama: A Treatise on Poetry and Verse, Dramatic Composition, Dramatic Authors, and the Effects of Dramatic Amusements (London: Saunders & Otley, 1839), 19; Review of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Knickerbocker 27 (Jan. 1846), Henry S. Salt, "Shelley as a Teacher," Temple Bar 66 (1882), 377. Salt, like Shelley, was an avowed atheist, and it is clear that his reference to the poet as "Christ-like" is not an endorsement of any religious belief but rather an appreciation of both his sense of otherworldliness and his message of brotherly love, social justice, and peace. 83 Salt, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Monograph, Ibid.,

63 58 Humanitarianism" series, Salt stated that "the question for us is not so much whether Shelley is qualified to be our predecessor, as whether we are qualified to be followers of Shelley." Regardless of the answer, Salt suggested that Humanitarians should endeavor to learn more about the poet through the Shelley Society, and put his ideals into action via the Humanitarian League the only two forms of "hero-worship," according to Salt, "worthy of rational men." 85 Finally, although the veneration of Shelley (and the fears that the academic establishment was playing down his radicalism) among Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians was primarily a British phenomenon, at least some American reformers shared an awareness of and an admiration for the poet's vegetarian and proto-ecological ideals. J. Howard Moore's writing, in particular, evinced the passionate Shelleyan hope for a more enlightened future in which vegetarianism and peace were the norm, not the exceptions. Few direct references to Shelley appeared in his articles and books, but Moore's regard for the poet was clear. In his influential 1906 work The Universal Kinship, for instance, Moore mourned how Western culture "has remained steadfastly deaf to the pleadings of its Shelleys and Tolstoys, owing to the overmastering influence of its anthropocentric religions." 86 A year later, in the second chapter of The New Ethics, 85 Henry S. Salt, "Shelley as a Pioneer," Humane Review 2 (Jan. 1902), The other "pioneers" included as topics of the lecture series were Richard Wagner, John Ruskin, and Leo Tolstoy. Shelley was, by far, the earliest example of a Humanitarian "pioneer," having died over six decades before Wagner's death in Ruskin had died only in 1900, and Tolstoy was still alive during this time. Interestingly, an anonymous and somewhat apologetic "note" (presumably, also by Salt) accompanied the printed version of the lecture, in which the author explained that the League found it useful to give public lectures on well-known Victorian figures since "people will often listen more readily to unpopular doctrines when associated with the life and character of a great man, than when directly forced on their notice so much pleasanter it is to admire from a comfortable distance the humanity of other persons than to stand face to face with the practice of it oneself." 86 Moore, The Universal Kinship,

64 59 he also included a short excerpt from Shelley's "Queen Mab," a Humanitarian favorite. 87 In a letter to Henry Salt written not long after he had finished The Universal Kinship, Moore was particularly effusive in his praise. "Shelley was such a prophet so consistent & illuminated in mind," Moore wrote, "[h]e was one of those rare beings that might be called a universal reformer." 88 Compared to their British counterparts, the published materials of American Humanitarians rarely referenced literary influences, however, and instead leaned more toward a reliance on recent scientific developments and evolutionary theory. Literary Influences: Thoreau Many reformers involved with the Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian movements in Britain were also deeply influenced by the life and written works of Henry David Thoreau. Prior to around 1880, Thoreau's work was neither widely available nor particularly well-known to British readers, and the occasional books or articles that did appear in the popular press often dismissed Thoreau as an anti-social hermit or cranky modern-day ascetic, a misanthrope who turned his back on the modern world in favor of solitary walks in the woods and a diet of beans. 89 Over the ensuing decade, however, a 87 J. Howard Moore, The New Ethics (London: Ernest Bell, York House, 1907), 21. The verse appeared in the course of Moore's critique of anthropocentrism and emphasizes the emotional similarities between humans and animals: "I tell thee that these viewless beings/ Think, feel, and live, like man;/ That their affections and antipathies,/ Like his, produce the laws/ Ruling their mortal state." 88 J. Howard Moore to Henry S. Salt, Nov. 2, 190[6]. Underlining is in the original. 89 In an influential 1880 essay, for example, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson denounced Thoreau as a "skulker," someone who "did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellowmen, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself." Stevenson went on to call Thoreau "dry, 59

65 60 number of the individuals responsible for formulating the basic tenets of Humanitarianism in England "discovered" the writing of the American naturalist. Quickly exhausting the limited secondary literature but clearly fascinated by Thoreau's ideas, several of these reformers started to read and study his work in earnest, and soon began publishing articles and books intended to portray Thoreau as a visionary philosopher rather than a peculiarly American curiosity. By the early 1890s, Humanitarian writers had produced a substantial new literature devoted to Thoreau, claiming him alongside Percy Shelley as an ideological ancestor and incorporating his ideals into their own philosophy. Though the Humanitarians' revisionist body of work included everything from simple biographical narratives to various critiques of Thoreau's abilities as a poet, a common thread among much of it was the presentation of Thoreau as something of a temporal and philosophical bridge connecting the earlier, naturalistic Romantic idealism of Shelley to both their own interest in social reform and their reformulated definition of the human-animal relationship. Thoreau's writing and experiences particularly those related to his time at Walden Pond provided reformers with an updated and practical validation of Shelley's earlier arguments regarding the need to balance human civilization with the natural world. If Shelley was the "prophet" who pointed the way toward a more peaceful and enlightened future for all humanity via the restorative power of living in harmony with priggish, and selfish," and described his experiments with simple living as evidence of a life that "that fears the bracing contact of the world." Six years later Stevenson recanted this view, writing that Alexander Japp's biography of Thoreau "added to my knowledge, and with the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism." See Robert Louis Stevenson, "Thoreau: His Character and Opinions," Cornhill 41 (June, 1880), ; and Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1886, reprint: New York: Current Literature Publishing, 1909), xvi-xvii. 60

66 61 nature, in other words, Thoreau was the pioneering soul who had suggested, in his simple hut beside the pond, that the journey might be possible. Thoreau and the Early Humanitarians The first major British work on Thoreau was published by Alexander Hay Japp in 1878 (under his pseudonym H. A. Page), and despite drawing some criticism it provided the early advocates of Humanitarianism with a useful entry point into their study of Thoreau and his ideas. 90 Although much of the book was built around long excerpts from Thoreau's writings and drew heavily from previously published works, Japp's study was significant in that it provided curious British readers with a fresh interpretation of Thoreau, one in which he appeared thoughtful and sensitive rather than cranky and eccentric. 91 Japp adopted the term "poet-naturalist" (first used by Thoreau's American biographer William Ellery Channing five years earlier), and lauded Thoreau for his appreciation of nature as well as his ability to illuminate, through his writing, the transformative power that accompanied truly appreciating the natural world and one's place within it. 92 "Thoreau went to nature an individualist," Japp wrote, "and came back the prophet of society." H. A. Page [Alexander Hay Japp], Thoreau: His Life and Aims (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878). Japp, who wrote under as many as seven pseudonyms, had published an article on Thoreau in 1874 that served as the basis for the book. See Alexander H. Japp, "Henry Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist," British Quarterly Review 59 (Jan. 1874), Ibid., 249. Japp also downplayed Thoreau's ties to Emersonian Transcendentalism, claiming it was this association that had, at least in part, prevented "scientific men" from warming to his views. 92 See William Ellery Channing, Thoreau, the Poet Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873). In addition to the standard biographical information and character study, Channing included some 61

67 62 Japp became involved in Humanitarian circles during the 1890s, and by 1901 was credited as a contributor on the masthead of the new Humane Review. He penned at least five articles over the next five years, including pieces on Robert Burns, household pets, and the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had undertaken a six-month reading tour of Britain in While his work was of great interest and utility to the movement (earlier, he had also written about Humanitarian favorites Thomas De Quincey and John Ruskin in addition to Thoreau), his own interests and beliefs began to diverge from Humanitarian orthodoxy after about Regardless of how his apostasy was regarded by his fellow reformers, however, Japp remained an ardent student of Thoreau and regularly met with others to discuss his works. Only a few months before his death he hosted Walton Ricketson, the son of one of Thoreau's friends in Concord, during a previously unpublished excerpts from Thoreau's journals, as well as a section of memorial poems and verse ( ). 93 Page, Thoreau: His Life and Aims, Alexander H. Japp, "Robert Burns as Humanitarian Poet," Humane Review 6 (Jan. 1906), 222; Alexander H. Japp, "Pets: My Own and Others,'" Humane Review 2 (July 1901), 135; and Alexander H. Japp, "Paul Laurence Dunbar as Poet," Humane Review 6 (Oct. 1905), 165. Japp's article about pets is particularly interesting while the author observes that his study had given him "the conviction that animals each, like men, have their own temper and mental constitution," the piece otherwise seems quite out of place in a Humanitarian League publication due to its rather sentimental and patronizing tone. Its subject matter is also remarkable because Japp had criticized pet owners he accuse them of "destroying the [pet's] true brute nature, and the dim rudimentary humanity along with it" in his 1878 Thoreau study, a new edition of which was also published in By the time of his death in October, 1905, Japp had published two books highly critical of Darwin, other evolutionary theorists, and even the very mechanism of natural selection. See Alexander H. Japp, Our Common Cuckoo and Other Cuckoos and Parasitical Birds: An Attempt to Reach a True Theory of Them by Comparative Study of Habit and Function, with a Thorough Criticism and Exposure of Darwin's Views and Romane's Views and Those of Their Followers (London: Thomas Burleigh, 1899); and Alexander H. Japp, Darwin Considered Mainly as Ethical Thinker, Human Reformer, and Pessimist (London: John Bale & Co., 1901). 62

68 63 visit to England. Japp and his guest subsequently called on Henry Salt, and the three men engaged in "much talk about Thoreau and other literary matters." 96 Edward Carpenter, too, was drawn to Thoreau during the formative years of Humanitarianism. He first read Thoreau's Walden in 1883, shortly after moving to a cottage at Millthorpe to begin his own experiment with a simplified form of country living. Calling the book "one of the most vital and pithy ever written," Carpenter later wrote that his initial encounter with Walden "took the bottom completely out of my little bucket!" Such was Carpenter's newfound devotion to Thoreau that, on an 1884 voyage to the United States to call on Walt Whitman in New Jersey, he made a point of taking a side trip to Massachusetts in order to bathe in Walden Pond and add a stone to Thoreau's cairn. 97 Another early devotee of Thoreau was William J. Jupp, who also became involved with the emerging Humanitarian movement during the 1880s. Like many of the other early Humanitarian reformers, Jupp wrote that aside from the works of Wordsworth and Shelley, his greatest intellectual debts were to Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Edward Carpenter. 98 Although trained as a Congregational minister Jupp was also involved with the ethical society movement, and was a founding member of the Fellowship of the New Life, an organization that continued for fourteen years after 96 Salt to Mrs. S. A. Jones, November 12, Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), 113, 115, William J. Jupp, Wayfarings: A Record of Adventure and Liberation in the Life of the Spirit (London: Headley Bros., 1918),

69 64 spawning the more successful and widely-known Fabian Society in Around this time he met Henry Salt, who later credited Jupp as the individual who brought him "tidings of the greatest of poet-naturalists" during frequent calls at the Salts' country cottage near Tilford. 100 Through these visits Jupp whom Salt praised as "a devoted nature-lover" and "one of Thoreau's truest admirers" was largely responsible for helping to initiate Salt's own "serious study" of Thoreauvian naturalism and simplicity beginning in By the early 1890s Jupp had left the Congregational Church to begin a "free religious movement" in Croydon, where he gave sermons with Transcendentalist themes influenced by the works of Emerson and Thoreau. 102 Jupp even included a chapter detailing his intellectual and spiritual debts to Thoreau in his 1918 autobiography, calling the naturalist a philosophical "comrade" and a "relentless thinker and searcher for truth." George Hendrick, Henry Salt: Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977, 25-26; 100 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, Hendrick, Henry Salt, 25-26; George Hendrick, "Henry S. Salt, The Late Victorian Socialists, and Thoreau," New England Quarterly 50 (Sept. 1977), ; Henry S. Salt to S. A. Jones, Oct. 6, Edward Carpenter had some earlier influence on Salt's budding interest in Thoreau, though it was less pronounced. Hendrick suggests that while still at Eton, Salt had read about Thoreau in Carpenter's early essays, but began to read Thoreau's work in earnest only after moving to Tilford and engaging with Jupp. 102 W. G. H. Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 335. Jupp continued to lecture before groups like the Christian Social Union and the South Place Ethical Society. 103 Jupp, Wayfarings, 118, 120. Although Henry Salt would later reveal in his own 1930 autobiography his lifelong "obligation" to Jupp for initiating his study of Thoreau, Jupp cited Salt's 1890 Life of Henry David Thoreau as one of his own major influences, writing that Salt's "sane clear insight into the deeper significance of that great Poet-Naturalist's life and work gives to his record of them its abiding interest and value" ( 125). One contemporary review of Jupp's autobiography praised the author for his "genial outlook on life and his immense sympathy toward humanity." See The Bookman 55 (Oct. 1918),

70 65 Of all the early Humanitarians, though, Henry Salt was the most tireless and eloquent champion of Thoreau and his ideas. If Shelley was Salt's greatest inspiration then Thoreau was easily a close second it was he, Salt explained near the end of his own life, "who, next to Shelley, has moved me more than any other." 104 Salt was particularly struck by Walden, later writing that his initial reading of it "was in my own case an epoch, a revelation," a reaction that was only strengthened when he began studying Thoreau in earnest during the mid-1880s and corresponding, in the course of his research, with Americans who had personally known him. 105 Like Shelley, Thoreau was the subject of some of Salt's earliest essays, and in the fall of 1885 Salt published his first piece on the naturalist for the journal Justice, the official organ of Britain's Socialist Democratic Federation. 106 Not surprisingly, the article emphasized those aspects of Thoreau's life and work most likely to appeal to a socialist audience. Salt wrote, for instance, that Thoreau had proven "how little labour is sufficient to support mankind," and concluded that "Thoreau's opinions will commend themselves to all Socialists." Salt, Company I Have Kept, Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, The SDF was founded by Henry Hyndman, Herbert Burrows, Helen Taylor, and others as the Democratic Federation in They added "Socialist" to its name in 1884 after William Morris and a contingent left to form the Socialist League. See "Great Britain" in William D. Bliss and Rudolph M. Binder, eds., The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908), 560; and Graham Johnson, "'Making Reform the Instrument of Revolution': British Social Democracy ," The Historical Journal 43 (2000), Henry S. Salt, "Thoreau," Justice (Nov. 1885). Salt admitted that Thoreau had not addressed the issue of what, exactly, happened to all the surplus wealth created by the working classes even as they "are themselves left in a condition of life-long penury and want," but suggested (like Carpenter had) that Thoreau demonstrated how workers could ameliorate their situation somewhat by simplifying their lives and reducing their wants. 65

71 66 But Salt's most significant contribution to the ongoing intellectual dialogue between Thoreau's legacy and the reform impulses of the early Humanitarians was a biography, published just one year before the founding of the Humanitarian League in The reading and research Salt conducted for his early articles during the 1880s had only strengthened his admiration for Thoreau, yet Salt was frustrated by both the sizable gaps in the existing literature and the dismissive tone often taken by some British writers at the time. Salt set out to create a study that was at once rigorous in its depiction of Thoreau as an important historical figure and more sympathetic to his philosophies and accomplishments, explaining at the time that he wanted to provide "a fuller and more serious estimate of Thoreau's doctrines than any hitherto published," with an emphasis on "interpreting rather than criticising in the ordinary sense." 108 Although he never traveled to the United States as part of his research, Salt initiated correspondence with several Americans who had personally known Thoreau during his lifetime, or were engaged in scholarship related to his work or life. These included Thoreau's friend Daniel Ricketson, by then in his late seventies, and Ann Arbor physician Samuel Arthur Jones, who, similarly troubled by the dearth of useful works on Thoreau, also had begun a biography. 109 Salt's volume was released in October, 1890, garnering a number of 108 Salt to Daniel Ricketson, November 18, For a detailed accounting of the epistolary relationship between Jones, Ricketson, Salt, Thoreau's literary executor H. G. O. Blake, and Concord, Massachusetts photographer Alfred Hosmer, see Oehlschlaeger and Hendrick, Toward the Making of Thoreau's Modern Reputation,

72 67 positive reviews in the British press and leaving its author rather pleased with its reception. 110 The Life of Henry David Thoreau appears to have fulfilled its author's goals, with Salt employing less hyperbole than earlier biographers like Japp and providing a straightforward, chronological account of Thoreau's life. Salt also devoted three full chapters to an analysis of Thoreau's philosophies, ideas, and worldview, with particular attention to those elements that would be of most interest to Humanitarians, including nature, animals, and the ethical implications of diet. Despite his obvious affection for his subject, however, Salt did not hesitate to include less than flattering information if he felt it was needed to fully appreciate the "true" Thoreau. He pointed out Thoreau's inability to fully adhere to his own principles regarding diet, for instance, and acknowledged other shortcomings including Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation that Thoreau lacked ambition. 111 Salt seemed especially vexed by Thoreau's inaction regarding the societal problems he observed, and at times even questioned his ability to fully comprehend them. 110 Salt to S. A. Jones, November 3, Shortly after the biography's publication, Salt wrote to Jones in Michigan: "My book has been very well received by the English press, with only one or two exceptions, and has been the subject of long notices in most of the leading papers." During the previous spring Salt began work on his next Thoreau project, editing a British edition of his "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers." See Henry D. Thoreau, Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, edited by Henry S. Salt (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890). Salt's introductory essay was also published in the August 1891 issue of Lippincott's Magazine. 111 Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 192. "I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition," Emerson famously wrote in "Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party." See Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Thoreau," in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. IV: Miscellaneous Pieces, ed. George Sampson (London: George Bell & Sons, 1905),

73 68 "He could not realise, or perhaps did not care to realise," Salt wrote, "the immense scope and complexity of the whole social problem." 112 Thoreau's Impact on Humanitarianism A number of common themes were evident in those early publications on Thoreau, and collectively they demonstrated some of the ways in which Thoreau's ideals influenced the emerging Humanitarian philosophy of the 1880s. Reformers like Japp, Jupp, and Salt clearly admired what they saw as Thoreau's unwavering moral consistency, for instance, and they praised his ability to see the unity and interconnectivity of humans, non-human animals, and the natural world. Moreover, most of the early Humanitarian writers were impressed by Thoreau's iconoclastic rejection of social convention, and commended his ability to frame the relationship between nature and human civilization in ways that seemed completely fresh and different. Collectively, these major themes the interconnectivity of terrestrial life, the importance of moral consistency, and the need for new ways of thinking about humanity's place in the larger world comprised the basic foundation upon which the rest of Humanitarianism would be built. These ideas were especially influential in solidifying Humanitarian attitudes toward non-human animals and ethical vegetarianism, and along with Shelley's earlier work they shaped the literary half of the Romantic materialist hermeneutic through which the early Humanitarians saw their world Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 292. Salt also wrote that "[i]n Thoreau the social instinct was deficient or undeveloped," adding that "he was not, like Emerson, a philosopher of wide far-reaching sympathies and cautious judicial temperament" (293). 113 In addition to turning to Thoreau for inspiration and confirmation of their own emergent philosophy, Thoreau's early Humanitarian advocates specifically sought to rehabilitate his 68

