In Pursuit of Percy Shelley, “The First Celebrity Vegan”: An Essay on Meat, Sex, and Broccoli

By Professor Michael Owen Jones
8 July 2022

Abstract: Through his writings opposing cruelty to animals and his vision of a utopian society infused with equality, social justice, and spirituality that begins with an individual’s diet, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley influenced generations of reformers and vegetarians. This essay examines his philosophy as embodied in his own alimentation. It answers for the first time the questions of why he devoted so much of his pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) to health and illness, how he could become a vegetarian, and what caused him to lapse from a vegetable diet. It utilizes the concept of “personal food system” to discuss Shelley’s enactment of his identity through daily eating habits. This study also briefly assesses the behaviors of two of Shelley’s friends who sometimes partook of a vegetable regimen, fellow poet Lord Byron and the barrister T. J. Hogg who authored a biography of Shelley, demonstrating further the usefulness of the theoretical framework and indicating more fully why Shelley became the doyen of nineteenth-century vegetarianism. Personal food system, the subject of model building for several years, has rarely if ever been applied to a particular individual, much less an historical personage. This study adds a new dimension to the literature on Shelley, contributes to folkloristics in its attention to custom, belief, and foodways, and reveals how identity may be enacted in a person’s eating behavior.

______________________________________

“It appears, therefore, that Shelley was a vegetarian at heart and by conviction, and, in the main, in practice also, though, for the reasons I have mentioned, he was not invariably consistent in his practice.”

– H.S. Salt (1888, 245), Vice President, Vegetarian Society, England

_______________________________________

One of the second generation of Romantic poets that included Lord Byron and John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) converted to a vegetable diet in early March 1812. Despite his being dubbed the “first celebrity vegan” (Davis 2011), most of the scholarship on Shelley and other writers in the Romantic period consists of literary, biographical, and critical studies, not foodways research. Twentieth century biographies contain scant mention of his eating habits. The few pages about Shelley in Preece’s book, Sins of the Flesh (2009, 252-260), emphasize his philosophy of ethical vegetarianism rather than his daily fare. Spencer’s treatment in The Heretic’s Feast (1993, 244-251) deals mainly with the influence of other vegetarian advocates on Shelley’s ideology. Articles by Oerlemans (1995) and Morton (2006) concern Shelley’s ecological and moral stance against animal food and his “ecotopian vision” (Morton 2006, 58). Morton’s book, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (1994), a revision of his dissertation (1992), examines in detail the “political significance of figurative language as it constructs the discourses of diet” (1994, 10). By dwelling on ideology expressed through poetry and metaphor, Morton purposefully avoids “forms of individualistic or psychologizing reading which tempt researchers in food” (pp. 10-11).

As a researcher of food and foodways, I am interested in food choice and other specifics of an individual’s eating behavior. While providing an overview of Shelley’s radical reformation of society, therefore, the present paper focuses on his alimentation related to his personality and philosophy, why he was able to turn to a vegetable diet with relative ease, and what accounts for his reverting to animal food at times. To explore more fully the relationship between identity and food choice, this essay includes the behaviors of several of Shelley’s predecessors and friends. Through such inquiry, we can observe continuities in customs and beliefs over time; for instance, the modern raw food movement as well as such customs and traditions as communes, open marriages, and nudism had antecedents long ago. In addition, we can gain insight into the challenges confronting those who attempt to maintain a non-flesh regimen in opposition to the culinary choices of the dominant culture, and, especially, achieve a greater understanding of the ways that individuals’ identities are enacted through eating habits.

The interpretative framework employed in this essay utilizes the concept of “personal food system,” which Furst, Connors, Bisogni, Sobal, and Falk outlined in 1996. They base their conceptual model of the process of food choice on the assumption that whether it be the selection of diet or even particular meals, at least five influences bear on people’s decisions of which foods to choose. These include “ideals” (expectations, beliefs, aspirations, and symbolic meanings including holiday traditions, special occasion meals, and ritual observances that call for specific foods), personal factors (satisfaction and gratification from eating, sensory preferences, emotional state, and personal interests and traits as well as physiological characteristics such as food allergies), resources (financial, and skill and knowledge of food preparation), social framework (social roles and meanings), and food context (the marketing or social environment). These influences affect the development of personal systems that involve strategies for making food-related choices. Later works have added refinements to the basic conceptual model, such as an article by Connors, Bisogni, Sobal, and Devine (2001) concerning values that people weigh when making alimentary decisions, including health, taste, cost, convenience, and managing relationships. In addition, an article by Bisogni, Connors, Devine, and Sobal (2002) discusses how identities are constructed or enacted through food choice (for instance, “I’m a salad lover” or “I’m a meat-and-potatoes person”). The authors write that people’s identities may be related to the range and types of foods preferred and consumed (such as non-meat products only, omnivorous fare, fast food, etc.), the quantity eaten (a hearty eater, a nibbler), and the consistency of food practices (e.g., a regular eater versus someone who “grabs lunch when I can”; or one’s fidelity in adhering to a particular alimentary routine). An orientation toward health, body image, salience of food (“I eat to live, not live to eat” versus “I love to eat and I love to cook”), and personal values or ideology also relate to a person’s identity as often evident in food choice. The historical record about Shelley does not contain enough information to test or illustrate all of these ideas, but it is sufficient to apply some of them for a fuller understanding of alimentary beliefs and practices of the poet and several of his friends.

While folklorists have published extensively on group identities—e.g., ethnic, regional, religious—they have not researched individual identity related to alimentation (Jones 2007), whether among living or historical personages; nor, with the exception of LuAnnne Roth (2002), have they studied the beliefs and practices of vegetarians. In the four sections below I first analyze Shelley’s pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) and then describe his character and the eating habits that enact his values, discuss his lapses from a vegetable regimen, and, last, examine the beliefs and behaviors of others that help further explain Shelley’s ideas and concerns.

THE SALUBRIOUS EFFECTS OF A SIMPLE DIET

_______________________________________

“. . . no longer now

He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh. . . .”

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1831[1813], 51)

_______________________________________

For the latter third of his life (he drowned with Edward Williams in a boating accident a month before his 30th birthday), Shelley adamantly opposed an animal diet on grounds of health and morality but also in criticism of wealth, power, and commercial interests. His life and works inspired the founding of the Vegetarian Society in England (1847), the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, the Keats-Shelley Review (1909-present), and the Shelley Memorial Award for poetry (1929-present). He is considered one of England’s greatest lyricists. A contributor to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein in which the Creature is a vegetarian, and an atheist and a political and social radical, Percy Shelley was denigrated by many during his life and afterwards for his principles and practices, but also worshipped by generations of writers and vegetarians as well as working-class radicals. The poet Robert Browning was so taken by a book of Shelley’s verse, given to him by a cousin on his thirteenth birthday, that he declared himself a vegetarian and an atheist like Shelley (although two years later he reverted to eating meat; Pottle 1965). In his inaugural address before the Shelley Society in 1886, the Reverend Stopford A. Brooke asked, “Why have a Shelley Society?”  Because “it is our humour.”  He added, “We are fond of Shelley. . . .”  The dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who changed his diet in 1881, paid tribute to the Romantic poet: “I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a Vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet” (Holroyd 1988, I, 84). Shaw proposed renaming vegetarianism “Shelleyism” (Preece 2009, 253).

Although classical antiquity had its share of those recommending a vegetable diet (e.g., Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Ovid, Plutarch), and 40% of residents in India today shun meat, much of the modern Western European and American interest can be traced to seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain (Guerrini 1999). Principal motivations consisted of health, spiritual, and ethical concerns not unlike today (Spencer 1993). Among the early promoters of a fleshless diet were physician George Cheyne (1671-1743), the hatter and radical Thomas Tryon (1634-1703), and ballad publisher Joseph Ritson (1752-1803). Dr. William Lambe (1765-1847) was one of the most distinguished champions of the reformed regimen. A student of his, John Frank Newton (1770-1827), an advocate of “nakedism,” temperance, and fleshless diets and author of The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811), occasionally dined at the table of William Godwin, father of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797-1851) who later penned the novel Frankenstein and married Percy Shelley. A visitor to the Godwin home that often served vegetarian fare, and then a “constant guest” of the Newton household (Williams 1883, 206), Percy Shelley fed on dinners of vegetables and distilled water as well as arguments against ingesting flesh and drinking spirituous liquors.

Shelley’s fervent renunciation of meat eating is evident in two essays that he penned, one titled A Vindication of Natural Diet, which was published in 1813 by the medical bookseller J. Callow, and the other “On the Vegetable System of Diet” (written sometime between 1813 and 1815; published 1929). He begins A Vindication (1884[1813], 9)[i]: “I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life,” which he boiled down to consuming flesh and fermented drink. Several poems include verses denouncing the killing and ingesting of animals.