74 69 Early Humanitarians were fascinated by Thoreau's emphasis on the benefits of simple living and self-reliance, and embraced these concepts as a validation of their own suspicions about the corrupting influence of modern society. In addition to offering explanations for the origins of many of the social injustices and inequalities the Humanitarians sought to remedy, Thoreau's writings about simplification also appeared to offer practical methods for solving them by addressing their underlying economic and social causes. This only broadened Thoreau's appeal to reformers like Edward Carpenter and Henry Salt, who were already critical of what they saw as an increasingly materialistic and status-oriented culture. In 1884 Edward Carpenter published an article in the socialist journal To-Day condemning the corruption of British society and suggesting that the working classes might at least partially mitigate their deteriorating economic conditions (and achieve greater social and political independence along the way) by adopting Thoreauvian practices of simplification instead of vainly striving to reputation among their fellow Britons. They especially wanted to counter the perception that Thoreau was merely an irrelevant, antisocial recluse. In his 1878 biography, for instance, Alexander Japp underscored Thoreau's fierce opposition to slavery. Aware that Thoreau had been criticized for defending John Brown after his violent raid on Harper's Ferry, Japp used the episode to instead highlight Thoreau's readiness "to return on the simplest principles of right and defend them," regardless of legal constraints or public opinion. Moreover, Japp argued that Thoreau had a "real interest in humanity and in human affairs," an attempt to neutralize charges that Thoreau was "a morbid egotist, a sentimentalist, a solitary." Henry Salt likewise acknowledged that Thoreau was widely misunderstood as a "hermit and misanthrope," but countered that Thoreau was in fact "one of the most remarkable and original characters that America has yet produced." They succeeded in converting at least one of their countrymen: in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson who had strongly criticized Thoreau in his influential 1880 essay "Thoreau, His Character and Opinions" recanted his earlier words, writing that Alexander Japp's biography of Thoreau "added to my knowledge, and with the same blow fairly demolished that part of my criticism." H. A. Page [Alexander Hay Japp], Thoreau: His Life and Aims (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), 108; Henry S. Salt, "Henry D. Thoreau," Temple Bar 78 (Dec. 1886), 369, ; Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1886, reprint: New York: Current Literature Publishing, 1909), xvi-xvii. 69

75 70 achieve some illusory upper-class "ideal" of living. 114 Carpenter, who like many other early Humanitarians had close ties to socialism, had become convinced that many of the ills then plaguing Western society were the result of a degeneration from a simple, more natural human state into a complex form of material exploitation driven by capitalism. 115 Thoreau's belief that living simply and closer to nature was the antidote for many modern social problems also appealed to Henry Salt, who praised the creed, rooted in the transcendentalism of the 1840s, that "men should endeavor to revert, as much as possible, from an artificial to a simple mode of living." The most efficacious means "for the correction of popular delusions," Salt added, was Thoreau's insistence on "the independence of the individual mind, and those simple, practical modes of living which alone can keep a man independent." 116 Humanitarians also saw in Thoreau a novel and inherently modern type of thinker, one willing to break with the ossified traditions of the past and formulate a more holistic vision that balanced the needs of nature and humanity, and of science and spirituality. In a later article on Thoreau, William Jupp provided one of the clearest demonstrations of the Humanitarians' Romantic Materialist hermeneutic when he 114 Edward Carpenter, "Social Ideal of England," To-Day: The Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism 1 (May 1884), 321. This article was reprinted a year later as a pamphlet titled England's Ideal (Manchester and London: John Heywood, 1885), and expanded to a book-length collection of essays in See Edward Carpenter, England's Ideal: and Other Papers on Social Subjects (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1887). This foray into writing about social reform, Carpenter later explained, was a direct consequence of his reading Walden and the subsequent realization that "some move in that direction, and some propaganda on the subject, was really needed." See Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, Christopher E. Shaw, Shaw identifies Shelley, of course, among Carpenter's other influences, as well as a number of figures admired by Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians like John Ruskin and Arthur Schopenhauer. 116 Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 61,

76 71 welcomed the representatives of this "new order," the appearance of the "poet-naturalist" who deftly drew from science and poetry alike and could reveal in "Nature a depth and richness we can hardly prize too well." 117 In Jupp's calculus, Thoreau as well as later devotees like Edward Carpenter and others who had begun to adopt Thoreauvian precepts during the 1880s and 1890s represented an entirely new way of approaching social reform, individuals who, abetted by advances in science and broad cultural shifts regarding religion, offered fresh approaches to solving the problems of inequality and suffering which had come to define and dominate Western society. Moreover, Jupp saw these "new" thinkers as part of a longer continuum of progressive thought stretching back to the radicalism embodied by the French Revolution and the Romantic poets, whose ideas had briefly flourished before being thwarted by the "dark decades of political reaction and repression" during the mid-nineteenth century. This suggestion of an unbroken, century-old chain linking Shelleyan romanticism, Thoreauvian naturalism, and their own new ideas about social reform and nature was further articulated in Jupp's autobiography: The advance of science and the collapse of old beliefs and superstitions which, under the name of authority and religion, had so long oppressed the human mind, were also great factors in the changing world of ideas and hopes. And now these "new" men took up the message which Blake and Wordsworth and Shelley had uttered, and translated it into the language of their own day, giving it a vaster significance and a mightier impulse, in the light of that large, clear freedom which their forerunners had helped win and make possible for them W. J. Jupp, "The Poet-Naturalists: 1. Henry David Thoreau," Great Thoughts 4 (January 1895), Jupp, Wayfarings,

77 72 Other Humanitarians similarly drew distinctions between traditional conceptions of nature and Thoreau's new ways of thinking, including his role in changing attitudes regarding the study of natural history. One Humanitarian observed that the "old style" of studying nature in which learning about wild animals meant stalking, killing, and mounting them was already giving way to a more modern and humane approach that treated animals "not as potential corpses, but as living embodiments of nature's will." Among all the early pioneers of this fundamental shift, the author continued, "none is more remarkable than Henry David Thoreau," since for him "there was no yawning gulf between human and non-human; indeed, he so anticipated, in his poetical fashion, the evolutionary doctrines of a later era." 119 This "new" thinking was directly linked to the third and most profound of Thoreau's many influences on the development of Humanitarianism: the ways in which his nearly mystical appreciation for the natural world especially the concomitant understanding of the entwined and interconnected nature of all living things affected Humanitarian attitudes and beliefs about the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. As early as 1886 Henry Salt had pointed to the chapter in Walden titled "Higher Laws," explaining that Thoreau had appreciated the moral connections between human social justice and human attitudes toward their non-human relatives. Salt first explored the strength of Thoreau's moral convictions, citing both his fierce opposition to slavery and his objections to the Mexican-American War. According to Salt, 119 "Henry David Thoreau: And the Humane Study of Natural History," Humane Review 4 (Oct. 1903), , 223. Though the article is unattributed, it is almost certainly the work of editor Henry Salt. In addition to touching on several aspects of Thoreau's doctrines that Salt had written about elsewhere, Salt's Life of Henry David Thoreau is curiously absent from the short bibliography of available works appearing in a footnote on page

78 73 however, these were but examples of a broader and more advanced system of ethical thinking that "went much further," one in which Thoreau's "humanity was shown not only in his relations to men, but also in his dealings with the lower animals." 120 Humanitarians were especially intrigued by Thoreau's willingness to conceive of nonhuman animals not in terms of their potential utility or liability for human enterprise, but rather as fellow living beings worthy of consideration and respect. "Humanity to animals was one of the most conspicuous virtues in Thoreau's character," according to Salt, who had been struck by Thoreau's "sense of brotherhood" with other living beings, particularly his recognition of the individual character and intrinsic value possessed by members of the "non-human no less than the human race." 121 Thoreau's encounters with the wild animals inhabiting the woods and waterways of Massachusetts thus had special appeal for Humanitarians, who could barely conceal their reverence for his ability to connect with other living things on what seemed to be such a deeply spiritual level. In his 1878 biography Alexander Japp explicitly compared Thoreau to St. Francis of Assisi, writing of Thoreau's sympathy to all living creatures stemming from a belief that non-human animals were not but mere features of the natural landscape but more like "rudimentary men" who must simply "await their transformation." 122 Henry Salt also drew favorable parallels between the naturalist and the saint, adding that "certainly Thoreau may claim the honour of having approached nearest in modern times to that sense of perfect brotherhood and sympathy with all 120 Henry S. Salt, "Henry D. Thoreau," Temple Bar 78 (Nov. 1886), Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1890), Page, Thoreau: His Life and Aims, 49, 62,

79 74 innocent creatures." 123 A special favorite of Humanitarians was the tale of Thoreau's casually reaching into the Concord River and pulling out a large fish, which did not try to escape but instead "lay as contentedly in his hand as if they were old acquaintances." 124 Finally, Thoreau's sense of kinship between humans and non-human animals strongly influenced Humanitarian attitudes about the ethical dimension of diet. Thoreau was himself ambivalent and at times contradictory about vegetarianism, and there is little evidence to suggest that he adhered to a meatless diet with regularity or for any extended period. Still, Thoreau devoted a substantial portion of the "Higher Laws" chapter in Walden to his musings on the links between nature, animals, and human dietary custom. He wrote, for instance, that humans instinctively felt a "repugnance to animal food," and even suggested that "every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food." In those same pages, however, he also boasted that he "could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary," and claimed that whatever humans consumed as food was not nearly as important as how it was eaten, arguing against a "devotion to sensual savors." 125 Humanitarians nonetheless were able to interpret Thoreau's words in ways that allowed them to highlight his apparent endorsement of vegetarianism while playing down 123 Salt, "Henry D. Thoreau," This story was included in the biographies of Thoreau by both Henry Salt and Alexander Japp, for instance. Its origins were in a short piece by abolitionist and ethical society leader Moncure Conway published in See Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, 100; Page, Thoreau: His Life and Aims, 55-56; and Moncure D. Conway, "To the President of the United States," in The Golden Hour (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1862), Henry D. Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (Boston, Ticknor & Sons, 1854; reprint Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897),

80 75 the reasons he did not follow it. Henry Salt, for instance, related how Thoreau "laughs at the farmer who tells him that it is not possible to live on vegetable food alone" while dryly observing that the very ox pulling him and his plow obtained his strength solely from plants. When the entire chapter was considered Salt concluded that Thoreau was indeed "very strongly in favour of a purely vegetarian diet as being at once more cleanly, more economical, and more moral than the usual system of flesh-food," and ended by citing what has subsequently become by far the most well-known statement by Thoreau on the matter. "'Whatever my own practices may be,'" Salt quoted from Walden, "'I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.'" 126 Interestingly, while Salt at one point claimed that it was Thoreau's "habit to eat no flesh," he readily admitted that Thoreau "was not a consistent vegetarian." Salt accounted for this apparent contradiction by suggesting that Thoreau himself was aware of an almost Manichean dualism existing between his own "higher and more spiritual" instinct and his tendency toward "a primitive and savage state." For Salt, however, Thoreau's simultaneous advocacy of a vegetarian diet and demonstrated inability to adhere to it was not a liability. Instead, it served to humanize him, only adding to the moral authority underlying his prediction of the same vegetarian future that the Humanitarians were working hard to achieve. The ability to include Thoreau among the established vegetarian canon of the late nineteenth century appealed to Howard Williams as well. Although he had not counted 126 Henry S. Salt, "Henry D. Thoreau," Salt called this particular quotation "Thoreau's testimony to that particular brand of the humanitarian movement which claims that without it no other can in itself be logical or consistent." 75

81 76 the naturalist among his list of historical vegetarians in the 1883 first edition of The Ethics of Diet, Thoreau was one of the nine additional vegetarian pioneers added for the revised 1896 edition. 127 Williams, like Salt before him, took deliberate pains to present an accurate assessment of Thoreau's occasionally inconsistent dietary habits, pointing out that he never espoused "any distinct philosophy of Compassion," and that the Transcendentalist philosophy of Thoreau's contemporaries like Emerson did not, in fact, imply "transcending the materialist diet." Still, Williams admired Thoreau's idealism, individualism, and love of nature, and despite his occasional ethical "inconsistencies," Williams agreed that he was indeed "one of the humanest of modern writers." Williams suggested that Thoreau's time at Walden Pond left him especially sympathetic to animals, and that if later in life he was not quite a practicing vegetarian, he at least had become "practically a food reformer." Citing the frequently quoted passage from Walden, Williams claimed that by the time of his death, Thoreau had left no doubt regarding his "final verdict in favour of abstinence from flesh." Williams, The Ethics of Diet: A Biographical History of the Literature of Humane Dietetics, from the Earliest Period to the Present Day (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1896). Besides Thoreau, the eight new historical vegetarian "authorities" were: Sakya Muni (Siddhartha Buddha); Latin poet Empedoklês; Asoka (seventh century King of Behar); seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith; German economist and physical fitness pioneer Wilhelm Zimmerman; founder of the German Vegetarian Society Eduard Balzer; bombastic German composer Richard Wagner; and physician and anti-vivisectionist Anna Kingsford. 128 Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory to the Practice of Flesh-Eating, Illinois ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003),

82 77 Thoreau's Humanitarian Legacy Finally, one of the more intriguing legacies of the Humanitarian fascination with Thoreau surfaced many years later, long after the Humanitarian League had disbanded and its reforming energies had dissipated. Writing in 1930, Henry Salt related with subdued but obvious pride a portion of his correspondence with Mohandas Gandhi from the previous year. By this time Gandhi was already well known for his work with the Indian National Congress, and he was less than a year away from achieving wider international attention through both the celebration of India's first Independence Day in January, 1930, and his "Salt March" from Ahmedabad to Dandi the following spring. 129 After seeing a reference to his own 1886 book A Plea for Vegetarianism in the English translation of Gandhi's 1927 autobiography, Salt wrote him a letter in September, 1929, inquiring about his familiarity with Thoreau. Gandhi replied the following month, explaining that he had first encountered Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" around "The essay seemed to be so convincing and truthful that I felt the need of knowing more about Thoreau," Gandhi explained, "and I came across your Life of him, his Walden, and other essays, all of which I read with great pleasure and equal profit." 130 Though it is hard to determine the extent to which Salt's biography of Thoreau influenced Gandhi, it is 129 For a contemporaneous account of the Salt March or Salt Satyagraha, see H. S. L. Polak, Mahatma Gandhi: The Man and His Mission (Madras: Natesan, 1931), Henry S. Salt to Mohandas K. Gandhi, Sept. 18, 1929 and Mohandas K. Gandhi to Henry S. Salt, Oct. 12, 1929, in Henry S. Salt, Company I Have Kept (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), ; excerpts of these letters can also be found in George Hendrick, Henry Salt: Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977),

83 78 clear that Salt served, in at least some capacity, as a link between the two. 131 Regardless of exactly how strong this link may or may not have been, it is similarly evident that Salt closely followed the news of Gandhi's Indian independence movement during the late 1920s and 1930s, and saw in it Thoreau's imprint. Gandhi had "put the Civil Disobedience principles into practice with some effect!" Salt observed a month after receiving a reply to his letter, adding that "Thoreau would have been flattered, had he foreseen." 132 Other Literary Influences Though the legacies of Shelley and Thoreau were clearly the dominant literary influences on the ideals of the Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian movements, several other writers left a less pronounced but still tangible mark. Three nineteenth-century writers in particular essayist Thomas De Quincey, novelist and essayist Richard Jefferies, and poet James Thomson had the most substantial impact, though their influence was less direct and their advocacy of vegetarianism, if any, was less integral to 131 George Hendrick suggests that Salt was a "vital link in the transmission of information about Thoreau to Gandhi." Some scholars note, however, that Gandhi himself denied being influenced at least by Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," pointing out that his advocacy of "resistance to authority" and usage of the word "satyagraha" were in place before he had ever read the essay. Still, Gandhi referred to Thoreau's piece at other times as a "masterly treatise" and "a great essay," and substantial evidence exists that Thoreau did, indeed have a profound impact on Gandhi's doctrines and philosophies. See George Hendrick, "The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' on Gandhi's Satyagraha," New England Quarterly 29 (Dec. 1956), pp ; and V. V. Ramana Murti, "Influence of the Western Tradition on Gandhian Doctrine," Philosophy East and West 18 (Jan.-April 1968), pp Henry S. Salt to Raymond Adams, November 8, 1929, quoted in George Hendrick, Willene Hendrick, and Fritz Oehlschlaeger, introduction to Life of Henry David Thoreau by Henry S. Salt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. xxix. Later, Salt wrote "I should have liked to hear what Thoreau would have said of the present situation in India" and that he believed "Gandhi was much influenced" by Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience." Salt to Adams, October 10, 1930 and November 22, 1931 (Hendrick, Hendrick, and Oehlschlaeger, p. xxix). 78

84 79 their broader message. Their significance was instead rooted in their naturalistic themes and a shared experience as cultural outsiders, often at odds with the mainstream of British intellectual and social life. Not unexpectedly, the primary evidence of these writers' imprint on Humanitarianism is apparent in the works of Henry Salt, though other reformers occasionally wrote about them as well. In addition to a number of magazine articles, Salt published individual monographs devoted to Thomson, De Quincey, and Jefferies between 1889 and 1904, each generally a combination of sympathetic biography and appreciative literary criticism. In his 1921 autobiography, Salt included mentions of all three in a chapter titled "Voices Crying in the Wilderness," using them as examples of the types of "impassioned writers, poets or poet-naturalists" whom he saw as "harbingers of a higher social state." 133 Their writings simultaneously appealed to both Salt's fundamental reverence for nature and his personal and professional interest in literature, especially poetry. Perhaps nearly as importantly, these writers appealed to Salt's identification with society's "outcasts and unrespectables," and reading (and writing about) them may have helped him come to terms with his own considerable distance from the mainstream of British thought. 134 Edward Carpenter, for one, recognized and appreciated both the contributions these authors made to Salt's ideals and his ability to adapt their individual themes to the Humanitarian vision. Salt's books on Thoreau, Thomson, De Quincey, and Jefferies, Carpenter wrote, demonstrated "the trend of his mind and his liberating 133 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, Hendrick, Henry Salt: Humanitarian and Man of Letters,

85 80 influence in the matters of religion and social freedom and a large-minded Naturestudy." 135 James Thomson The first of Salt's literary biographies was his study of the James Thomson, written at the urging of the poet's friend Bertram Dobell and published in At first glance Thomson best known for profoundly bleak works like his 1874 poem "The City of the Dreadful Night" and his struggles with depression and alcoholism would appear an unlikely source of inspiration for Salt or other early Humanitarians. 137 Dobell himself, for instance, later called Thomson "the laureate of pessimism," a moniker most turn-of-the-century critics would have agreed with. 138 Yet Salt found much to admire in Thomson's life and written work, tracing connections to other revered literary figures and 135 Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, Four years earlier, Salt had published a magazine article on Thomson, though it was primarily a critical assessment of his poetry rather than a biography or general appreciation. See Henry S. Salt, "The Works of James Thomson ('B. V.')," Gentleman's Magazine 36 (June 1885), There were actually two British poets that shared the name James Thomson. The first ( , from Ednam, Scotland) was best known for his work "The Seasons." Interestingly, Howard Williams included a short entry on this Thomson in The Ethics of Diet, calling him "the first amongst modern poets to denounce the manifold wrongs inflicted upon the subject species, and in particular, the savagery inseparable from the Slaughter-House." The second James Thomson the subject of Henry Salt's biography was born in 1834 and died in In an effort to distinguish himself from the earlier poet he adopted the pen name Bysshe Vanolis (usually shortened to "B. V."), a combination of Percy Shelley's middle name and an anagram of Novalis, the pseudonym of the German Romantic writer Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. See Williams, The Ethics of Diet, 135; and Bertram Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism: A Sketch of the Life and Character of James Thomson ("B. V.") (London: published by the author), This was indeed the title of Dobell's 1910 biography of Thomson. For a (somewhat) more recent exploration of the origins and validity of Thomson's reputation, see William David Schaefer, James Thomson (B.V.): Beyond "The City" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 80

86 81 arguing that at least in part "it was on Thomson's shoulders that the mantle of Shelley descended." Acknowledging Thomson's reputed pessimism, Salt also praised the poet for being, "by virtue of his indomitable courage and love of truth, one of the inspired voices of democracy." 139 Salt considered Thomson, like Shelley, something of an ideological forebear. In his biography, Salt pointed to the poet's atheism, his sympathy for "the downtrodden victims of social injustice," and his condemnation of contemporary politics, especially "the bellicose spirit of certain modern statesmanship" related to the Crimean War. Moreover, Salt suggested Thomson understood "that true democracy must be rid of other things besides political inequalities" including imperialism and religious intolerance a concept fundamental to the Humanitarian view that all social injustice was entwined and therefore must be addressed as such before reform could be effected. 140 Most intriguingly, though, Salt wrote that Thomson's pessimism was sometimes overstated, and was tempered somewhat by a keen sympathy for all life and a "gentleness and tenderness to suffering fellow-beings." 141 In his 1857 "The Happy Poet," for example, Thomson hinted at the Humanitarian ideal of interspecies unity and equality: The birds rejoice in singing for my joy, And shaking sunshine thro' the clustered leaves: A brain that never plotteth them annoy, A heart that loves them and their injury grieves, Swift bird and beast and jewelled insect free 139 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, Henry S. Salt, The Life of James Thomson ("B. V."), rev. ed. (London: A. & H. Bonner, 1898), Ibid.,

87 82 Full well can trust; one brotherhood are we. 142 This dimension of the poet's thinking, Salt argued, evinced a philosophy in which "compassion is made the principle of moral action," and suggested that Thomson's habitual gloominess was more akin to the "benevolent sadness of Buddha" than a representation of cynicism or bitterness. Ultimately, Salt concluded, Thomson possessed "that strong sense of humanity which lies at the back of all really memorable literature," and solidified his status as a progenitor of Humanitarianism. 143 Richard Jefferies Henry Salt became interested in Richard Jefferies, along with Thoreau and English naturalist John Burroughs, soon after he left Eton in Jefferies had only recently achieved some initial renown, beginning with his collections of essays on British country life such as The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) and Wild Life in a Southern County (1879). Although his writing career was limited to roughly a decade (he died in 1887 at the age of 38), Jefferies explored other literary forms as well, including children's books (Wood Magic: A Fable), autobiography (The Story of My Heart), and the 1885 novel After London, in which the city was destroyed by a catastrophe and subsequently reverted to a natural state. 145 All were united by his affection for the English countryside and its 142 James Thomson ("B. V."), "The Happy Poet," in A Voice from the Nile and Other Poems (London: Reeves & Turner, 1884), Salt, The Life of James Thomson ("B. V."), rev. ed., Hendrick, Henry Salt: Humanitarian and Man of Letters, See Richard Jefferies, Wood Magic: A Fable (London: Cassell, 1881); The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography (London: Longman, 1883); and After London, or Wild England (London: Cassell, 1885). For basic biography, see Samuel J. Looker and Crichton Porteous, Richard 82

88 83 inhabitants, a suspicion of civilization and large cities, and an abiding faith that humanity could fulfill its highest potential by forsaking the latter for the former. Writing in 1894, Salt praised Jefferies' "indomitable confidence in the happiness of the future race" and argued that "his genius will indirectly be a great power in the dissemination of a higher ideal." 146 Salt compared Jefferies' work favorably with Thoreau's, calling him "a kindred writer" of the naturalist and indicating that Edward Carpenter was likewise impressed. 147 Others Humanitarians made similar comparisons, as with a 1901 Humane Review article in which Arthur Harvie called Jefferies "our English Thoreau." 148 Another aspect of Jefferies' appeal to Salt and other Humanitarians was his implicit acknowledgement of the psychological similarities between humans and nonhuman animals and some of the traits they shared. Although Jefferies never explicitly argued in favor of vegetarianism or the adoption of any form of rights for animals, he often appeared to be both respectful of their innate mental capacity and sympathetic to their suffering. Describing the relationship rural men have with their animals, for instance, Jefferies wrote in 1880 that a gamekeeper Jefferies: Man of the Fields (London: John Baker, 1964), a particularly sympathetic assessment of Jefferies' life and work, and Brian Taylor, Richard Jefferies (Boston: Twayne, 1982). 146 Henry S. Salt, Richard Jefferies: A Study (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1894), Henry S. Salt to S. A. Jones, Aug In addition to noting Carpenter's appreciation of Jefferies, Salt later compared Carpenter himself favorably to Jefferies. See Salt, Richard Jefferies: A Study, Arthur Harvie, "Richard Jefferies: The Tender Mercies of a Great Naturalist," Humane Review 2 (July 1901), 162. Harvie admitted that due to his uncritical assessment of rural activities like fox and rabbit hunting, much of Jefferies' nature writing might indeed be "difficult for the humanitarian to read." But Harvie also saw a progression toward Humanitarian ideals over the course of Jefferies' short career. "The longer he lives the more sympathetic, the more truly human he becomes," Harvie observed, adding that "it is a matter for rejoicing that his very last set of essays have no trace of inhumanity" (169). 83

89 84 is perfectly certain that they [his dogs] think and reason in the same way as human beings, though of course in a limited degree Most of his class believe, likewise, in the reasoning power of the dog: so do shepherds; and so, too, the labourers who wait on and feed cattle are fully persuaded of their intelligence. Jefferies concluded this piece by contending that the residents of England's countryside thus have a better understanding of the human-animal relation than the educated urban classes, writing, "I have observed that almost all those whose labour lies in the field, and who go down to their business in the green meadows, admit the animal world to a share in the faculty of reason. It is the cabinet thinkers who construct a universe of automatons." 149 In one 1903 article in The Humanitarian, the anonymous author made specific reference to Jefferies, and quoted this last sentence in asserting the Humanitarian argument for the "'rights' for animals." 150 Thomas De Quincey On the surface De Quincey would appear to be, like James Thomson, a curious source of Humanitarian inspiration, as he was best known for his 1821 essay "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." This work was something of a sensation in 149 Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880), "Theology v. Humanity," The Humanitarian 1 (Sept. 1903), 147. This article, an excoriation of the "medieval" attitudes that organized (Christian) religion employed regarding the humananimal relationship, also quotes Ernest Seton Thompson ("We and the beasts are kin Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing in degree only from our own, they surely have their rights") and Dr. Wesley Mills ("Formerly, it was said that the animals cannot reason. Only persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position"). Thompson, a prolific writer and early leader of the Canadian Boy Scouts, left organized scouting in protest of its military bearing and later founded what became the Cub Scouts; Mills was a physiologist at McGill University in Montreal. For the full context of these quotes see Ernest Seton Thompson, Wild Animals I Have Known (1898; reprint, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912), 12-13; and Wesley Mills, The Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence (New York: Macmillan, 1898),

90 85 British literary circles, and it quickly established De Quincey as an important English writer. 151 His active career continued through the early 1850s, and while he published books in 1832 and 1844, his work appeared mostly in the form of articles for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Tait's Magazine. Although the body of De Quincey's work does not appear to have had the same impact on Humanitarian ideals as those of Shelley, Thoreau, or even Richard Jefferies, it did leave an indelible impression on at least a handful of those involved in the establishment of Humanitarianism. Bernard Shaw, for example, once said that aside from their active participation within the "Shelleyan nexus" of the 1880s, it was a "common admiration of De Quincey" that had initially drawn him to Henry Salt and cemented their friendship. 152 As was the case with Thoreau, the earliest major British work on De Quincey was written by Alexander Japp (also under the pseudonym "H. A. Page"). Japp's De Quincey's Life and Writings, first published in 1877, was an attempt to provide a more balanced critical approach to his work, and to counter the prevailing perception of De Quincey as a masterful interpreter of drug-induced fantasies by arguing that he was instead a thoughtful, analytical writer and a keen observer of the real world. In the introduction, Japp portrayed De Quincey as a misunderstood outsider both eminently rational and emotionally sensitive, an individual whose frequent "absorption in his ideal world" was not a symptom of any discontent with the real world, but rather a quality 151 For general biographical information see Judson S. Lyon, Thomas De Quincey (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969) and Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1981). For more on the initial reaction to "Confessions," see Julian North, De Quincey Reviewed: Thomas De Quincey's Critical Reception, , especially Henry S. Salt, "Salt on Shaw," in Winsten, Salt and his Circle,

91 86 "associated with the utmost geniality, patience, [and] a true sympathy with moods and habits the most alien from his own." His naturally sympathetic manner, Japp continued, meant that he was given to "throwing over every creature with whom he comes into close contact the mantle of a gracious tolerance, in which defects were softened or obtrusive faults condoned." 153 De Quincey, in other words, possessed many of the traits a gentle nature, a sort of dreamy idealism coupled with a more pragmatic, analytical side, a sense of outsider status, and a broad tolerance for others that appealed to and inspired the early Humanitarians. De Quincey's personality seemed to veer even closer to the Humanitarian ideal in a piece of correspondence Japp included in the second volume of his biography. In the brief introduction to an 1855 letter to his daughter Margaret, Japp pointed out how the missive demonstrated De Quincey's "relations to the domestic animals, and his sympathy for them in their sufferings." 154 Writing that his pet cat had knocked over a vial of ink on his desk, De Quincey resisted anger and instead pondered the mischievousness of feline nature, musing that whatever trouble cats might cause, they have already been punished "ten thousand times over" by the 'infamous cruelties" perpetuated by humans. 155 Henry Salt, too, was fascinated both by the personality and prose of Thomas De Quincey, and demonstrated this interest in an 1887 article in the British journal Time. Like Japp, Salt believed that De Quincey was largely misunderstood by the public, and 153 H. A. Page [Alexander Hay Japp], Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings, vol. I (London: John Hogg & Co., 1877), Ibid., Thomas De Quincey to Margaret Craig, May, 1855, in Page [Alexander Hay Japp], Thomas De Quincey: His Life and Writings, vol. II,

92 87 used his piece to argue in favor of a more complete and nuanced reading of the essayist, one that looked beyond his narcotic fantasies in order to discover the sensitive proto- Humanitarian within. Duly noting De Quincey's Tory affinities, Salt wrote that those "political sins" might be overlooked in light of his tolerant nature and his fundamental sensitivity to all suffering. According to Salt, De Quincey's "personal sympathies were at all times warm and sincere, for, owing to his own intimacy with poverty and suffering, he was quite free from the least taint of Pharisaism or class prejudice." The "humane aspect" of his personality, Salt continued, compelled him to comfort friendless children and assist the poor, even to the point of "advising some poor family as to the best mode of laying out their scanty wages." Salt also described De Quincey's concern with many of the specific social problems that would soon become part of the Humanitarian agenda. He pointed out De Quincey's interest in the welfare of women, for instance, citing his revulsion to the "brutal spirit of the world" that looked askance as women were forced into prostitution or mine labor out of sheer economic necessity. Salt also noted his opposition to corporal punishment, and even referenced De Quincey feline sympathies in his 1892 Animals' Rights, citing the same letter published in Japp's earlier biography: "'the groans and screams of this poor persecuted race, if gathered into some great echoing hall of horrors, would melt the heart of the stoniest of our race'." 156 In 1904 Salt published another work on the essayist, a short volume that represented his fifth and final book-length study of a nineteenth century literary figure. Using the Time article as the basis for one chapter, Salt filled the rest of the book with 156 Henry S. Salt, "Some Thoughts on De Quincey," Time (Oct. 1887), reprinted in Literary Sketches (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, & Co., 1888), ; Salt, Animals' Rights,

93 88 biographical information on De Quincey and an extended critical examination of "Confessions of an Opium-Eater." His primary argument, however, was the same De Quincey was misunderstood by the public, yet played a small but important role in the development of the Humanitarianism. Salt repeated his assertion that De Quincey's "noble pity for suffering humanity was one of the most striking features" of his character, explaining that this sentiment "lay constantly at the base of his thoughts" and that his subject's essential nature was "a profoundly moral one." Furthermore, and of particular note to Humanitarians, one of De Quincey's "sympathies" expanded upon by Salt for his longer study was his attitude toward non-humans. Although "of zoology he knew little," Salt wrote, "[t]oward the lower animals, too, there is a considerable vein of tenderness in De Quincey's writings." 157 Salt's affection for De Quincey's personality and writing as well as his interest in defending the writer's reputation, both personal and literary continued for the rest of his life. In 1921, Salt wrote that De Quincey had "a profound regard for a suffering humanity" and was "in several respects a pioneer of advanced humanitarian thought," particularly due to his views on topics like corporal punishment and women's issues. Like the other literary figures he admired, Salt considered De Quincey both unfairly judged and significantly ahead of his time, and seemed amused that the opprobrium regarding De Quincey's alleged lack of morality was "written by critics who lag more than a century behind him in some of the matters that afford an unequivocal test of man's advance from barbarism to civilization." 158 Salt devoted an entire chapter of his second 157 Henry S. Salt, De Quincey (London: George Bell & Sons, 1904), Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages,

94 89 autobiography to the essayist, writing that for "De Quincey as a prose writer I have long felt the same sort of affectionate respect as for Shelley among poets; inasmuch as he not only possessed the highest distinction of style, but showed a singularly gentle and kindly outlook on life." Salt had begun a correspondence with De Quincey's daughter Emily following the publication of his 1904 book, and much of the rest of the chapter consists of excerpts from her letters, carefully chosen for their ability to validate the existence of a side of her father she knew well and that Salt had long insisted was there. 159 Other Writers Various literary threads were woven deep into the fabric of Humanitarianism, with the work of a small core of poets, novelists, and essayists providing the nascent movement with both a set of ideological touchstones and a shared culture that served to unite its advocates. While the imprint of Shelley, Thoreau, Thomson, Jefferies, and De Quincey was obvious, several other figures had a more subtle influence. Among this "second tier" was the English writer George Meredith, whose poetry published in books with titles like Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883) and A Reading of Earth (1888) evinced the naturalistic themes that proved so appealing to Humanitarian reformers. Many of Meredith's verses on nature appeared during the formative years of the Humanitarian movement, and had great appeal to the early reformers. In "Earth's Secret," for instance, Meredith visited the theme of urban corruption and the possibility of redemption through nature, writing that the "key" to understanding the world's mysteries is not found among the "turbid cities" in which "the troubled passions toss the 159 Salt, Company I Have Kept,

95 90 mind," but rather through wandering amidst the natural beauty of the countryside. 160 Henry Salt, who like Meredith lived in rural Surrey, corresponded with the older writer occasionally during the early 1890s and even called on him a few times to discuss their mutual admiration for James Thomson. 161 In 1904 Salt praised Meredith for being "naturalist and novelist in one," explaining that "the gospel which he preaches may be not inaptly summed up as 'a return to nature'." 162 Another lesser but nonetheless discernable early influence on several early Humanitarians was John Ruskin. Beginning in the 1840s Ruskin became widely known as a writer, cultural commentator, and critic of art and architecture often advocating an aesthetic emphasizing a Romantic naturalism though he turned his attention more to politics and issues of social and economic justice as the century progressed. Edward Carpenter credited Ruskin for shaping the "style and moral bias" of the essays in his own 1887 collection England's Ideal, and two years later similarly acknowledged Ruskin's contributions to his argument in favor of a new and more humane study of science. 163 Two early encounters with Ruskin likewise left their mark on a young Henry Salt. While still a master at Eton, Salt was very impressed by a lecture given by Ruskin, later praising his "lucid train of thought" and writing that he was "by far superior to the rest" of the 160 George Meredith, "Earth's Secret," in Selected Poems of George Meredith (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897), Henry S. Salt to S. A. Jones, August 3, The admiration for Thomson apparently ran in both directions Salt called him one of Meredith's "earliest and most sympathetic" admirers, and Meredith assisted Salt with his book on Thomson. See Henry S. Salt, "Nature-Lessons from George Meredith," Humane Review 4 (Jan. 1904), Henry S. Salt, "Nature-Lessons from George Meredith," Humane Review 4 (Jan. 1904), Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, ; Edward Carpenter, Civilisation: Its Causes and Cure (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889),

96 91 distinguished guest speakers Salt had heard at the school. 164 In the winter of , Salt encountered Ruskin while walking alone in the countryside and admiring the results of a recent cold snap that had "turned the Lakeland mountains into a strange realm of enchantment." Though he did not engage Ruskin in conversation at the time, Salt met with him a few days later and listened intently as Ruskin described his "veneration" of the natural landscape and his frustration that the pollution from copper mines often obscured his view of the sunset over the mountains. 165 As the principles of the Humanitarian movement solidified over the ensuing decades Ruskin's stature among reformers grew, and in 1902 he was named alongside Shelley, Richard Wagner, and Leo Tolstoy as one of the four subjects of a Humanitarian League lecture series devoted to the "pioneers" of their cause. In a companion piece published that spring in the Humane Review, William Jupp cited Ruskin for his intellectual contributions to Humanitarianism, particularly his ideas about the political economy and the relationship between inequality and social class. Jupp concluded by suggesting that a widespread acceptance of Ruskin's theories of reform would only expedite the arrival of the society that Humanitarians hoped for, one in which "justice and love shall prosper, and the fair brotherhood of man be established in truth and happiness on the earth." Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, 52. Salt noted that Eton was often stiflingly conservative and inhospitable to new ideas William Morris, for example, was hissed at when, during a lecture, he began discussing socialism and was thus particularly struck by Ruskin's ability to "hold enchanted an audience, even of Eton boys, for the full space of an hour" (52-53). 165 Ibid., "Notes," Humane Review 2 (Jan. 1902), 337; W. J. Jupp, "Ruskin as Pioneer," Humane Review 3 (April, 1902), 15. The "Pioneers of Humanitarianism" lectures were, at least in part, something of a public relations exercise on the part of reformers, a program designed to assert or reclaim the 91

97 92 Conclusion The Humanitarian movement and its ethical vegetarian component had strong philosophical and practical roots in several aspects of American and British culture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, including socialist politics, advances in science, and the reforming impulses that nurtured contemporary movements as diverse as women's suffrage and antivivisectionism. Literary sources, however, were among the most profound influences on the development of Humanitarianism during the 1880s. Especially in Britain, many of the early Humanitarian reformers had backgrounds in writing and literary criticism, were typically well-read, and benefited from elite educations and associations that were established and nurtured in London's literary circles. The collective oeuvres of literary forbears like Shelley and Thoreau thus provided an important intellectual common ground, and often served as a focal point of the discussion, debate, and exchange of ideas around which the inchoate movement could coalesce and strengthen. More importantly, though, the lives and works of writers like Percy Shelley and Henry David Thoreau, especially when combined with contemporary developments in scientific fields like evolutionary biology, directly led to the development of the Romantic materialist hermeneutic through which Humanitarians understood the world around them and that in turn shaped their strategies for reform. Themes such as the transformative power of nature and the extensive web of connections linking humans, Humanitarian aspects of these literary and cultural figures' work in the face of what they saw as widespread misunderstanding or even willful ignorance. "The fact that critics and biographers, in treating of the writings and lives of great men, almost always depreciate or wholly ignore any humanitarian tendencies as a mere whim or eccentricity," the original announcement read, "makes it the more necessary that this bias should be rectified by such a lecture-course as that of which we speak" (367). 92

98 93 animals, and the rest of the natural world contributed significantly to the basic ideological framework of Humanitarianism, shaped the ways in which Humanitarians understood specific social problems, and pointed to some of the potential avenues for ameliorating them. Although elements of these writers' biographies or written output appeared occasionally to conflict with or even contradict the stated ideas or aims of the Humanitarians Thoreau's apparent lack of interest in explicit social reform, for example, or Jefferies' fondness for fox hunting many reformers found these figures inspirational on a basic human level, and often appeared to identify with their status as misunderstood cultural outsiders who were, perhaps, just a little ahead of their time. Indeed, for many Humanitarians, Shelley and Thoreau in particular were nothing short of prophets, true visionaries who understood and anticipated many of the injustices the reformers were seeking to rectify, figures of moral authority who could lend to their cause not only a certain celebrity imprimatur, but a solid ethical heft as well. Less than a year before he began circulating the manifesto of the Humanitarian League in 1891, Henry Salt eloquently summed up their lasting influence in a letter: Believe me that when Shelley is rightly understood (as he cannot be under our existing system of morality which is really immorality), he will be recognised as one of the truly great characters of this century the poet without an equal since Shakespeare, and one of the most clear-sighted prophets of social reform. Unlike as he is to Thoreau in many ways, they are alike in this, that both were champions of the great humanitarian movement which will be the religion of the future, and both have that unspeakable tenderness which is for ever misunderstood by the mere critic, but endears them beyond all expression to those who are in sympathy Henry S. Salt to S. A. Jones, June 30, Emphasis is in the original. 93