A Vindication of Natural Diet, a version of which was incorporated in Note 17 of Queen Mab (Clark 1939), is sprinkled with references to Hesiod, Horace, Pliny, Lambe, Cheyne, Milton, and Newton, among others. As indicated in a footnote, Newton provided the important idea, referring to a myth, that Shelley fleshed out in the second paragraph of A Vindication, namely, “Prometheus, (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. . . . All vice arose from the ruin of healthful innocence” (1884 [1813], 10-11). Later he writes (p. 17), “It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror, does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.”

Because “animal flesh and fermented liquors” are “slow but certain poison,” insists Shelley, those switching to vegetables and distilled water would “have to dread no disease but old age” (p. 20). He also contends, “There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried” (p. 18). As evidence he cites the families of Lambe and Newton, numbering 17 individuals, who “have lived for seven years on this diet without a death, and almost without the slightest illness” (p. 19).

Similar to the arguments of vegetarians today (Beardsworth and Keil 1992; Hamilton 2006; Preece 2008), Shelley includes moral, political, social, economic, and ecological justifications in A Vindication of Natural Diet, which he sandwiches between claims of health benefits at the beginning and the end of his pamphlet. “The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase [sic] of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance” now available (Shelley (1884[1813, 20). Hence, by not “devouring an acre at a meal,” the former “eater of animal flesh” would be “appeasing the long-protracted famine of the hard-working peasant’s hungry babes.” Expanding on the notions of agricultural inefficiency and social injustice, Shelley writes: “The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.”  Only the wealthy, he continues, can “indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh.”  He then condemns the “vice, selfishness, and corruption” of commerce, and challenges England’s dependence on other countries for “the luxuries of life” in the form of spices, wines, and other items (p. 21). It is the “avarice of commercial monopoly” that has made the gap between the rich and poor “wider and more unconquerable.” Shelley attributes to the “unnatural diet” the roots of misery and evil, denounces the “brutal pleasures” in the tradition of blood sports, deplores the horror “in the death-pangs and last convulsions of dying animals,” and warns that violence to animals breeds human callousness toward one another (p. 25).

In sum, Shelley’s “simple diet” helps prevent or cure various “bodily and mental derangements,” a number of societal ills and injustices, and the abuse of natural resources. By increasing the food supply a vegetable diet decreases the demand for land and with it class conflict (Oerlemans 1995). The change to “a natural diet” that can convert “disease into healthfulness” and usher in “the moral reformation of society” begins not on a large scale with nations but “by small societies, families, and even individuals.” Shelley’s goal, in a nutshell, was to create a world of benevolence, health, and equality; one in which human beings are in closer harmony with nature (and one another) rather than assuming dominion over other species and the “right” to kill and eat them (Preece 2009), or what Peter Singer (1976) labels “speciesism,” and an age in which we do not feed upon a diet of violence that whets our appetite for more (Oerlemans 1995).           

A Vindication is heavily laden with discussions of health and illness. As Morton contends (1992, 107), however, and as illustrated above, “Shelley's vegetarianism can be seen as ideological to a greater extent than it can be seen to be ‘purely’ medical.”  Yet Shelley alluded to fitness and disease often and at length. Why?

One reason is that his predecessors had emphasized the salubrious effects of a vegetable diet. John Frank Newton, whom Shelley met in November 1812 and with whom he dined often at the time, said he had been “for many years an habitual invalid” but recovered by following the new, natural regimen (Williams 1883, 206). Furthermore, “The children of our family can each of them eat a dozen or eighteen walnuts for supper without the most trifling indigestion. . .” (p. 208). Such a matter was not insignificant. In The English Malady Cheyne writes (1733, 300), “One of the most terrible objections, some weak persons make against this regimen and method, is . . . they have always found milk, fruit, and vegetables to inflate, blow them up, and raise such tumults and tempests in their stomach and bowels, that they have been terrified and affrighted from going on.”