99 94 CHAPTER 3 ESTABLISHING THE UNIVERSAL KINSHIP: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF HUMANITARIANISM Introduction The influence of Shelley, Thoreau, and other literary figures allowed the early Humanitarians to begin tracing the contours of a broad social reform agenda emphasizing equality, the need to live in harmony with nature, and the web of interests connecting humans to other humans and to non-human animals. Because of the personal, subjective nature of its roots, however, reformers worried that this coalescing set of values lacked the intellectual weight necessary to convince skeptics of its ideological soundness or wider relevance. It was the latter part of their Romantic materialist understanding of the world that ultimately provided a solid basis for the Humanitarian reform agenda, primarily in the form of evidence that human evolution followed the same path and resulted from the same mechanisms that guided the evolution of all other animals. These revelations about the nature of human evolution, explicated in Charles Darwin's 1871 The Descent of Man, allowed Humanitarians to ground their Romantic ideals in the objective language of science, and provided a compelling and rational underpinning for the theoretical constructions that Shelley and Thoreau had only hinted at. A number of theories of human evolution had been proposed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Darwin himself had already explained the basic mechanism of evolution through natural selection in his 1859 treatise The Origin of Species. Still, it was only in Descent that he extended these ideas to human evolution. 94

100 95 Through his meticulous observation of animal anatomy and behavior, and their similarities to (and differences from) those of humans, Darwin provided overwhelming scientific evidence to support his contention that humans and animals were products of the same evolutionary forces, the distant offspring of a common ancestor. By this time a steady procession of discoveries by geologists, astronomers, and botanists had already raised doubts about the age of the earth and the biblical chronology of human history, and though these revelations contributed substantially to what Keith Thomas has called the "destruction of the old anthropocentric illusion," they were also gaining acceptance among the educated classes of Europe and North America. 168 In The Descent of Man, Darwin further hastened this destruction, irrevocably blurring the previously unquestioned line separating human from non-human and bringing into question the uniqueness of humankind's "mental and moral attributes." 169 If his theories were correct, humans would need to reassess not only their assumptions regarding their biological relationship with other animals, but their ethical ones as well. With the publication of Descent, Darwin offered convincing evidence of the connection between humans and non-human animals that was at the center of the 168 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, Some of the major discoveries Thomas discusses include geological and fossil evidence from Charles Lyell and others suggesting that the earth was millions, not thousands, of years old, and that "[w]hole species of animals and plants had come into existence, lived, and been obliterated, long before humanity appeared" (168). Peter Bowler cites the discovery of primitive humanoid bones at Engis, Belgium, Gibraltar, and especially the Neander valley in German between 1829 and Thomas Huxley devoted a significant portion of his 1863 book Man's Place in Nature to exploring the significance of the humanoid fossil record, and it represented one of the first major attempts to explain human evolution in Darwinian terms, as well as the relationship between humans and other primates. See Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), especially , and Thomas H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863; reprint, New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1873), Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 229. For an overview of the origins of Darwinism itself, see especially

101 96 naturalistic Shelleyan ethic. Since they demonstrated that humans and other animals shared a common evolutionary history, Darwin's theories also provided Humanitarians a scientific validation of their Romantic impulse to overturn anthropocentrism and restore the proper relationship between humans and the natural world. More specifically for the early Humanitarians, these theories gave substantial weight to their ethical arguments for vegetarianism, and perhaps even for the extension of basic rights to non-humans. If it was true that humans and animals differed not in fundamental kind but merely in degree, they reasoned, would not eating animal flesh then be morally akin to cannibalism, and killing an animal comparable to murder? Furthermore, Darwinian evolution provided reformers with hope for the future. Because evolution was a continual and dynamic process, Humanitarians saw in it the implicit promise that, with the appropriate reforms, human civilization might solve many of its entrenched social problems and progress onward toward the second Golden Age envisioned by Shelley. Despite the towering presence of Darwin and the significance of The Descent of Man, Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians also drew from other Victorian evolutionary research, particularly when it allowed them to underscore the anatomical and psychological bonds between humans and non-human animals. Much of the work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel, for example, seemed to furnish a substantial corroboration of the Humanitarian message. Moreover, reformers discovered that the emerging field of evolutionary psychology provided similarly compelling evidence for their arguments. Expanding on Darwin's observations about animal emotions and mental development in The Descent of Man, researchers such as George Romanes and Edward Payson Evans offered tantalizing clues about the parallels between the mental workings 96

102 97 of humans and animals, and argued that many animals shared the rich palette of emotions experienced by humans. Their work also appeared to promise the most substantial hope yet for finally undermining René Descartes' remarkably durable contention that nonhuman animals were mindless, insensitive automatons. It was one thing, after all, to demonstrate that animals shared physical features and a common evolutionary ancestry with humans. It was quite another to suggest that perhaps they thought like them, too. Reformers understood the ethical implications of these developments in both Darwinian theory and evolutionary psychology, and Humanitarians on both sides of the Atlantic quickly worked them into their agenda for a new type of social reform that sought to remedy injustices to humans and non-human animals alike. Human Evolution and The Descent of Man Humanitarian reformers found The Descent of Man particularly appealing and useful because of Darwin's expansive deliberation on the physical, psychological, and developmental similarities between human and non-human animals. This research itself was spurred by critics of his earlier works, many of whom argued that human intelligence and capacity for abstract thought were unique in the natural world and could not have evolved from simpler animal forms. In response, Darwin devoted the first four chapters of Descent to careful observations of these mutual traits, and the ways in which they support the theory that humans and non-human animals evolved from common ancestors via similar mechanisms. He began by pointing out the homologous anatomical structures shared by animals, including elements of the skeletal and nervous systems, before moving on to 97

103 98 catalog the similarly analogous aspects of embryological development. Darwin also examined vestigial evidence of human evolution, such as the appendix, the sense of smell, and the muscles used for moving the ears or scalp. 170 In the second chapter, he expanded his analysis to explain how millennia of evolution resulted in the diversity of human races, as well as the physical and mental variations within any given population. Darwin illustrated his points by tracing numerous analogies between the human and nonhuman worlds, demonstrating that the same fundamental forces of natural selection appeared to provide the mechanism for the evolution of humans and animals alike. He concluded that the biological variations observable among the global human population were effected by the exact same dynamics that introduced differences among animals. 171 Although Darwin's explanations of these commonalities in anatomy and physical variability were useful to Humanitarian reformers eager to validate their beliefs about the interconnected nature of humans and animals, the following two chapters of Descent offered particularly powerful corroboration for their arguments. Acknowledging the sizeable gulf between the human intellect and any mental abilities animals might demonstrate, Darwin began the third chapter by pointing out that his basic theory of human evolution would unravel if it could be shown that humans alone possessed unique "mental powers." For his overall explanation to work, in other words, he had to demonstrate that human evolution unfolded in precisely the same fashion as that of nonhuman animals, and that the evolutionary forces shaping the minds of both were likewise identical. In the simplest terms, this meant that if humans had demonstrable mental 170 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871), Ibid.,

104 99 abilities then animals must have some version of them as well, while if they were absent in animals then they should be lacking in humans, too. To make this point Darwin noted that the mental capabilities of even "animals very low in the scale are much higher than might have been expected," and that there was "no fundamental difference" in the basic nature of human and animal mental processes but instead a spectrum of "numberless gradations." 172 He rounded out the chapter with dozens of specific examples of animal behavior, all illustrating different points on the spectrum of mental ability and intended to demonstrate that most every human emotion could be identified in the behavior of at least some non-human animals. Darwin also provided instances of animals exhibiting traits including wonder, curiosity, imitation, attention, memory, and imagination, and offered additional evidence that some species appeared to possess abilities traditionally thought to be uniquely human the use of language, the power of reason, a sense of spirituality, and the capacity to appreciate beauty. Some of the higher mammals, he suggested, even occasionally suffered from ennui. 173 In the fourth chapter Darwin continued his examination of the evolutionary roots of human behavior by tracing the development of morality, the one mental characteristic assumed to exist solely among humans. Pausing to remind his readers that the gap between humans and animals was indeed a substantial one, he nonetheless contended not 172 Ibid., Ibid., Darwin wrote that it was exceedingly difficult to ascertain the exact nature of non-human mental ability or thought due to the "impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal." Concerning what is often considered the most uniquely human traits, Darwin admitted that "no animal is self-conscious" if that term is meant to suggest the ability to reflect on one's past, future, or eventual death. Still, he was reluctant to make a blanket statement on the matter, arguing that a dog, for example, might sometimes combine memory and imagination to recall "his past pleasures or pains in the chase." If so, Darwin wrote, this indeed "would be a form of self-consciousness" (86). 99

105 100 only that a form of moral sense was observable in certain animals, but that modern human systems of moral behavior had, in fact, evolved from those in animals. Darwin admitted that many species appeared to offer no evidence of a moral sensibility at all, but he explained this by arguing that the key to the evolution of morality was sociability. Since social animals organize into communities, he reasoned, the forces of natural selection would most likely favor behavior benefiting the entire community rather than any one individual. Over time this would lead to the appearance of what he called the "social instincts," those innate drives to engage in behavior and that would privilege the well-being of the whole social group and reinforce tendencies toward sympathy, altruism, and "self-sacrifice." These social instincts eventually became codes of morality in higher animals, rooted in the need to simultaneously seek the approval of the community and avoid its disapprobation. Perhaps most importantly, at least for Humanitarians, Darwin concluded by explicitly stating that the evolutionary aspects of morality, abetted by the concurrent growth in humans of intellect and habit, "naturally [led] to the golden rule, 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise.'" It is this principle, he wrote, that "lies at the foundation of morality." 174 By demonstrating that humans and animals shared not only physical similarities but the parallel development of emotions and even morality, The Descent of Man helped early Humanitarians to simultaneously explain and validate the more amorphous and subjective ideas about the relationship between humans and nature they had absorbed from their Romantic and Thoreauvian forbears. First, by seriously undermining longheld beliefs that humans were unique, Darwin allowed reformers to attack the anthropocentrism that they saw at the root of so many injustices, whether manifested in 174 Ibid., , ,

106 101 the oppression of one group of humans by another or the exploitation of non-human animals by humans. Moreover, through his sustained argument that all humans and animals shared a common evolutionary lineage and were thus separated not by fundamental differences but rather by subtle variations, Darwin provided the raw material necessary for the development of Humanitarianism as a universal ethic that was applicable to every form of animal life. Darwin's theories also underscored the importance of sympathy and altruism, behavioral traits that informed every aspect of Humanitarian doctrine and were crucial to reformers' vision of effecting broad social change. Indeed, regardless of the terminology whether it was called "the Great Law," for example, or "mutual aid" the precept of the Golden Rule occupied a central position in the Humanitarian philosophy. 175 Finally, through the suggestion that the mechanism of natural selection within human and non-human communities alike was dependent more on cooperation than competition, Descent gave Humanitarians the foundation on which to build a programmatic system of reform emphasizing the social utility of altruism and aid, and a powerful argument against the laissez-faire interpretations of evolution offered by others like the social Darwinists. 175 The "Great Law" was most frequently used by Howard Moore and appeared in several of his works, while "mutual aid" was borrowed from and associated most often with the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. See Moore, The Universal Kinship, ; Moore, The New Ethics (London: George Bell & Sons, 1907), 13-15; and Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: McClure Phillips, 1903). For an overview of Darwin, the Golden Rule, and its application to the natural world see also Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989),

107 102 Recapitulation Theory and Evolutionary Psychology Although Darwin's observations about the similarities between humans and nonhumans in The Descent of Man were at the heart of the Humanitarian ethic, the theories of several other evolutionary scientists also informed their philosophy and validated their basic beliefs about the consanguinity of human and animal life. Among the most influential was recapitulation theory, which stated that the embryonic development of any given animal progresses through the exact same stages as the evolutionary history of its species. 176 Deriving its name from the descriptive phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," the theory appealed to Humanitarians because it seemed to offer conclusive proof of similar evolutionary patterns between humans and non-human animals, and also because it did not require specialized knowledge to understand. Moreover, some versions of recapitulation theory appeared to explain not only the physical evolution of humans and animals, but the development of the mental similarities that Darwin noted in Descent. Also important were early forays into the realm of animal psychology, which provided similar "proof" that there was no obvious line separating human and animal minds, but rather a spectrum of intelligence and abilities. Collectively, the work of scholars such as Ernst Haeckel, George Romanes, and Edward Evans built on the groundwork laid by Darwin, allowing Humanitarians to both strengthen their arguments based on the interconnectivity of animal life, and attempt to dismantle anthropocentric constructions of human uniqueness. 176 Recapitulation theory, while initially influential, fell out of favor among scientists with the acceptance of Mendelian genetics around the turn of the twentieth century, and has since been generally discredited. See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1977),

108 103 Haeckel and Physical Recapitulation German biologist Ernst Haeckel was one of Darwin's most vocal late-nineteenth century supporters, renowned for his own contributions to the biological sciences. 177 He is probably most well known, however, for his theory of physical recapitulation. In his 1866 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen and again in his 1874 Anthropogenie, Haeckel proposed that embryonic recapitulation which he variously called "biogeny," "biogenesis," or the "biogenetic law" provided the most convincing physical evidence of evolution, and offered scientists the remarkable ability to trace a species' entire evolutionary development over the course of just a few months. "The history of the Germ," he explained in Anthropogenie, referring to the embryo, "is an epitome of the History of Descent." 178 Partially due to widespread interest in recapitulation theory, Haeckel enjoyed a substantial popularity among scholars and the general public alike, and his work influenced the broader culture of the period. His monographs, which were 177 Haeckel, who added the words "ecology," "ontogeny," and "phylum" to the scientific vocabulary, also developed the concept of the evolutionary "tree," in which individual species branch off from the larger limbs of their ancestors. Although Haeckel was vociferous in his support of Darwin, he did not necessarily agree that natural selection was the sole mechanism for evolution, and during the latter years of the century he expended a substantial amount of time and energy developing a synthetic explanation for evolution that combined elements of the work of Darwin, Lamarck, and others. Stephen Jay Gould also points out that while Haeckel was "an inveterate coiner of terms," many of his newly-minted words soon fell out of favor and are no longer used. See Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, For additional background information on Haeckel, his impact on nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, and the historical context in which he worked see also Bowler, Evolution: History of an Idea, ; Peter J. Bowler, Life's Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life's Ancestry , 62-87; and Robert C. Stauffer, "Haeckel, Darwin, and Ecology," The Quarterly Review of Biology 32 (June 1957), Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principle Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1903), 6. The Evolution of Man was the English language translation of Anthropogenie. Haeckel went so far as to argue that recapitulation did not merely offer an overview of the evolutionary process, but was indeed the primary causal factor driving it. See Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny,

109 104 widely available in numerous translations, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and historian Robert Richards has suggested that prior to the first World War more people learned about Darwinian principles of evolution from Haeckel than any other single source, including Darwin himself. 179 His particular interpretation of evolutionary theory was therefore the one most commonly encountered by educated Europeans and Americans, including the early Humanitarians. In addition to recapitulation theory, reformers may have also been drawn to Haeckel's gradual move away from a strict scientific materialism and toward a philosophy of monism, which asserted that both mind and matter were essential elements of a single universal substance. 180 Among the Humanitarians acknowledging a debt to recapitulation theory was Chicago high school biology teacher J. Howard Moore, who understood both the import of Haeckel's ideas and the Humanitarian implications of his theories. In his 1906 treatise The Universal Kinship, Moore referenced Haeckel's History of Creation and The Riddle of the Universe alongside the works of Darwin and Huxley, citing recapitulation theory as direct evidence 179 Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle Over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2-3. Richards contrasts Haeckel's nineteenth century book sales to those of Darwin The Origin of Species, for example, sold only 39,000 copies in its six English editions between 1859 and 1890 and notes that by 1912 Die Welträthsel (the title translates variously as "The Riddle of the Universe" or "The World Puzzles") had been translated into 24 languages, including Esperanto. Gould agrees that Haeckel was "even more influential than Darwin in convincing the world of the truth of evolution" and that his impact on Western culture was significant. Both Richards and Gould cite a 1929 overview of the history of biological science when describing Haeckel's popularity and cultural import. See Erik Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1929). 180 Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, 201. While there is no direct evidence that Haeckel's mystical, quasi-religious embrace of monism was itself instrumental in the development of Humanitarian views on the singular and unified nature of all terrestrial animal life, the broad cultural reach of his work among Europe's educated classes suggests that many Humanitarian reformers were almost certainly aware of Haeckel's arguments that matter, mind, and spirit were all parts of a greater whole. 104

110 105 of both Darwinian evolution and the consanguinity at the heart of the Humanitarianism philosophy. "As if to emphasize the kinship of all life's forms and to render incontrovertible the fact of universal evolution," Moore wrote, "Nature compels every individual to commence existence at the same place, and to recapitulate in his individual evolution the phylogenic journeyings of his species." 181 Despite his influence, history has generally not been kind to Haeckel. Partly because many of his contributions to evolutionary science were later discredited, scholars have tended to emphasize his divergence from Darwinian orthodoxy, highlighting his loyalty to Lamarckism or questioning the authenticity of his well-known illustrations of embryonic development. 182 Some have pointed to the historical connections linking Haeckel, social Darwinism, and the origins of eugenics. Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, has written that Haeckel's ideas led in the "tragic direction" of National Socialism, while Daniel Gasman has asserted that Haeckelian theory not only inspired the rise of German Nazism, but was the single greatest influence on fascism in general. 183 Other scholars, 181 Moore, The Universal Kinship, The controversy surrounding the validity of these drawings (which overstate the similarities between the embryos of various species, and which Haeckel himself admitted were drawn from memory rather than direct observation) has since been compounded because advocates of creationism have used Haeckel's alleged fraud to argue against Darwinian evolution. See Elizabeth Pennisi, "Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered," Science n.s. 277 (Sept. 1997), For an overview of the nineteenth century origins of the questions surrounding Haeckel's drawings, see Nick Hopwood, "Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel's Embryonic Illustrations," Isis 97 (June 2006), Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 77; Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (London: MacDonald, 1971); and Daniel Gasman, Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). Lynn K. Nyhart calls Gasman's book both the most readily available English-language source on the subject and "notoriously polemical." See Lynn K. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 342n3. Daniel Weikart has also written extensively on this topic; see From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism 105

111 106 however, have argued that Haeckel's views in fact ran contrary to conventional interpretations of social Darwinism, and emphasize the need to situate any analysis of Haeckel within the proper cultural framework of nineteenth century German thought. Robert J. Roberts has pointed out that context is particularly important for understanding Haeckel's theories, citing his intellectual roots in distinctly German phenomena like Goethe's continental Romanticism and the tradition of Naturphilosophie. 184 Paul Weindling, meanwhile, has noted that Haeckel's interpretation of natural selection was not based on a "pessimistic philosophy of purposeless" interspecies conflict, but in fact reflected a deep appreciation for the unified nature of all living things, a monistic worldview "in which even the most minute beings reveal beauty, harmonious order and the germs of intellectual and social life." This way of seeing the world, according to Weindling, demonstrated "how the facts of nature were relevant to the most pressing social and ethical problems of the day," an idea that was similarly crucial to the development of Humanitarianism. 185 in Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For a historiographic overview of the debate over Haeckel's role in the history of Nazism see Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (1971. Reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), xi-xxviii. 184 Robert J. Richards, The Foundation of Ernst Haeckel s Evolutionary Project in Morphology, Aesthetics, and Tragedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Richards also suggests that personal tragedies, like the early death of his wife, had a profound effect on Haeckel's worldview. 185 Paul Weindling, "Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus and the Secularisation of Nature," in James R. Moore, ed., History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

112 107 Romanes and Mental Recapitulation If Haeckel helped to influence the coalescing set of Humanitarian values through his theories of evolution and embryology, the work of George John Romanes provided an even stronger scientific validation. Romanes, a Cambridge-educated evolutionary biologist who had befriended Darwin and Huxley early in his relatively short career, also sought to make the connections between ontogeny and philology. While Haeckel focused on a theory of physical recapitulation, Romanes worked to establish a concurrent psychological or mental association. Like Darwin and Haeckel, Romanes never specifically endorsed Humanitarianism, and his correspondence with Darwin indicated a shared contempt for anti-vivisectionists or others seeking to place limits on scientific inquiry. 186 Though he also published ten book-length studies and frequently contributed articles on biology, evolution, and natural history to general interest magazines such as the Nineteenth Century and the North American Review, his influence on the evolutionary arguments employed by Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians came mostly from three major works published over an eight-year span that corresponded with the formative years of the Humanitarian movement. 187 In Animal Intelligence (1881), Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), and Mental Evolution in Man (1888), Romanes laid out a theory of 186 In an 1876 letter to Darwin, for example, Romanes refers to the ongoing fight between scientists and anti-vivisectionists, writing that the "heat of battle is not the time for us to expect fanatics to listen to 'sense.'" It is a theme revisited on numerous occasions in their communication. See George John Romanes, The Life and Letters of George John Romanes, sixth edition, edited by Ethel Romanes (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), especially 53, 62, 121, An eleventh book, Thoughts on Religion, was published posthumously in Many of the shorter pieces were collected in an anthology published in 1897, including the articles "The Darwinian Theory of Instinct," "Man and Brute," "Mind in Men and Animals," and "Origin of Human Faculty." See George John Romanes, Essays (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897). 107

113 108 mental recapitulation that paralleled Haeckel's theory of embryonic recapitulation, and used his research in animal and human psychology to draw a number of conclusions that proved particularly interesting and useful to early Humanitarian thinkers. In Animal Intelligence, for instance, Romanes argued that the mental processes of non-human animals were analogous to those of humans, and that in the broad spectrum of mental abilities there was no evidence of any sharp line of demarcation separating those of humans and animals. Comparing the mental development and behavior of a range of animals from single-celled organisms to apes to humans of different ages, Romanes concluded that "[w]hether we look to the growing child or to the ascending scale of animal life, we find that instinct shades into reason by imperceptible degrees," an observation, he pointed out, that was precisely what Darwinian theory would predict. 188 Romanes expanded on these ideas in the following two books, focusing more clearly on the differences between instinct and emotion and explaining how these mental phenomena were shaped by evolutionary forces. In Mental Evolution in Animals, Romanes identified twenty-eight specific emotions displayed by various non-human animals including grief, jealousy, remorse, and the desire for parental affection diagramming them in what he suggested was the order in which they developed over time. 189 In Mental Evolution in Man, he extended his argument to human psychological 188 George John Romanes, Animal Intelligence (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1882), 15. Romanes was also very careful to point out that it became increasingly difficult to differentiate whether animal behavior was guided by intelligence or instinct as he moved from "higher" animals like mammals to "lower" ones like insects. 189 George John Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1884), The full list, in order, consists of "Surprise, Fear, Sexual and Parental Affection, Social Feelings, Pugnacity, Industry, Curiosity, Jealousy, Anger, Play, Affection, Sympathy, Emulation, Pride, Resentment, Æsthetic Love of Ornament, Terror, Grief, Hate, Cruelty, Benevolence, Revenge, Rage, Shame, Remorse, Deceit, Ludicrous." 108

114 109 evolution, claiming that although humans possess a number of "super-added faculties," they shared the same set of twenty-eight basic emotions with both animals and their own proto-human evolutionary ancestors. Borrowing from Darwin and Haeckel to synthesize a psychological analog to recapitulation theory, Romanes argued that the progression of human mental capacities from conception through the age of fifteen months neatly reflected the stages of mental development in animals as they evolved from simple organisms to more complex ones over time. 190 "[B]etween the brute and the man, there is not merely a similarity of kind, but an identity of correspondence," he wrote in Mental Evolution in Man, adding "there can be no doubt that the human mind runs exactly parallel with the animal." 191 Humanitarians were excited by Romanes' research since it helped them to buttress their emerging ideas about the tenuous nature of human-animal difference. Henry Salt, for instance, referenced Animal Intelligence in his 1892 Animals' Rights to further refute 190 Opposite the title page of Mental Evolution in Man, there is a simple three-column chart highlighting the 28 levels of corresponding "products of intellectual development" between various animals and individual humans as they progress from egg to child. The developing human embryo thus moves from levels five through fifteen (shading, in Romanes' terminology, from "partly nervous adjustments" into "nervous adjustments"), which he correlates to the increasing mental abilities of animals as they evolved from single-celled organisms to jellyfish. Moving upward, Level 18 ("primary instincts") matches the mental development of a three weekold child with that of insect larvae, while level 24 ("communication of ideas") places the five month-old child on the same mental plane as the Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants, which Romanes considered the most mentally advanced insects the rest of the six-legged world was mired at level 20, "recognition of offspring"). Continuing upward one encounters levels 26 (where most mammals and ten month-old children shared an "understanding of mechanisms"), 27 (in which monkeys, elephants, and twelve month-old humans demonstrated the "use of tools"), and finally, 28 ("indefinite morality," comprising the higher apes and 15 month-old humans). This is where the comparisons between humans and animals ended, however levels 29 through 50 charted only human psychological development. See George John Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889), i. 191 Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, 343. Romanes also noted that these parallels ended at the point where the uniquely human qualities emerge at around the age of fifteen months. 109

115 110 traditional Cartesian thinking that non-human animals were incapable of thought or feeling. Romanes' depiction of animal emotion, after all, indicated that non-humans were not only capable of feeling pain but perhaps even experiencing self-awareness and a sense of dread regarding their own death. 192 J. Howard Moore also evinced an intellectual debt to Romanes, both in his rationale for ethical vegetarianism during the 1890s and again in The Universal Kinship. Moore especially turned to Romanes to argue against anthropocentric cultural assumptions about the uniqueness of the human mind. Just as Darwin, Haeckel, and others had provided overwhelming evolutionary evidence of the physical interrelation of humans and non-humans, Moore pointed out, researchers like Romanes seemed to demonstrate a corresponding "psychical kinship, an actual consanguinity of feelings and ideas, among all the forms of animal life." Salt, Animals' Rights, Calling Romanes "one of the leading scientists of the present day," Salt cited his argument that the "theory of animal automatism which is usually attributed to Descartes, can never be accepted by common sense." See also Romanes, Animal Intelligence, 6-7. If animals indeed possessed not only the physical ability to feel pain but the mental ability to anticipate their own death, there would be dramatic moral implications, especially in the case of food animals facing slaughter. 193 Moore, The Universal Kinship, 110, 112. Moore also sought to transcend the ongoing discussion about the nature of the human mind and the theological implications of recapitulation theory. He wrote that philosophical debates associated with evolution like those between Haeckel's monism and the dualism of traditional religion, for example, or materialism and idealism were not nearly as important as the revelations about the fundamental psychological relationship between humans and non-nonhuman animals. The value of abstract intellectualizing pales, he hints, next to "the fact, which is perceived by all, that there is an ever-faithful parallel between the neural and psychical phenomenon of every organism." Philosophizing about human thought or consciousness was merely an academic exercise, in other words, since any existing conception of a uniquely human mind would necessarily crumble under the weight of the evidence suggesting a "continuous gradation of intermediate intelligences" among all animals. 110

116 111 Other Evolutionary Evidence American scholar and amateur scientist Edward Payson Evans further helped articulate the connections between evolutionary psychology and Humanitarian beliefs. Trained in linguistics, Evans relocated to Germany and began a writing career that frequently explored the role of animals in Western culture, including their representation in religious imagery and the history of their legal status. 194 By the 1890s, however, Evans had turned his attention to the cultural and moral implications of recent developments in comparative psychology and evolutionary biology. In a series of articles published between 1891 and 1894 in the Atlantic Monthly and Popular Science Monthly, and in his 1897 book Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology, Evans explained the ways in which recent scientific developments provided an intellectual foundation for animals' rights and necessitated the inclusion of non-humans in any system of human ethics. 195 Evans was particularly hopeful that the ultimate Darwinian legacy would be the 194 See E. Evans, Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture (London: William Heinemann, 1896) and The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: William Heinemann, 1906). The latter is a particularly fascinating overview including the text of original documents in their original languages of instances in which criminal charges were formally brought against animals, including those in which the animals sometimes were executed as a result. Many cases, as with the French pig hanged in 1408 for eating a small child, were domestic animals that had killed humans or done significant damage to crops. Others were the unfortunate (and most likely unwilling) partners in crime of humans charged with bestiality. But Evans also noted there was evidence, even in the medieval era, that humans occasionally felt obliged to concede what would now be called basic rights to various animals, and moreover, to do so within the established legal framework. In a case involving a 1587 infestation of locusts or harvest-flies, for instance, representatives of both the human plaintiffs and the arthropod defendants agreed that the insects themselves should have a small plot of land set aside for them, since they had the "right to adequate means of subsistence, suited to their nature" (22-50). 195 E. Evans, Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), 1. His articles during this time included "Progress and Perfectibility in the Lower Animals," Popular Science Monthly 40 (Dec. 1891), 174; "The Nearness of Animals to Man," Atlantic Monthly 69 (Feb. 1892), 172; "The Aesthetic Sense and Religious Sentiment in Animals," Popular Science Monthly 42 (Feb. 1893), 472; and "Ethical Relations Between Man and Beast," Popular Science Monthly 45 (Sept. 1894),

117 112 eventual fulfillment of Jeremy Bentham's 1780 prediction that slaves and even animals would one day join the human moral community, that "the time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes." 196 Evans saw advances in evolutionary science not only as a validation of Bentham's ideas, though, but indeed as an accelerant for change. These developments also had profound implications for the human-animal relationship, underscoring the difference between traditional constructions of animal welfare and new ideas about animal rights. Evans compared them to changing attitudes about slavery: "The ethical corollaries to Darwin's doctrine of the origin of species and to his theory of development through descent," he noted, "have already passed these bounds of beneficence not only by demanding the mitigation of cruelty to slaves, but also to the abolition of slavery, and not only by inculcating the kind treatment of animals by individuals, but also by asserting the principle of animals' rights." Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, fourth edition (London: Trübner & Co., 1882), 429. Bentham made this statement in his chapter on penal codes, and it should be taken within the context of his strict utilitarianism. He argued the need to outlaw "everything that serves as an incitement to cruelty" on the grounds that any cruelty creates an environment that only leads to more cruelty, and wrote that it was proper also "to forbid every kind of cruelty to animals, whether by way of amusement or for the gratification of gluttony. Cock-fights and bull-fights, the chase of the hare and the fox, fishing, and other amusements of the same kind, necessarily suppose a want of reflection or a want of humanity; since these sports inflict upon sensitive beings the most lively sufferings, and the most lingering and painful death that can be imagined." At the end of the paragraph he concluded: "Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? A time will come when humanity will spread its mantle over everything that breathes. The lot of slaves has begun to excite pity; we shall end by softening the lot of the animals which labour for us and supply our wants." Contrary to what even some Humanitarians seemed to believe, however, Bentham did not suggest that animals had any inherent rights, nor did he argue that there was any ethical stricture governing human behavior toward animals other than the duty to prevent undue pain. "Men must be able to kill animals," he plainly stated, "but they should be forbidden to torment them" ( ). 197 Evans, Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology,

118 113 Moreover, Evans' publications on animal psychology also confirmed Humanitarian suspicions about the negative effects of organized religion on the humananimal relationship. He contended, for instance, that the physical and mental similarities between human and non-humans animals revealed by scientists like Darwin, Haeckel, and Romanes had been obscured by centuries of Western religious anthropocentrism, starting with the ancient Genesis myth and continuing unabated until the nineteenth century. The time had come, according to Evans, for humans to finally accept that they were "truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal," an acknowledgment that would render traditional Western religious teachings about the inherent uniqueness or superiority of humans as "philosophically false and morally pernicious." This argument, about needing to understand the "natural" order of things and confront the established religious and cultural traditions which had concealed it, was particularly appealing to early Humanitarians since it simultaneously reflected both the Romantic and materialist sides of their emerging worldview. Henry Salt mentioned these observations in his Logic of Vegetarianism, noting that Evans was helping to erase the anthropocentric "delusions" that had up until then prevented humans from reestablishing their proper relationship with the natural world Evans, Evolutional Ethics, ; Henry S. Salt, The Logic of Vegetarianism (London: Ideal Publishing Union, 1899), 38. Despite his clear disdain for the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, Evans was not completely opposed to religious thinking. Not only did he suggest, as had Darwin in Descent, that animals had the capacity for basic religious impulses some, he wrote in 1893, had the ability to fetishize objects in a manner not unlike that of primitive humans, while others demonstrated "a sense of the supernatural," he ultimately concluded that the most likely fate of humans and non-humans alike upon the death of the corporeal body was metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. See Evans, "The Aesthetic Sense and Religious Sentiment in Animals,"

119 114 Evans was not alone in offering these kinds of interpretations in The Popular Science Monthly and similar publications meant for a broader audience, however, and during the 1890s other writers followed his and Romanes' lead in exploring the ways in which science seemed to be shedding new light on the mental and psychological similarities between humans and non-humans. In one 1891 article, for instance, the author pointed to the behavior of baboons, dogs, rooks, and even wasps and ants to illustrate his argument that various species of animals exhibit the same defined power structures, organizational principles, and elements of governance that characterized human societies. 199 Later in the decade, the same magazine featured a pair of articles debating whether or not animals were capable of reason, demonstrating that these topics were of interest to the educated reading public as well as the scientific community. 200 Evolution and Humanitarianism The evolution-based arguments of Darwin, Haeckel, Romanes, and others echoed throughout Humanitarianism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reformers repeatedly cited the moral obligations accompanying the evolutionary evidence of human-animal physical consanguinity, for instance, as when Positivist Frederic Harrison reminded an 1896 lecture audience that human-animal relations did not exist outside the world of human morality but were rather "inwoven with it, and 199 J. W. Slathe, "Laws of Government Among the Lower Animals," The Popular Science Monthly 38 (March, 1891), Writing about the tendency of some rooks to "persecute their fellow-citizens who build on unauthorized trees," Slathe even suggests that these particular birds were the first animals to have "evolved the vice of intolerance." 200 Edward Thorndike, "Do Animals Reason?" The Popular Science Monthly 55 (Aug. 1899), 480; Egerton R. Young, "Do Animals Reason?" The Popular Science Monthly 56 (Nov. 1899),

120 115 insuperable with it." 201 Similarly, in a 1910 letter celebrating the Humanitarian League's twentieth year, novelist Thomas Hardy wrote that the public had yet to embrace the most important lesson of Darwinian evolution, the evidence "that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical." 202 Others, like Henry Salt, emphasized not only the physical ties but the emotional similarities between humans and animals, and worked to both upend anthropocentric cultural practices in general, and deeply-ingrained Cartesian assumptions about animal difference in particular. 203 The evolutionary arguments behind many Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian ideals were compelling enough that even the explicitly Christian vegetarian organization The Order of the Golden Age occasionally trafficked in them. The Paignton-based Order typically favored traditional religious arguments for vegetarianism, including that it was the "natural" prelapsarian diet or that eating meat led to a predilection for satisfying physical desires over spiritual obligations. 204 On several occasions, however, the group's official organ, The Herald of the Golden Age, ran articles that cited Darwin or evolution 201 Frederic Harrison, "The Duties of Man to the Lower Animals," printed in Humanity 1 (Feb. 1896), The speech was part of the Humanitarian League's series on "The Rights of Men and the Rights of Animals," and was given at Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on January 21st, Though Humanitarians embraced Harrison's ideas about the relationship between evolutionary theory and human duty to animals, he was not among their ranks, suggesting that it was perfectly acceptable for humans to continue to eat animals and employ their labor as long as they avoided treating them with cruelty. 202 Thomas Hardy, "Mr. Thomas Hardy on Animals' Rights, The Times, May 3, 1910, 10. Hardy acknowledged that although the conclusions derived from Darwin were inescapable, there was still the problem of "how the principle of equal justice all round is to be carried out in its entirety." Still, he praised the Humanitarian League for "grappling with this question." 203 See especially Salt, Animals' Rights, Sidney H. Beard, A Comprehensive Guide-Book to Natural Hygiene and Humane Diet, seventh ed., (London: The Order of the Golden Age, 1913),

121 116 to further their own Christian vegetarian agenda. Sometimes this took an inferential form, such as including Darwin's name among a list of eminent "authorities" whose work seemed to support a fleshless diet. 205 Other references were more direct, including the 1903 piece lauding Darwin's "magnificent contributions to the study of Human Origins," and his demonstration of the "very close relationship existing between the Anthropoid Apes and ourselves in both structure and function." 206 Josiah Oldfield who was also very active in the Humanitarian League even sought to reconcile the seemingly incompatible concepts of Darwinian materialism and humanity's divine nature by fusing the languages of religion and evolutionary progress, resulting in a sort of vegetarian millennialism in which all living things ascended a "great ladder of life." Beginning as single-celled organisms, life moved steadily upward in a "struggle toward the higher rungs," passing through the progressively more complex plant and animal stages before taking on an increasingly "God-like" human shape. Evolution was not complete, Oldfield wrote, until the life form continued upward through ages of dominion and slavery and finally reached an enlightened, millennial age at the ladder's apex. Only then could it slough off its "shaggy coats" and "gory tusks" and recognize that "the highest and best food of man is that which is obtained without cruelty, without slaughter, and without sacrifice." "The Coming Revolution in Diet," The Herald of the Golden Age 1 (Jan. 25, 1896), 4. The list of pro-vegetarian "authorities" was printed with some regularity, usually as part of articles delineating the many reasons to adopt a vegetarian diet, and also included the names of Cuvier, Gassendi, and Linnaeus alongside Darwin as contributing to its validation. 206 J. Todd Ferrier, "The Testimony of Science in Favour of Humane and Fruitarian Diet," The Herald of the Golden Age 8 (April 1903), Josiah Oldfield, "'From Dust to God,'" The Herald of the Golden Age 10 (April 1910),

122 117 J. Howard Moore and the "Universal Kinship" The most outspoken advocate for the evolutionary basis of Humanitarianism was the Chicago high school teacher J. Howard Moore. Moore attended Oskaloosa College in Iowa during the early 1880s but did not graduate, eventually gravitating toward various social reform causes and spending several years on the midwest lecture circuit speaking on temperance issues. 208 By the early 1890s he had enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he was active in prohibition and women's suffrage circles and founded the school's Vegetarian Eating Club in Moore earned his A. B. degree in April, 1896, and three years later married Jennie Darrow, the sister of Clarence Darrow, who was then beginning his legal career as a Chicago attorney. 210 Though he was something of a late bloomer (he was 32 when he took his degree), beginning in the 1890s Moore became one of the more passionate spokespersons for ethical vegetarianism and 208 Oskaloosa College was in the midst of a major crisis during Moore's years as a student, though it is not clear what effect this may have had on his education. In 1881, the college's founders, George and W. J. Carpenter, left Oskaloosa to establish a new college in Des Moines (soon named after its benefactor Francis Marion Drake), and convinced the entire faculty save one to follow them. Oskaloosa College continued operating for two more decades before it finally closed down. See Charles James Ritchey, Drake University Through Seventy-Five Years, (Des Moines: Drake University, 1956). 209 In 1895 Moore won a statewide temperance oratory contest sponsored by several Illinois prohibition organizations, and went on to win the national contest in Cleveland as well. The title of Moore's winning speech was "The Scourge of the Republic." See "Champion Prohibition Orator," Atchison (Kansas) Daily Globe, 22 July, 1895, There is some discrepancy over Moore's educational history. The brief news item in the Daily Globe indicated that Moore indeed graduated from Oskaloosa College, and was engaged in graduate-level study at the University of Chicago. Two directories from the 1910s (one of American authors and one of notable Chicagoans), however, suggest that while Moore attended Oskaloosa for several years it was indeed a bachelor's degree he earned at Chicago, in In a Chicago Tribune story listing Chicago University's 1896 convocation, Moore is listed among the fourteen students taking a BA. This same article also reports that Thorstein Veblen was promoted from tutor to instructor in Political Economy. See "Out of School Halls," Chicago Tribune (April 3, 1896),

123 118 Humanitarianism in the United States. His training in science and education, his connections to Chicago's socialist and reform circles (many established through Darrow), and his background in oratory made him a natural advocate for the scientific basis of vegetarianism. While making his living as a teacher at Crane Technical High School, Moore continuously honed his Humanitarian arguments through lecturing and writing on biology, evolution, and ethics. By the early years of the twentieth century he had befriended British Humanitarian leader Henry Salt, with whom he carried on a correspondence marked by mutual admiration and the exchange of ideas, concerns, and copies of their latest publications. This relationship established something of a trans- Atlantic conduit for Humanitarianism, reinforcing Humanitarian values on both sides of the ocean while also providing at least some sense of community that allowed American and British reformers to feel they were participating in a larger movement. Moore and the Chicago Vegetarian Society Moore was an active force in the Chicago Vegetarian Society from its inception in 1895, and its monthly journal became one of the primary outlets for his writing. Moore was instrumental in guiding the new organization's direction, and his frequent essays and opinion pieces in the Chicago Vegetarian helped to keep the focus on a distinctly ethical form of vegetarianism. While the Society certainly encouraged a vegetarian diet regardless of individual motivations or rationales, Moore's nearly ubiquitous presence and his influence on the journal's content lent it a noticeably Humanitarian tone, and allowed the Society to serve almost as the de facto American outpost of Britain's Humanitarian League, especially in its first decade or so of existence. The very first 118