Newton’s physician, friend, and mentor, Dr. William Lambe, had turned to a non-flesh diet owing to ill health, and he published works on the value of a vegetable regimen in treating such diseases as cancer, tuberculosis, and asthma (1810, 1850[1815]). Lambe also found through chemical analysis that the Thames River and other resources were “filthy” and “loaded with animal and vegetable putridity” (1828, 269); hence, his insistence on drinking distilled water. The condition of waterways was so odious that Tobias Smollett satirized it in his picaresque novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1772, II, 6): "If I would drink water, I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the River Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster – Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcases [sic] of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels and common sewers, within the bills of mortality." Drinking wine, beer, and fermented liquors was a common alternative to slaking one’s thirst from polluted sources. The “gin craze” in the 18th century, when grain was cheap, led to such an insatiable demand for “Madame Geneva” that London saw an annual average consumption of seven gallons per adult (Harris 2012).

A second reason for Shelley’s emphasis on health is that life expectancy in Britain was short—an average of 35 years in the 1700s and 41 years by 1820—in part because of the high rate of maternal and infant mortality (Cutler, Deaton, and Lleras-Muney 2006). Early demise resulted from smallpox, typhus, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, influenza, and tuberculosis. People suffered rickets, whooping cough, skin and eye diseases, parasitic infections, kidney and bladder stones, rheumatism, ulcers, and bad teeth as well as common functional complaints like colds, gastrointestinal problems, burns, bruises, and broken bones (Osborn 2010). Infectious diseases accounted for 60% of deaths in 1848. An overriding concern was to guard against becoming ill in the first place, and to avoid “the risk of poisonous medicines” (Shelley 1884[1813], 25). Animals themselves were a source of disease in people, as George Cheyne warned his readers in An Essay of Health and Long Life (1724), and John Oswald reiterated in The Cry of Nature (1791, 92, note 4) in which Oswald wrote, “Animals, like men, are subject to diseases.—Animal food must therefore always be dangerous.” The authors were justified in their concerns. Zoonotic diseases abound from contact with animals and even inhaling barnyard dust, as well as consuming undercooked meat, because of fecal contamination, parasites, and bacteria in flesh, urine, milk, and birth fluids.

Perhaps another reason Shelley steeped A Vindication with medical matters is as a strategy to make his radical views more palatable to readers. His ecotopian vision involving a harmonious relationship with nature, nourished by individuals changing from a meat-based diet to a vegetable one, “goes to the core of our spiritual and physical being”; such ecological reform at the time was a “rare feat in accounts of nature” (Oerlemans 1995, 548). Shelley urges readers to “give the vegetable system a fair trial” by breaking through the “pernicious habit” of flesh eating (1884[1813], 23). The carrot on the stick, as it were, is his promise that the “proselyte to a simple and natural diet” will “acquire an easiness of breathing,” “no longer pine under the lethargy of ennui,” and enjoy freedom from “a variety of painful maladies.”  Vegetarianism was “reasonable, accessible and relatively simple”; it could be accomplished by “a change in diet . . . easily in reach of every individual” (Oerelmans 1995, 545, 547). Hence, Shelley addressed A Vindication “not only to the young enthusiast” who will “embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit,” but also to “the elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance . . . and is inflected with a variety of painful maladies,” and to “the mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease, and unaccountable deaths incident to her children, are the causes of incurable unhappiness. . .” (Shelley 1884[1813], 25-26).

As further inducement to take up his “system of perfect epicurism,” Shelley refers to the gustatory delights of a “bloodless banquet”: “The pleasures of taste to be derived from a dinner of potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, lettuces, with a dessert of apples, gooseberries, strawberries, currants, raspberries, and in winter, oranges, apples, and pears, is far greater than is supposed” (Shelley 1884[1813], 24). Near the end of A Vindication (p. 26) he admonishes those desiring health to attend to two rules that he sets forth in capital letters, the typographical equivalent of shouting: One is to “NEVER TAKE ANY SUBSTANCE INTO THE STOMACH THAT ONCE HAD LIFE.”  The other is to “DRINK NO LIQUID BUT WATER RESTORED TO ITS ORIGINAL PURITY BY DISTILLATION.”  In the final two sentences of an appendix, after listing several individuals who lived 100 years or longer, Shelley provides a testimonial to the beneficial effects of a vegetable regimen (p. 27): “It may be here remarked, that the author and his wife [Harriet] have lived on vegetables for eight months. The improvements of health and temper here stated, is the result of his own experience.”

A fourth motive for dwelling on illness is that Shelley had his own health problems including an early tendency toward consumption. On March 7, 1817, he wrote to his father-in-law, William Godwin, that “My health has been materially worse,” for yet again he had “experienced a decisive pulmonary attack” (Dowden 1887, I, 69). He was also subject to sleepwalking, trances, and violent nightmares in youth, and later to hallucinations, bouts of depression, nervous attacks after periods of emotional distress (Medwin 1913[1847]; Hayter 1980), chronic nephritis, infectious diseases including ophthalmia and boils, and hypochondria (Holmes 1975).