124 119 issue of the Chicago Vegetarian, for instance, announced that Moore was scheduled to speak on "The Solidarity of Reforms" at an upcoming meeting, and a year later he read a paper at another meeting that covered other basic Humanitarian themes. 211 By 1897 the Society had serialized Moore's essay "Why I am a Vegetarian," one of the era's more impassioned arguments in favor of ethical vegetarianism. The longer format allowed Moore to explore more fully the connections between evolution, diet, and other reforms, including women's suffrage. Again underscoring the Humanitarian creed, Moore argued that all cases of true justice were interrelated and interdependent, and that for any program of social reform to be truly effective it must address all forms of injustice, whether directed at women, colonial subjects, or non-human animals. 212 The following year Moore was even given his own full-page column in the Chicago Vegetarian, further extending his influence on the Society and its message. 213 Though he frequently touched on other aspects of the Humanitarian ethic, Moore was especially adamant about two specific elements, both grounded in his reading of Darwin and other evolutionary theorists. One was the anthropocentrism he saw at the 211 Chicago Vegetarian 1 (Sept. 1896), 2; J. Howard Moore, "The Problem of Life: Extracts from Paper Read Before the Chicago Vegetarian Society Last Month," Chicago Vegetarian 1 (Nov. 1896), 2. Aside from several brief notices and a few classified advertisements, the inaugural edition of the Society's journal (which numbered only four pages) consisted mostly of an announcement of a Thanksgiving feast featuring "vegetable turkey" and "celestial hash" and costing two dollars. "There could be no better or more appropriate time for having a gathering of this character than at Thanksgiving," the piece noted, "when non-flesh eaters can get together and express their thankfulness at not being obliged to eat what other folks eat, when they can give thanks for the privilege of sitting down to a clean, pure, bloodless feast" (1). 212 J. Howard Moore, "Why I am a Vegetarian," Chicago Vegetarian 2 (Dec. 1897), 8. The fourpart essay was an expanded version of an earlier speech; another version was published as a 44- page pamphlet. See J. Howard Moore, Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered Before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (Chicago: Press of Purdy, 1895). 213 The column was initially called "As Moore Sees It" but was soon renamed "As It Seems to Me." 119

125 120 heart of all social inequity, the energetic devotion to their own interests that humans exercise at the expense of anyone not like themselves. Humans, Moore wrote, "proclaim themselves the darlings and gods of the universe, and teach each other that other races are mere fixtures to furnish food and amusement for themselves." Worse than the "egoism" fueling this phenomenon was the hypocrisy entwined with it, Moore believed, and he noted that while virtually every world culture claimed some variation of the Golden Rule, none applied it to non-human animals. Humans "inculcate as a rule of conduct and they preach it valiantly that each should act upon others as he himself would prefer to be acted upon," he explained, "but they make no pretensions to an application of it beyond their own species." 214 While nearly all humans were guilty of both the anthropocentrism and its accompanying hypocrisy, Moore was especially critical of individuals and organizations that he thought should know better. Among the worst offenders were the animal welfare organizations and humane societies, Moore wrote, whose members "protect an animal from a blow and the next moment without compunction massacre and swallow it." 215 Like other Humanitarians, Moore traced all social injustice to the "stupendous illustrations of inconsistency" like those demonstrated by animal welfarists. Real justice could only exist when ethical systems were applied consistently and universally, Moore argued. One of his primary goals repeated in nearly all his writing and lectures was thus to undo the selective, anthropocentric ethic that most humans took for granted and spread the message that "[e]very being is an end no creature is a means. This is the Fundamental of true ethics." Though he was sometimes accused of misanthropy and 214 J. Howard Moore, "The Problem of Life," Chicago Vegetarian 1 (Nov. 1896), Moore, "Why I am a Vegetarian,"

126 121 pessimism, Moore was in fact rather optimistic that effecting this sort of change was possible, especially through education and an emphasis on rational, scientific approaches. He pointed out that humans were already successfully overcoming the "ethnocentric ethics" that pitted one race against another, and he predicted that from the current anthropocentric ethics humans were "bound to go to zoocentric, or universal ethics." 216 All of Moore's criticism of human anthropocentrism and inconsistency was predicated on his fundamental message: that Darwin had provided irrefutable evidence that all humans and non-human animals had evolved from the same primitive ancestor, and therefore they comprised not a rigid hierarchy of discrete species but rather an enormous, interrelated family of equals. "Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures," he explained in 1897, while "[b]iology teaches us, if it teaches us anything, that there is a solidarity of the sentient world. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree but not in kind from the creatures below and around him." 217 In practical terms this meant that humans had no more right to use non-human animals for labor, food, or entertainment than they had to keep slaves or deny rights to women, since these all stemmed from rejecting Darwin's implied message of familial equality. For Moore, acknowledgement of this "universal kinship" also required a concomitant acceptance of Humanitarian values, especially ethical vegetarianism. Moore wrote that 216 Ibid., 8. Moore's condemnation of anthropocentrism and criticism of Western culture and religion for fostering it were typically interpreted as misanthropy or even self-hatred by those not sympathetic to the Humanitarian message. The Chicago Tribune's obituary following his 1916 suicide in Chicago's Jackson Park provides a fine example, while also ridiculing Moore's fervent belief in the restorative power of nature. See "Scorning Man, He Ends Life to the Thrushes' Call: Prof. J. Howard Moore Goes Back to Nature by the Cruel Artifice of Suicide," Chicago Daily Tribune (June 18, 1916), J. Howard Moore, "Why I am a Vegetarian," Chicago Vegetarian 2 (Oct. 1897),

127 122 he forswore meat, for instance, " because I believe in a rational application of the Golden Rule. They are my fellow creatures." 218 "The Universal Kinship" In addition to his lectures, essays, and contributions to the journals of the Chicago Vegetarian Society, Moore published several book-length explorations of his favorite themes and his particular brand of Humanitarianism, all of which bore the imprint of Darwin and other evolutionary theorists. In his first major work, 1899's Better-World Philosophy, Moore argued that human culture and civilization had corrupted the "natural" progression of evolution, causing widespread injustice and suffering. Only after replacing anthropocentric "egoism" with a sympathetic altruism, he suggested, could humans get back on track and evolve toward a utopian future of interspecies equality and harmony. 219 Fifteen years later he published The Law of Biogenesis, comprising the text of two lectures Moore read before his students at Chicago's Crane Technical High School. Both were explications of the recapitulation theories that Moore enthusiastically embraced the first lecture was devoted to physical recapitulation, the second to psychological and the work of Haeckel and Romanes, respectively, figured prominently. In these lectures Moore's argued that the course of human evolution 218 J. Howard Moore, "Why I am a Vegetarian," Chicago Vegetarian 1 (Nov. 1897), 9. In a further explication of the connections between evolution and diet, Moore flatly stated that vegetarianism was "the ethical corollary of evolution simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin." See "Why I am a Vegetarian," Chicago Vegetarian 1 (Dec. 1897), J. Howard Moore, Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (Chicago: Ward Waugh and Co., 1899). Part of Moore's prescription for resetting the course of human evolution came close to endorsing eugenics, but he backed away and concluded that education especially if it is started early was the most efficacious remedy. See especially pages and

128 123 recapitulated the development of individual children from birth on into adulthood. This was good news for humanity, he suggested, since just as selfish and unruly children eventually become "civilized" adults, humanity itself would continue to evolve through the "same process of change and reform," eventually reaching its enlightened, more Humanitarian potential. 220 Another book of lectures, Savage Survivals, followed in 1916 and traced the cultural and ethical evolution of both humans and non-human animals. It was essentially a companion to The Law of Biogenesis, emphasizing ethical development rather than biological. 221 Moore's magnum opus, however, was The Universal Kinship, first published in The apotheosis of both his personal worldview and his contributions to the movement, Moore's book served, alongside Williams' The Ethics of Diet and Salt's Animals' Rights, as one of the defining texts of Humanitarianism. It was at once a summary, an analysis, and a deliberate synthesis of the many strands of evolutionary theory that contributed to the Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian arguments, drawing from theorists such as Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and Romanes in addition to nonscientists including Edward Evans and Peter Kropotkin. In the first of the book's three main sections, "The Physical Kinship," Moore examined the anatomical and physiological similarities between humans and animals, explained the basic mechanism of evolution, and situated humans alongside the other "orders, families, species, and races 220 J. Howard Moore, The Law of Biogenesis: Being Two Lessons on the Origins of Human Nature (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1914), 36-41, J. Howard Moore, Savage Survivals (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1916). 222 The following year Moore published The New Ethics, which elaborated on the message of The Universal Kinship but did not introduce any significant new arguments. While much of latter was devoted to a rational analysis of how evolution was linked to animals' rights and ethical vegetarianism, Moore employed far more lurid and emotional arguments in The New Ethics. 123

129 124 of the animal kingdom." 223 In the second, titled "The Psychical Kinship," Moore cited Descent and the work of George Romanes to map out the ways in which psychological and mental development paralleled physical evolution. In the book's final section, "The Ethical Kinship," Moore used the evolutionary evidence from the first two-thirds of the book to make his case that human ethical responsibility extended not only to all other humans, but to non-human animals as well. 224 Moore's twofold argument throughout The Universal Kinship was clear, compelling, and all but irresistible to Humanitarians. First, physical and psychological evolutionary theory had demonstrated beyond doubt the "consanguinity and unity of all organic life." More importantly, though, the acknowledgment of both this "universal kinship" and the continuous forward momentum of evolution combined to suggest a utopian future, a golden age that could be reached only by transforming society through the types of reforms advocated by Humanitarians. As humans came to accept their evolutionary heritage and essential animality, Moore contended, they would also learn that altruism, sympathy, and following the Golden Rule would allow them to overcome their primitive, violent origins and continue their progress toward a more perfect society. "The same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man's manacles and is today melting the white woman's chains will to-morrow emancipate the working man and 223 Moore, The Universal Kinship, Ibid, The many lessons of evolutionary biology and comparative psychology, he wrote, all pointed to one inescapable conclusion: if humanity represented but one limb on the "gigantic arbour" of animal life, then human ethical duty to non-humans was as important as the recognition of ethical duties within the human community itself. Humans had no more right to use animals for food, clothing, labor, or entertainment than they did to enslave, exploit, or otherwise oppress their fellow humans. The concept of an evolutionary tree with diverging branches originated nearly four decades earlier with Ernst Haeckel, in the second edition of Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. 124

130 125 the ox," Moore concluded, "and, as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit shall banish Selfishness from the earth, and convert the planet finally into one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of PEACE, JUSTICE, and SOLIDARITY." 225 The Universal Kinship garnered more public notice than typical for Humanitarian authors when it appeared early in 1906, though its reception outside the reform community was generally lukewarm and occasionally dismissive. A reviewer in The American Naturalist, for instance, accurately summarized Moore's main arguments but went on to express amusement at "the mixture of fact and error, observation and travelers' tales, serious of statement and straining after absurd expressions." 226 A review in American Anthropologist was even less kind. Conceding that Moore's book might have had some benefit if it resulted in the "kinder treatment of our animal friends and servants," its author rejected Moore's argument for animal rights out of hand, asserting that the differences between humans and non-humans are as substantial as they are selfevident, and will resist any attempts to reconcile them. The fundamental dissimilarity between the two cannot be "swept away by anatomical comparisons and psychological investigations," he stated. "It simply is." Ibid., 329. Capitalization is in the original. 226 G. M. A., Review of The Universal Kinship by J. Howard Moore, in The American Naturalist 40 (Nov. 1906), J. R. Swanton, Review of The Universal Kinship by J. Howard Moore, in American Anthropologist n. s. 8 (Oct.-Dec. 1906), 706. While not providing any additional support regarding the self-evidence of the human-animal divide, Swanton did add that he "must also raise a protest against the extremes to which the biological brotherhood idea tends to be carried. We wish our 'humbler brothers' well, but it will be some time before we see the duty or the expediency of sitting down to lunch in company with centipedes and tigers, or of keeping house from choice with cockroaches and rats." For examples of other responses from the academic and popular press, see Review of The Universal Kinship, by J. Howard Moore, The Annals of the 125

131 126 In both American and British Humanitarian circles, however, The Universal Kinship was greeted with great enthusiasm. Shortly after its publication, for instance, an article in the Humane Review refuting G. K. Chesterton's criticism of the Humanitarian movement countered with examples from Moore's "remarkable work" and quoted from him at length. 228 A few months later Ernest Bell also lauded the book, mentioning it alongside the writing of Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, and Edward Payson Evans, and agreeing with Moore that the fundamental similarities between humans and non-humans dictated that "we can in no way evade the conclusion that the same rule of conduct should apply to [animals] as to human beings." 229 When Moore sent a copy to Mark Twain, the writer responded that he had also wondered why humanity's moral progress trailed far behind its physical evolution, and expressed his gratitude that Moore had spared him "the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and irascibly for me." 230 British novelist Mona Caird called Moore's book "a broad, convincing, and scientific exposition," and even the Christian Humanitarian organization the Order of the Golden Age embraced Moore's evolutionary argument despite his avowed atheism and published a four-page distillation of his American Academy of Political and Social Science 28 (July 1906), 177; "Comment on Current Books," The Outlook 83 (May 5, 1906), 45; Review of The Universal Kinship, by J. Howard Moore, The Pedagogical Seminary 14 (March, 1907), 128; and "Contemporary Literature," Westminster Review 165 (May, 1906), For a typical review of the 1916 revised edition of Moore's book, see also Irving King, review of The Universal Kinship, by J. Howard Moore, American Journal of Sociology 22 (March, 1917), "Mr. Chesterton's Mountain," Humane Review 7 (July 1906), 85, Ernest Bell, "Why do Animals Exist?," Humane Review 7 (Oct. 1906), Samuel L. Clemens to J. Howard Moore, February 2, 1907, published in Mark Twain's Letters, vol. 2, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1907),

132 127 book at the time of its publication. 231 Henry Salt referred specifically to Moore's work in a number of his own books, including his final statement of Humanitarian principles The Creed of Kinship (1935) the title of which was taken from Moore's primary thesis. 232 The positive reception of The Universal Kinship among other reformers left Moore especially optimistic about the spread of Humanitarianism. In a letter to Salt, Moore complimented his friend for his "unique & splendid function in the world" and the "enormous effect" his reform work was having in Britain. Moore also wrote that the "Humanitarian movement [in the United States] is growing rapidly the vegetarian idea especially so," and provided evidence ranging from advertisements for meatless foods in major newspapers to the presence of four vegetarian restaurants in Chicago alone. He also explicitly noted the importance of evolutionary science to their cause. Undergirding the expanding appeal of Humanitarianism and vegetarianism, Moore observed, was "the doctrine of evolution, which is mellowing & preparing the minds of men for new ethical standards." Mona Caird, "A Letter from Mona Caird," The International Socialist Review 7 (July, 1906), 63-64; J. Howard Moore, "Universal Kinship," The Herald of the Golden Age 11 (April 1906), Moore was actually a regular contributor to the Order's journal, publishing at least five articles between 1906 and The organization also sold The Universal Kinship via mail order, calling it in one advertisement "a charming and instructive book." 232 Henry S. Salt, The Creed of Kinship (London: Constable & Co., 1935), 106. In referencing Moore, Salt summed up the Humanitarian credo: "We arrive, then, at exactly the same conclusion as that of Howard Moore in his The Whole World Kin, that, since Darwin established the unity of life, the attitude of a civilised people must be that of 'universal gentleness and humanity.'" The Whole World Kin was a condensed edition of The Universal Kinship, also published in See J. Howard Moore, The Whole World Kin: A Study in Threefold Evolution (London: George Bell & Sons, 1906). The title of the shortened book was probably an allusion to the line in Act III of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." 233 J. Howard Moore to Henry S. Salt (undated letter, probably 1907). 127

133 128 Extending the Argument: A Case for Cannibalism? Humanitarians on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the work of evolutionary theorists like Darwin, Haeckel, Romanes, and others who offered convincing evidence that far more similarities than differences existed between humans and non-human animals. Reformers found the message of interspecies consanguinity versatile and useful, frequently employing the "universal kinship" argument to make their case for animals' rights and other causes. These same principles of evolutionary interrelation and physical and psychological closeness quickly became problematic when applied to issues of food and diet, however, and sometimes led directly to the unsavory topic of cannibalism. After all, Humanitarians reasoned, if there was no distinct biological line dividing humans from non-humans, would it not follow that the human consumption of animal flesh and the human consumption of other humans were likewise separated merely by a matter of degree? Cannibalism was unquestionably a delicate subject, but Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian reformers soon learned to harness its rhetorical power and use it to draw attention to their own arguments and agenda. "Every lecture on flesh-eating," Henry Salt suggested to fellow Humanitarians in 1910, "ought to touch on cannibalism." 234 The practice of linking cannibalism to meat eating was not a new one in the late nineteenth century. Almost two millennia earlier, for example, Plutarch had made the connection by pointing to the "dead corpses" on a wealthy man's dinner table and wondering what kind of person would "allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered 234 Henry S. Salt, "Concerning Cannibalism," The Humane Review 10 (Jan. 1910), 247. This essay was also anthologized in Salt's The Humanities of Diet. 128

134 129 being." 235 In 1740 English physician and vegetarian advocate George Cheyne was more explicit, examining the role of culture in determining diet and suggesting that there was little difference "between feeding on human Flesh, and feeding on brute animal Flesh, except Custom and Example." 236 Even Herman Melville touched on the topic in Moby- Dick, with his colorful digression in Chapter 65 titled "The Whale as a Dish" drawing parallels between cannibalism, meat markets, and the consumption of foie gras Plutarch, "Of Eating of Flesh," quoted in Williams, 47. Plutarch's essay was a defense of Pythagoras' vegetarianism, and was rife with observations about the similarities between the bodies of humans and those of animals slaughtered for food. In a slightly different translation, the essay begins: "You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds." See Plutarch, "Of Eating of Flesh," trans. William Baxter, in Plutarch's Morals. ed. William Goodwin (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1874), V: George Cheyne, "An Essay on Regimen," quoted in Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 163, 178. Italics are in the original. 237 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper Brothers, 1851), 335. Though not a deliberate endorsement of vegetarianism, the passage is nonetheless a delightful bit of satire aimed at the culinary affectations among America's emerging middle class. "Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds," Melville wrote. "Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against the coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their boated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras." In 1901 the Humanitarian League published a lengthy appreciation of Melville, praising Moby-Dick and describing Melville as the "Walt Whitman of prose." Interestingly particularly given the book's graphic depictions of exceedingly bloody whaling processes the article's author did not mention animals' rights or even vegetarianism, and the inclusion of the piece was presumably due to editor Henry Salt's literary interests. See Archibald Macmechan, "Herman Melville," The Humane Review 2 (Oct. 1901),

135 130 Although there were several variations, Humanitarians typically utilized the rhetoric of cannibalism in three primary ways. The first was as a dramatic response to the "assimilability argument," one of the most persistent and commonly-cited grounds for opposing vegetarianism at the time. Especially during the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists in the developing fields of nutrition, organic chemistry, and food science increasingly asserted that meat was a nearly ideal food for humans, far more nourishing than plant-based foods since it was closer to the chemical makeup of the human body and its nutrients thus more readily "assimilable." 238 Yet if this was the case, Humanitarians told carnivores, then a purely rational and scientific approach to diet would suggest that the ideal sustenance for humans the one truly perfect food was the flesh of their fellow men and women. "If moral considerations are to be removed from the diet question, and we are to look only to what is 'likest to ourselves,'" wrote Henry Salt, "the perfect diet is roast man, and all the arguments now used to defend flesh-eating are equally good to defend cannibalism." Countless examples exist: An 1859 article in the Atlantic Monthly reported that "easily assimilable brown meat is the proper food" for individuals who exercise vigorously; A physician at the 1883 Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association noted that of all "the nitrogenous foods, meat is admitted by all authorities to be the most easily digested, most easily assimilable, and most rapid in its nutritive action"; and a physiology textbook from 1891 asserted that meat was among "the most concentrated, and most easily assimilable" foods. See "Coffee and Tea," The Atlantic Monthly 3 (Jan. 1859), 38; Graily Hewitt, M.D., "The Question of Food in Obstetric and Gynæcological Practice," British Medical Times and Gazette 2 (Aug. 31, 1883), 152; W. D. Halliburton, M.D., A Text-Book of Chemical Physiology and Pathology (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), Salt, "Concerning Cannibalism," 248. Salt took the phrase "likest to ourselves" from an February 27, 1887 piece by Dr. Andrew Wilson in the Illustrated London News. Wilson wrote that "animal matter, being likest to our own chemical composition, is most easily and readily converted into ourselves," the process which is, after all, "the end and aim of all feeding." Salt countered Wilson further by asserting that the question, "'Can I assimilate him?' should be one's inner thought when looking on 'a man and a brother.'" Salt needled Dr. Wilson for being "nettled at having the logical conclusions of his own theories explained to him," before quoting another doctor (F. Gowland Hopkins) who, while speaking at "the Royal Institution," reportedly answered 130

136 131 Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians often enjoyed using satirical parables to point out the apparent inconsistencies of the assimilability argument. A favorite was the fictional tale of the "Converted Bishop," which appeared in slightly different form in several vegetarian publications around the turn of the century (figure 1). In this story, a Figure 1. "The Converted Bishop." Source: Chicago Vegetarian (Aug. 1899). proselytizing clergyman successfully convinces the king of a cannibalistic tribe of islanders to stop cooking and eating his fellow missionaries, telling him the practice was immoral. Later, the king spies the bishop slaughtering a sheep for dinner and asks him if he truly believed, as he had indicated earlier, that it was wrong to eat humans. The the rhetorical question of "what would be the most efficient food of man?" with the example of cannibalism. Salt dutifully praised Gowland for "at least being candid and outspoken." 131

137 132 bishop vehemently answers in the affirmative, after which the king asks why it is acceptable to eat the flesh of animals but not humans. The bishop replies that it is because men have souls while sheep do not. The king, becoming impatient with the bishop's equivocating, counters that it is the body that is eaten, not the soul, and demands a straight answer. Growing increasingly uncomfortable, the bishop feebly suggests that animal flesh is desirable because it is "more easily assimilated." The king, predictably, decides the bishop is indeed onto something, and orders him cooked for dinner. 240 Henry Salt, who was comfortable using the language of cannibalism and encouraged other reformers to do the same, offered a typically wry take on the antiassimilability parable in The Humanities of Diet. In an essay titled "Kreophagist versus Anthropophagist," a proper Englishman is granted a short interview with a "medicine man" one Professor Grillman who was visiting Britain from the Cannibal Islands. 241 Asked how he could participate in something so completely "barbarous" as the slaughter and consumption of his fellow humans, the "professor" scoffs, calling the Englishman a sentimentalist and faddist (echoing two mild epithets frequently lobbed at vegetarians) 240 "The Converted Bishop," Chicago Vegetarian 3 (Aug. 1899), 7-8. The frontispiece of this issue contains a full-page illustration to the story, showing a bespectacled man in typical late- Victorian garb standing aghast before a group of spear- and shield-carrying, blackfaced cannibals. The article was evidently reprinted from an earlier issue of the London Vegetarian. A similar story specifically referenced a Belgian soldier, Captain Coquillhat, who was dispatched to the Congo, where he encountered "fierce Bangalla cannibals." After also pointing out the difference between humans and animals, a "bright fellow in the crowd" told the Captain that "'all your talk only shows that human flesh is the best sort of food, while the flesh of mere animals is a vile sort of nutriment.'" In this version, however, the Westerner was not eaten. See "Talks With Cannibals," The Vegetarian Magazine 11 (June, 1907), Though it has fallen out of use, the word "kreophagist" (taken from the Greek kreo, meaning "meat" or "piece of meat," and phagian, or "one who eats") was often employed by latenineteenth and early-twentieth century vegetarians to define their carnivorous opponents. "Anthropophagist," or literally, "one who eats humans," is a more obscure term, and although a favorite of Salt's it was used infrequently by other Humanitarians. 132

138 133 and citing the rational basis for his diet. Repeating contemporary defenses of meat-eating rooted in the science of organic chemistry, Professor Grillman reminds his interviewer that "'to the scientist, sir, all flesh is identical'" and therefore, "'it follows that to eat an ox is the same as to eat a man.'" Taken aback, the Englishman abandons the scientific criticism of cannibalism and quickly shifts the topic to religion, remarking that animals were clearly sent by a provident God as food for humans. Professor Grillman calmly replies that his own god must be even more beneficent, since he had provided his people with humans in addition to animals. The story continues in this vein, with the cannibal easily dispatching further objections using a similarly consistent logic, until the Englishman finally flees after being invited to stay for lunch. 242 Humanitarians also used the rhetoric of cannibalism to equate a carnivorous diet with savagery, barbarism, and violence. Stories ridiculing the "assimilability" argument typically used uncivilized cannibals as ironic foils for the putative civility of Westerners, and even the title of Henry Salt's 1921 autobiography Seventy Years Among Savages was itself a play on this theme. In the book's introduction, Salt suggested that the only difference between his civilized countrymen and the barbarism of savage tribesmen was 242 Henry S. Salt, "Kreophagist versus Anthropophagist: A Chat with Professor Grillman," in The Humanities of Diet: Some Reasonings and Rhymings (Manchester: The Vegetarian Society, 1914), Salt punctuated the story with a short poem titled "Paterfamilias at the Breakfast Table," in which recent news is related over the morning meal: My dear, pray pass the sausages; and then I'll read the story of those shipwrecked men. God help them! Seven long days all signals vain They drifted foodless on the awful main; Till, maddened by fierce hunger-pain and thirst, They drew the fatal lots You guess the worst! Cannibals! Their crime was hideous! And yet We folk who stay home should not forget The terrors and temptations of the seas. My dear, this tongue's superb! The mustard, please! 133

139 134 the ability of the former to hide their primitive behavior behind "a cloak of fallacies and sophisms, and to represent themselves as 'lovers' of those very creatures" that they slaughtered and consumed. 243 It was precisely this "cloak" that Humanitarians and vegetarians sought to remove, exposing what they believed was the barbarism and bloodiness lurking beneath the entrees found in the finest dining rooms and restaurants. In The Universal Kinship, J. Howard Moore provided a particularly dramatic example of this tactic when he referenced Flemish illustrator Théodore de Bry's wellknown sixteenth-century engraving depicting a "butcher's shop" of the Anziques tribe in central Africa. 244 Moore used this image which depicts an African wielding a cleaver to carve what is clearly a human leg on a chopping block, while a human head is visible and other human limbs hang in a stall behind him to remind his reader that human dietary custom was merely a cultural construction, and that no objective, physical difference existed between the flesh of animals and that of humans (figure 2). Moore argued that his fellow humans could not see the similarities between the scene de Bry illustrated and a modern butcher's shop because they were blinded by tradition and incapable of "looking 243 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, de Bry's work was in wide circulation, especially his dozens of engravings depicting sixteenthcentury scenes of indigenous American peoples and their encounters with European explorers and colonists. Moore most likely came across de Bry's "butcher's shop" engraving in Thomas Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. Though de Bry's images were published repeatedly between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries it is clear from the very European physical traits of his subjects that the images were not true representations and were based on the (probably greatly exaggerated stories) of returning Europeans. Some historians have interpreted the lack of racial accuracy itself as an imperial act, a visual acknowledgement that the process of subduing American Indians and "Europeanizing" them was already well underway before See Thomas H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1863), 69; and Thomas Scanlon, Colonial Writing and the New World, : Allegories of Desire (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999),

140 135 Figure 2. Detail of an engraving by Théodore de Bry. The illustration originally accompanied Philip Pigafetta's 1598 Regnum Congo. Source: Thomas H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (New York: Appleton, 1863), 69. at things the way they are," and so he pointed an accusatory finger at an ostensibly "civilized" Western culture that would gape aghast at de Bry's illustration yet remain indifferent to an almost identical scene in which the limbs of oxen and pigs were substituted for the human. With Swiftian flair Moore suggested that it was not a great leap from de Bry's engraving to a scene in which upstanding, turn-of-the-century Americans or Europeans gathered around a market stall where "[o]ne fellow wants a tender 'cut' of young girl's sirloin, and another would like an old man's calf for soup." If humans insisted on maintaining their stake in the slaughter and butchery that accompanied the bloody business of consuming animal flesh, Moore asked, why stop at 135

141 136 what Darwin has shown to be an essentially arbitrary line separating human from nonhuman? Why not "make hash and sausages out of our broken-down grandfathers and grandmothers just as we do out of our worn-out horses?" 245 Furthermore, Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians employed the imagery and rhetoric of cannibalism to draw attention to what they criticized as the hypocrisy and ethical inconsistency of Christians who claimed to live moral lives yet failed to see the suffering resulting from their diets. In 1900, for instance, former Chicago Vegetarian Society president Rena Michaels Atchison likened Christian holiday meals to cannibalistic barbarism, writing that the "heathen cannibal fattens his fellowmen to be eaten on his great feast days, just as the Christian cannibal fattens his four-footed friends for his new moons and feasts" (see figure 3). 246 A year earlier J. Howard Moore had been even more graphic, decrying the "holocaust" that was "perpetuated day after day by Christian cannibals" who were responsible for the "corpses dangling from sale-hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks" in every American city. Accusing them of "the most frightful inconsistency of civilized minds today," Moore excoriated the ostensibly Christian women and men "kneeling nightly by their pillow sides and congratulating themselves on their whiteness and rising each morning and leaping on the bloody remains of some slaughtered creature." Moore, The Universal Kinship, Rena Michaels Atchison, "Christian Cannibals," The Vegetarian Magazine 5 (October 15, 1900), Atchison was president of the Chicago Vegetarian Society from January 1898 until the summer of J. Howard Moore, "The Unconscious Holocaust," The Vegetarian Magazine 4 (December, 1899), 6-7. "Whiteness" here presumably refers to moral purity rather than race. 136

142 137 Figure 3. "A Suggestion for Christmas Decorations." Source: The Vegetarian Magazine (Dec. 1899), p. 2. While these were the most common ways that Humanitarians likened meat-eaters to cannibals, some reformers occasionally tested other strategies as well. Among the most provocative was Henry Salt's suggestion that perhaps those tribes and peoples who had engaged in cannibalism were actually morally superior to educated, civilized Britons and Americans. "Nor can it be maintained that cannibals are a specially degraded race," Salt wrote in 1910, noting that some anthropologists had already argued that many of 137

143 138 these "primitive" cultures were in fact "less cruel and bloodthirsty" than their more "civilized" European cousins, engaging in cannibalism infrequently and only out of ancient ritual or sheer dietary necessity. 248 Cannibalism was a relatively rare event even among those few groups who practiced it, in other words, yet the wholesale slaughter of animals for food and the processing of their carcasses in mechanized facilities was so routine in Western society as to go unnoticed. Ultimately, Salt spoke for many Humanitarians when he concluded by suggesting that the only true, consistent, and honest condemnation of cannibalism would be found in "that humane instinct, which makes it impossible for men to prey on fellow-beings with whom there has once been established a sense of sympathy and kinship," an instinct that would appear the moment that humans acknowledged non-humans as their evolutionary brothers and sisters, deserving of the same consideration and rights as any human. 249 Conclusion The theories of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary scientists deeply influenced the development of late nineteenth century Humanitarian philosophy, and allowed reformers to affix the imprimatur of science to their arguments. Collectively, the various strains of contemporary evolutionary theory informed the second half of the 248 Salt, "Concerning Cannibalism," 251. This sentiment was also expressed eight years earlier in The Herald of The Golden Age, in a brief passage from Robert Louis Stevenson's South Sea Islands. "And so it is with island cannibals," Stevenson wrote. "They are not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly character " Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Lesser Cannibal," The Herald of the Golden Age 7 (July, 1902), Ibid., 252. Salt ended his essay by observing that "unfortunately, the flesh-eating European has not yet realised this kinship, any more than the man-eating African has realised his kinship with his fellow-man." Still, he optimistically noted a "real, though extremely slow, advance" in that direction. 138

144 139 Romantic materialist hermeneutic through which Humanitarians understood not only the proper relationship between humans and the natural world, but its implications for social reform. If it was Shelley's naturalistic Romanticism and Thoreau's pleas for living simply and in harmony with nature allowed Humanitarians to envision an idealized society, then it was the work of Darwin and the evolutionary theorists who furnished them with a rational affirmation of their core beliefs and a solid scientific foundation on which to base their reforming efforts. At the center of the Humanitarian ethic was the concept of the essential biological similarities among humans and non-human animals. If animals descended from the same evolutionary ancestors as humans and existed as a result of similar biological processes, Humanitarians argued, then it was impossible to draw a line separating their interests. Simple logic therefore dictated that non-human animals must be included alongside humans as part of any consistently-applied system of ethics. This idea, in turn, informed the Humanitarian agenda for alleviating societal problems. Since human and non-human life was interconnected and equally valuable, and since all injustice was the result of inequalities of power stemming from the inability to recognize this, Humanitarians reasoned that social reform efforts must similarly emphasize the rights of both humans and animals, and the ways in which their lives and fates are interrelated. By consciously appropriating the ideas of naturalists and scientists like Darwin, Haeckel, and Romanes and incorporating them into their existing philosophical framework, Humanitarians hoped to demonstrate that their own ideas, values, and proposals for reform offered the most rational and useful solutions to the pernicious side effects of modern economic, political, and social systems. 139

145 140 Despite the integration of Darwinian theory into Humanitarian arguments, however, there was no unanimity on the topic among all reformers within the movement. Alexander Japp, for one, argued that Darwin had caused "infinite damage to the cause of humanity" through a "pessimism" about humanity and a complicity in allowing the "red in tooth and nail" side of natural selection to adversely affect public opinion on evolution. 250 Japp suggested it was Thoreau's thoughts and doctrines, not Darwin's, that would provide the most useful framework on which to build the hopes of the Humanitarian movement. In response, some Humanitarians conceded that the public was often dogmatic in its interpretation of Darwinism, and that Darwin himself should not be immune from censure regarding his theories' more "dubious and contradictory tenets." Others, however, simply reiterated the centrality of evolutionary theory to their own philosophy. One reformer summed up this thinking in 1901, writing that Humanitarians cannot agree with the view that the main doctrine of Darwinism, the idea of evolution, is in any way antagonistic to our principles. On the contrary, it seems to us that the surest foundation of the humanitarian creed is to be sought in the scientific doctrine of the kinship and common origin of all living beings, as contrasted with the old anthropocentric notion which conceived the lower races as wholly distinct from mankind and purposely created for its use Alexander H. Japp, Darwin Considered Mainly as Ethical Thinker, Human Reformer and Pessimist (London: John Bale & Co., 1901). 251 Review of Darwin Considered Mainly as Ethical Thinker, Human Reformer and Pessimist (London: John Bale & Co., 1901), by Alexander H. Japp, Humane Review 2 (Oct. 1901), In the following issue of the Humane Review, Japp was granted several pages to rebut the review of his book. Among other contentions, Japp made it clear that one of his principle objections to Darwin was the "pessimistic" account of human evolution in which Darwin "degraded man to find points of what he thought contact with the animals." Japp also argued that Darwin's reading of evolution was not the continuous spectrum advocated by Humanitarians but rather evinced a "great break" between humans and non-human animals. Curiously, another of Japp's main criticisms was Darwin's alleged "dislike of and intolerance of poetry, art, and drama, 140

146 141 There was room for healthy debate, in other words, but ultimately there could be no arguing that the fundamental principles of human evolution as laid down by Darwin provided the scientific bedrock for the Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian movements. Reformers discovered, however, that incorporating scientific theory and rhetoric into their own agenda was a double-edged sword. Undeniably, grounding some of the basic tenets of Humanitarianism in the work of Darwin and other respected scientists helped to legitimize their cause, and provide a framework of rationalism they hoped would deflect the criticism that Humanitarians were mere sentimentalists and idealists. Debates over human evolution, the mechanisms of heredity, and the role of humans in the natural world were substantial aspects of the late-victorian public discourse, and their strategic integration into Humanitarian arguments allowed reformers to position themselves as legitimate participants in these broader cultural dialogues. Yet the emergence of an increasingly professionalized realm of science around the turn of the twentieth century seemed to present Humanitarians with as many challenges as solutions, and reformers frequently evinced mixed feelings about science in general and its potential for addressing specific societal problems. Just as Humanitarianism was characterized by the Romantic materialist worldview informing its basic principles, as the movement progressed a profound ambivalence regarding science would also emerge as a defining feature. even Shakespeare." See Alexander H. Japp, "Darwinism and Humanitarianism," Humane Review 2 (Jan. 1902),

147 142 CHAPTER 4 VEGETAL SHOES AND HYDROCARBONACEOUS SUBSTANCES: HUMANITARIANISM AND THE PROMISE OF SCIENCE, MEDICINE, AND TECHNOLOGY Introduction The Humanitarians of the 1880s were deeply influenced by the science and scientific culture of the era, especially developments in evolutionary biology that appeared to validate their Romantic beliefs about the interrelation of humans, non-human animals, and the broader natural world. Also underlying the new Humanitarian enterprise was a constant desire to avoid the accusations of sentimentality, emotionality, and intellectual shallowness that were frequently directed at other movements for reform especially those related to vegetarianism and animal issues in order to marginalize their beliefs or trivialize their activities. Early progenitors of Humanitarian thought such as Howard Williams and Henry Salt thus insisted that their system of beliefs should emphasize both a dedication to ethical consistency and the eminently rational rhetoric of science. Writing about the early days of the movement, Salt acknowledged the skepticism that greeted it but also demonstrated how he and the early Humanitarians sought to ground their principles in rational thought. "[W]hile we were supposed to be merely building 'castles in the air,'" he recalled, "we were in fact following Thoreau's most practical advice, and putting the foundation under them." 252 Moreover, as they looked over a crowded reform environment in which innumerable organizations rallied to various social causes and competed for the attention, support, and financial resources of 252 Salt, Seventy Years Among Savages, 122. Italics are in the original. 142

148 143 like-minded individuals, Humanitarian leaders hoped that the emphasis on a reasoned approach rooted at least partially in science would help to set their efforts apart from those of other groups. Humanitarianism, however, was not and indeed, never claimed to be a purely scientific movement. It is true that sympathetic members of the scientific community were invited to lecture before Humanitarian audiences and contribute articles to their journals, and that a handful of influential individuals, including J. Howard Moore and Edward Carpenter, could point to some kind of scientific background or training on their résumés. Yet most Humanitarians had little connection to the burgeoning professional scientific culture of the late nineteenth century, and many expressed suspicion or even fear that an ever more powerful and secretive scientific establishment would betray its potential as a positive social force. Paradoxically, even as modern science appeared poised to lift humanity from millennia of superstition, warfare, and inequality, it also threatened to replace old forms of oppression with new ones. "[W]e had no sooner been liberated by science from the thraldom of the ignorant past," observed one Humanitarian in 1901, "than chains were being forged for our bondage to those who call themselves the apostles of science itself." 253 The tension resulting from the simultaneous promise and menace of science was a constant presence in the literature of Humanitarianism, and the profound ambivalence most Humanitarians felt toward science and scientists was a defining characteristic of their movement. As its leading figures frequently pointed out, much of their philosophy was developed as a deliberately rational outgrowth of Darwinian revelations about the 253 Edward Berdoe, "Humane Methods in Medicine," Humane Review 2 (July, 1901),

149 144 relationship between humans and non-human animals. The Humanitarians' cautious embrace of science went far beyond their debt to The Descent of Man, however, or their insistence on applying their ethics as consistently as possible. Indeed, Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians looked to science and industry to create alternatives to commonly used animal products, for example, which they hoped would expedite the eventual but inevitable transition to a bloodless society in which no animal was slaughtered or exploited. This vision of a truly Humanitarian future, they knew, could never be fulfilled until viable alternatives to meat, leather, and the use of animals for transportation and labor became widely available. Progress in technologies like steam power, electricity, and automated systems of manufacturing was rapid and dramatic, and to many reformers suggested that these alternatives might not be far off. In addition to the practical everyday benefits promised by applied science, Humanitarians hoped developments in several emerging disciplines of "hard" science would provide a rational and irrefutable basis for at least part of their message. Since ethical vegetarianism was a crucial aspect of Humanitarianism, reformers eagerly adopted the language of organic chemistry and nutritional science as part of a concerted effort to convince skeptics that a meat-free diet could also be a healthy one, and that vegetarian meals offered levels of nutrition and energy comparable to or even greater than ones based on animal flesh. British physician, biochemist, and vegetarian advocate Anna Kingsford became a particular favorite of Humanitarians, who regularly cited her work as scientific proof for many of their claims regarding vegetarianism, health, and nutrition. 144

150 145 Toward an Animal-Free Society A constant theme in the Humanitarian literature was the cautious hope that scientists, inventors, and industrialists would help facilitate the transformation to an increasingly vegetarian society by introducing effective and useful substitutes for animal products and labor. Non-human animals were ubiquitous throughout the turn-of-thecentury urban landscape, with horses and mules pulling carts, wagons, and carriages, and representing a crucial element of the economies and public transportation needs of even the most modern cities. In the mid-1880s a time in which the horse-drawn omnibus was the primary form of urban public transportation some 300 cities in the United States alone were home to at least 525 such lines and necessitated the use of tens of thousands of horses. 254 As late as 1911, the New York City Department of Health reported removing over 20,000 dead horses, mules, donkeys, and cattle from city streets during a single year. The presence of injured or dying horses and dogs was such a widespread feature of urban life that many local humane societies issued guidelines and pamphlets to municipal police departments, describing (often with the aid of diagrams) the appropriate method for painlessly shooting any such animals they would inevitably encounter. 255 In addition to the vast numbers of actual animals living and dying in the cities, animal products and derivatives including leather, bone, and felt were commonplace, and 254 George W. Hilton, "Transportation Technology and the Urban Pattern," Journal of Contemporary History 4 (July, 1969), David Rosner, Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995), 14; "To Policemen and Others," undated pamphlet circulated by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and reprinted in Roswell C. McCrea, The Humane Movement: A Descriptive Survey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910), The example of 20,000 dead animals per year works out to an average of about 55 per day. 145

151 146 used in everything from clothing to industrial applications. Many of these were byproducts of the slaughtering of cattle and hogs, as an increasingly mechanized and corporate meat industry (in the United States, especially) sought economic value in every last part of a slaughtered animal's carcass. Humanitarians understood these connections, and were especially aware that animals raised for food while mostly reared hidden from view in rural and outlying regions represented a fundamental component of a city's economic, social, and commercial life. With animals and animal products such a universally-accepted and integral aspect of Western existence at the time, Humanitarians identified human dependence on animals as one of the major impediments to a broader acceptance of their ideas. The development of functionally suitable and economically viable alternatives was thus a central concern for many reformers, and they cautiously turned to the laboratories and universities for encouragement that a future without widespread exploitation of non-human animals was possible, and perhaps even imminent. This wary faith that science might reduce human reliance on animals was apparent from the earliest days of Humanitarianism. In the preface to 1883's The Ethics of Diet, for instance, Howard Williams was confident that human resourcefulness would soon provide solutions to the problem of animal exploitation. No "thoughtful person, who knows anything of the history of Science and Discovery," he wrote, could possibly "doubt that the resources of Nature and the mechanical ingenuity of man are all but boundless." Getting the best scientific and industrial minds to actively engage specifically in the development of alternatives to animals and animal products was something of a problem, however, and the author suggested that a critical mass of Humanitarian demand might first be required to produce the economic pressure necessary 146

152 147 to set things in motion. Regarding leather, for example, Williams observed that although "various non-animal substances have been proposed, [and] in some cases used as substitutes for the prepared skins of the victims of the Slaughter-house," it would be only after there is a "general demand for such substitutes" that "there would spring up an active competition among inventors and manufacturers in this direction." 256 This guarded optimism about applied science and industrial ingenuity was repeated over the first decade of Humanitarian and ethical vegetarian reform, though not without occasional caveats about potential harm. In 1892's Animals' Rights, Henry Salt articulated his own mixed feelings, warning his readers to be wary of both the commercial and industrial worlds while simultaneously asking them to remain focused on the ultimate animal-free objective: The use of machinery is often condemned, on aesthetic grounds, because of the ugliness it has introduced into so many features of modern life. On the other hand, it should not be forgotten that it has immensely relieved the huge mass of animal labour, and that when electricity is generally used for purposes of traction, one of the foulest blots on our social humanity is likely to disappear. Scientific and mechanical invention, so far from being necessarily antagonistic to a true beauty of life, may be found to be of the utmost service to it, when they are employed for humane, and not merely commercial, purposes. 257 In other words, the unpleasant side of industrial development and technological progress not only the expanding influence of science within the realms of politics and culture (which were certainly on the minds of reformers), but the expanding urban panorama of belching smokestacks, chuffing steam trains, and polluted waterways might be mitigated if industry could produce useful substitutes for meat, leather, and animal labor. 256 Williams, The Ethics of Diet, xxxi. 257 Salt, Animals' Rights,

153 148 Alternatives to Leather, Fur, and Wool Humanitarians were particularly eager to see the development of suitable vegetarian footwear. Anxious reformers understood that leather, like meat, was a product of the slaughterhouse, but also knew that few practical alternatives to leather shoes existed, especially during the first decade or so of the movement. 258 Some Humanitarians especially those also engaged in dress reform or pursuing a Thoreauvian "simple life" in rural areas solved this dilemma by shunning traditional footwear in favor of homemade sandals or other simple shoes, though this solution was impractical for the majority of reformers who lived and worked in urban areas. 259 Many Humanitarians and ethical vegetarians sought to apply their ethics as consistently to their clothing and footwear as they did to their diet, but for a vegetarian shoe to be useful it would necessarily also be comfortable, durable, water-resistant, and reasonably fashionable. Reformers became increasingly concerned with this challenge as the movement expanded during the 1890s, with one champion of "logical humanitarianism" even offering a 10 award for the best example of a workable non-leather shoe. 260 In 1895, 258 A contemporary volume on clothing affirmed both the extent of the shoe industry and the Humanitarians' concerns about the connections between footwear and animals. American shoe factories alone "use so much leather that all the animals reared on our farms cannot supply them," the author stated, "and they employ two hundred thousand men, women, and children in turning out boots and shoes, by the hundreds of millions, every year." See Frank George Carpenter, How the World is Clothed (New York: American Book Company, 1908), Edward Carpenter, for instance, was well known for his penchant for making and wearing sandals. One early biography of Bernard Shaw noted that Carpenter and others seeking the "simple life" during the latter decades of the nineteenth century wore sandals, and that Carpenter "even wore his out of doors." See Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd Company, 1911), Using the Retail Price Index, the sum of 10 in 1895 would be equivalent to 828 in 2007, or roughly $

154 149 Josiah Oldfield offered an eloquent assessment of the situation as he saw it. Noting that "the necessity of leather has always been held up as a permanent bar to the adoption of a logical and consistent vegetarianism," he admitted that finding alternatives to leather products especially shoes was "indeed, a difficult problem to solve." Oldfield was optimistic that this would soon be achieved, however, and using his own feet as test subjects he set out to find the ideal non-leather boot. He quickly rejected India rubber as a potential material, calling it too "noiseless" but identifying its impermeability as a more significant obstacle, since it caused the feet to "become smelly." 261 Gutta-percha was eliminated for similar reasons, and Oldfield observed that shoes made from these substances also looked inappropriate and "drew attention to themselves by being peculiar." He ultimately pronounced "Pannus Corium" a treated fabric that looked like leather the best alternative then available for manufacturing the uppers. 262 As for the soles, Oldfield first tried asbestos (which unfortunately "began to peel away in a woolly, fluffy way") before deciding that a tightly woven, waterproofed flax fabric had the best qualities. After wearing shoes made from these materials during the fall of 1895, Oldfield declared that he was "satisfied not only that a Vegetarian boot can be made, but that a boot equal in appearance, in comfort, and in wear can be made without a particle of 261 Josiah Oldfield, "Is There Nothing Like Leather? Some Experiments with Vegetarian Boots," Vegetarian Review (Dec. 1895), While the objections to the potential odors ("emanations from the foot") that resulted from rubber's impermeability are understandable, Oldfield's rejection of rubber shoes because they were "too noiseless to suit most tastes" remains more inscrutable. 262 Although the material had been available for at least 50 years, shoes and boots made from Pannus Corium were typically marketed to women, especially those with "corns and tender feet" or who hailed from "a class whose feet require something softer even than the softest leather." See J. Sparks Hall, The Book of the Feet: A History of Boots and Shoes (New York: William Graham, 1847),

155 150 leather being used in it." Oldfield's test models were custom-made, though, and the problems of efficient manufacturing, widespread availability, and affordability remained a major impediment. Humanitarian anxiety about the use of animal products for footwear, as well as the ongoing hope that science and industry would provide practical alternatives, was also evident in numerous shorter articles, advertisements, and letters to the editors of Humanitarian and vegetarian journals. Despite Oldfield's misgivings about asbestos as a potential replacement for leather soles only a few years earlier, the journal Food, Home, and Garden reported that an inventor in Germany had patented a new method for manufacturing faux leather from the mineral. Although the process seemed somewhat complex it involved combing the asbestos into fibers, coating them with an Indiarubber-based solution, and evaporating a benzene solvent the result was "said to resemble very closely leather in its peculiarities and structure." 263 In one 1897 letter to the editor of the Chicago Vegetarian, a reader related the story of an acquaintance who questioned his use of leather footwear. Admitting that the query had initially "stunned" him and forced him to consider the broader ramifications of his commitment to vegetarianism, the writer pondered the alternatives. "What shall it be? Paper?" he asks, before answering his own question. "I think when railroad ties can be made of paper that surely shoes could be manufactured from it," he writes, "[a]nd if they can, we want them." 264 In 1901 another reader similarly asked, "What shall we wear upon our feet? 263 "Asbestos Leather," Food, Home and Garden 3 (July 1899), E. Hetherington, "Suggests Paper for Shoes," Chicago Vegetarian 2 (Dec. 1897), 18. The reference to railroad ties is most likely a reflection of rapid advances in the industrial processes used by the paper industry. Large-scale commercial production of paper from wood pulp was a relatively recent development dating back only to the early nineteenth century and new 150

156 151 What shall we have as a substitute where sole and upper leather is wanted and for manufacturing machinery belts, etc.? Must the animal die?" The editor agreed that currently available solutions were inadequate, with felt being "too thick," lasting "too thin," and rubber and cork largely "impractical." Yet his response also maintained that these problems "will gradually be solved," noting that at least one "strong and durable" leather substitute was already being manufactured, and that cork was increasingly used in soles. Ultimately, the hope was that industry would create more practical alternatives, since "the bulkiness of both cork and felt will in time be obviated by experiment in their continued manufacture." 265 Industry indeed appeared to respond to the demand, particularly for clothing and several other items traditionally made of animal products. A single paragraph in the January 15, 1900 issue of The Vegetarian Magazine assured those readers "who are so strict that they do not care to wear an article of clothing into which any animal properties are introduced" that a London bootmaker was reported to have created a leather-free boot that was soft, free from cracks, and that would even last twenty-five percent longer than equipment and techniques allowed the introduction of an increasing number of products made from wood fibers. This was especially the case with wood pulp, which could be molded into a wide variety of shapes and sometimes coated or painted. The faith in wood pulp as a manufacturing material was such that one dental journal (presumably, the dental profession was particularly interested in materials engineering) reported in 1883 that paper products had already been adapted for use as "pails, tubs, table-ware and floor-mattings, car wheels and railroad ties, houses and observatory domes." Of particular note was the notice of "a steamboat which has been completed made almost entirely from paper," which measured some twenty feet long, had a capacity of "several tons, and featured sheathing made from "a solid body of paper three-eights if an inch in thickness." See Lyman Horace Weeks, A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, (New York: Lockwood Trade Journal Company, 1916), ; and "Miscellaneous Editorial," Items of Interest 5 (Jan. 1883), "Pertinent Questions," The Vegetarian and Our Fellow Creatures 5 (March 15, 1901),

157 152 ordinary leather boots. 266 In late 1901, the back cover of The Vegetarian and Our Fellow Creatures listed a number of animal-free products that could be ordered through the Vegetarian Society of America, including a vegetarian soap "free of all animal matter." 267 As early as 1903, concerned readers of The Herald of the Golden Age were being referred to specific London clothiers that offered imitation leather gloves made from cotton and "vegetable fibre," boots of a similar material, and the new "Wolft" brand of soles, which were constructed of compressed plant cellulose and described as a "splendid" product that "makes a capital shoe." 268 In Chicago, a 1907 notice heralded the news that a German manufacturer of "xylolin, or paper yarn" was seeking to open mills in the United States, and would hopefully provide inexpensive alternatives to leather and wool. 269 By 1912 the London retailer Debenham & Freebody was running full-page advertisements promoting a line of "Fur Substitutes for Humanitarians" that included imitation fur stoles, scarves, muffs, and a "Persian and Musquash Set," all accompanied by handsome line drawings of fashionable women wearing the various products (figure 4). One ad 266 "A Vegetarian Shoe," The Vegetarian Magazine 4 (Jan. 15, 1900), "Vegetarian Specialties and Novelties," The Vegetarian and Our Fellow Creatures 6 (Dec. 1901), back cover. The VSA also offered peanut butter, fruit butter (made from the reader's choice of raisins, figs, or dates), a "wholesome product of white parched corn" called Penola, and the rather unappealingly named "Kaughphy," a coffee substitute. 268 "Substitutes for Leather Gloves" and "Leather Boots Superseded," The Herald of the Golden Age 8 (Dec. 1903), 138. Also recommended were boots from the Sochon Company in London, whose products were reportedly "cool and soft, and quite as durable as leather boots." The anonymous writer furthermore explained that he wore those particular boots whenever addressing audiences on the subject of vegetarianism, "so as to be able to extinguish promptly, by exhibition of a practical object lesson, the objections of the ubiquitous individual who generally pops up upon such occasions with the triumphant question, 'what about our boots?'" No mention was given of what type of footwear the author favored when not giving such lectures. 269 "More Leatherless Shoes," The Vegetarian Magazine 11 (June, 1907), 20. The short piece claimed that xylolin "combines the good qualities of cotton and linen at one-third the price of cotton and one-tenth the price of linen." 152

158 153 described the company's wares as "so perfect that it is most difficult to distinguish them from Real 153

159 154 Figure 4. Debenham & Freebody, "Fur Substitutes for Humanitarians" advertisement. Source: Herald of the Golden Age (July 1911). Fur." 270 Other garment manufacturers also made at least some progress in creating animal-free items and marketing them to followers of ethical vegetarianism and Humanitarianism. A. E. Ayliffe & Son of Kensington, for instance, touted its "'Humana' Footwear" in 1910, a product line "built entirely of vegetable substance, and contain[ing] no Animal Matter whatever" (figure 5). Significantly, the company claimed that their shoes and boots were "produced specially to supply Humanitarians," and were the result of a "new advance in applied Humanitarianism." Debenham & Freebody, "Fur Substitutes for Humanitarians" advertisements, in The Herald of the Golden Age and British Health Review 15 (January 1912), back cover, and (March 1912), back cover. 271 A.E. Ayliffe & Son, "'Humana' Footwear" advertisement, The Herald of the Golden Age 15 (Jan. 1912),

160 155 Figure 5. A. E. Ayliffe & Son, "'Humana' Footwear" advertisement. Source: The Herald of the Golden Age (Jan. 1912). Howard Moore demonstrated optimism about the imminent obsolescence of animal-based clothing in his 1907 book The New Ethics. A follow-up to the previous year's Universal Kinship, Moore used the new volume to explore some of the social and cultural ramifications of the earlier work's biological and ecological arguments. In a chapter titled "The Cost of a Skin," Moore deplored the "massacre" of animals for their pelts and indicts fashionable men and women for their complicity in the slaughter. But he also wrote that advances were leading to a variety of new manufactured goods, and that the "less economical animal products have been steadily superseded by products from the vegetal world." By 1907 sealskin could be replaced by plush and calfskin by "vegetal leather," he pointed out, and industry was producing a wood-based artificial silk "as fine and lustrous as ever was spun by the oak-eating babes of Polyphemus." Furthermore, Moore fully expected these products to become more widespread and inexpensive as Western civilization evolved away from its barbarous roots. "And we may expect that this sartorial reform, already so far advanced, will go on," he explained, "and that the more enlightened generations of the future, for both moral and economic reasons, will clothe themselves entirely in fabrics of bloodless origin." J. Howard Moore, The New Ethics (London: Ernest Bell, York House, 1907), The "wood" which could be spun into silk was most likely a reference to cellulose, a fibrous plant material that was referred to in numerous other publications. 155

161 156 Food Without Guilt While anxiety related to shoes and clothing was certainly evident, Humanitarians were even more concerned about food. How could their arguments for ethical vegetarianism take root, many wondered, without easily available and affordable alternatives to meat and meat products? Reformers answered this question and assuaged some of their anxiety by maintaining a steadfast hope that human ingenuity, informed by recent progress in food science and industrial production, would help to usher in an era of healthy, nutritious, and economical plant-based substitutes for meat and other animal-based foods. Although "meat analogs" had been developed many centuries earlier in China, they were virtually unknown in Western culinary culture until Dr. John Harvey Kellogg worked on developing a number of nut-based products for use at his Battle Creek Sanitarium, beginning in the early 1890s. 273 Previous generations of dietary reformers had long proposed various foods that might serve to replace meat among new converts to vegetarianism Sylvester Graham's whole wheat bread during the 1840s is one particularly well-known example but Kellogg was the first to create and mass-produce plant-based products deliberately intended to mimic the texture and nutritional composition of meat. In 1896, US Department of Agriculture Assistant Secretary Charles W. Dabney wrote to Kellogg, encouraging him to continue with this work and suggesting 273 "Meat Analog" is the standard food industry term for any product (usually made from soy protein, other legumes, or wheat gluten) Yuba, the thin skin which forms on the surface of soy milk when it is heated in order to make tofu, had long been used in China, Taiwan, and parts of Japan specifically as a substitute for meat; traditionally it was pressed into wooden molds in order to replicate the texture and appearance of duck, chicken, pork, or even tripe. See Alan Davidson, "Yuba," in The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999),

162 157 that navy beans might be especially well suited for such foods. 274 That same year Kellogg unveiled the first of what would eventually become a line of thirty meat substitutes and other nut-based foods with names like Nuttose, Protose, and Bromose, mostly made from ground nuts or mixtures of nuts and wheat gluten (figure 6). Although originally served only to the Sanitarium's guests, these products proved popular enough that Kellogg created the Sanitas Nut Food Company in order to sell them to former patients and other interested consumers well beyond Battle Creek Charles William Dabney, A Memoir (s.n.: 1947), cited in Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacabbo, Vegetarian America: A History (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004), See also William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Soybeans and Soyfoods: 1100 B.C. to the 1980s (unpublished manuscript, 2004). 275 In 1899 Kellogg merged the Sanitas Food Company and the Battle Creek Health Food Company into the Sanitas Nut Food Company, Ltd. The company was initially run by Kellogg's brother, Will Keith Kellogg. 157

163 158 Figure 6. Sanitas Nut Food Company, Protose advertisement. Source: The Vegetarian Magazine (Oct. 15, 1900). Both ethical and traditional vegetarians embraced Kellogg's new foods, and by the late 1890s they were well-represented throughout the vegetarian and Humanitarian literature. As early as 1897, for instance, Kellogg's company was purchasing full-page advertisements in the Chicago Vegetarian, one of which described Nuttose as a "pure product of nuts, of the consistency of cheese, having somewhat the appearance and flavor of cold roast mutton" and which could be "used in various ways, being prepared similarly 158