As an example of Shelley’s psychosomatic disorders, his friend Peacock writes, “About the end of 1813, Shelley was troubled by one of his extraordinary delusions. He fancied that a fat old woman who sat opposite to him in a mail coach was afflicted with elephantiasis, that the disease was infectious and incurable, and that he had caught it from her. He was continually on the watch for its symptoms. . .” (Brett-Smith 1909, 33). Hogg adds, “[H]e was perpetually examining his own skin, and feeling and looking at that of others. One evening, . . . when many young ladies were standing up for a country dance, he caused a wonderful consternation amongst these charming creatures by walking slowly along the row of girls and curiously surveying them, placing his eyes close to their necks and bosoms, and feeling their breasts and bare arms, in order to ascertain whether any of the fair ones had taken the horrible disease. . . . This strange fancy continued to afflict him for several weeks, and to divert, or distress, his friends, and then it was forgotten as suddenly as it had been taken up, and gave place to more cheerful reminiscences, or forebodings. . .” (Hogg 1858, II, 335-37).

For incidents of melancholy, coughs, and physical pain, Shelley treated himself with laudanum, a popular nostrum and potent narcotic; however, it caused spasms serious and frequent enough that colleagues and biographers remarked upon them. He also took the drug in times “of extreme dejection or in paroxysms of passion” (Trelawny 1878, II, 23); for instance, when he suffered a “nervous attack” in January 1812 after a falling-out with Hogg who had attempted to seduce his wife, Harriet. Shelley had included free love and non-exclusiveness of marriage in his radical views, but Harriet was repulsed by Hogg’s advances. Moreover, the event caused, for a while, “the loss of Hogg as a friend, and almost – one must insist – as a lover” (Holmes 1975, 91). Another incident when he turned to laudanum occurred in July 1814 after sixteen-year old Mary Godwin professed her love for him and he subsequently abandoned Harriet to elope with Mary. As Peacock describes Shelley at the time: “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said: ‘I never part from this.’” Shelley then added in a calmer tone, “Everyone who knows me must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither” (Brett-Smith 1909, 48). A third period of despondency and dependency on the drug was late 1816 to 1817 when his estranged wife, Harriet, pregnant with Shelley’s or some other man’s child, drowned herself. Adding to his despair, the Chancery denied Percy’s lawsuit to keep his two eldest children to rear as vegetarian atheists, he suffered financial problems, and doctors informed him that a recent pulmonary attack indicated dangerous tuberculosis (Hayter 1980).

Many of the ideas in A Vindication had precedent in the writings of others, including vegetarians with whom Shelley supped. The pamphlet acknowledged and likely was inspired by the serious health threats of the early nineteenth century, not only disease and illness but also dubious and dangerous medical practices. Dwelling on medical matters, Shelley could appeal to issues of concern to readers some of whom, especially the aristocracy, would sour on his radical views. Finally, his work reflects a growing worry about his own health. This brings up the question of his personal food system and its relation to his identity, ideals, and ideology.

OF BREAD, BUNS, AND DISTILLED WATER

_______________________________________

“Mrs. Shelley used to send him something to eat into the room where he habitually studied; but the plate frequently remained untouched for hours upon a bookshelf, and at the end of the day he might be heard asking, ‘Mary, have I dined?’”

– J.A. Symonds (1909[1878])

_______________________________________

Two years before writing A Vindication of Natural Diet and a year prior to commencing a vegetable regimen, Shelley shocked family and administrators at Oxford with The Necessity of Atheism (1811), which appeared during his first year in college and for which he was expelled in March 1811 when he refused to recant his views. Five months later, 19-year old Percy eloped to Scotland with 16-year old Harriet Wesbrook. In early March 1812, Harriet wrote to a friend, Elizabeth Hitchener: “You do not know that we have forsworn meat and adopted the Pythagorean system. About a fortnight has elapsed since the change, and we do not find ourselves any the worse for it. . . . We are delighted with it, and think it the best thing in the world” (Axon 1891, 1-2). While she accepted his unusual choice of diet, it was Shelley’s professing atheism and other radical notions that “truly petrified” Harriet (Spencer 1993, 245). She wrote to her Irish friend, Mrs. Nugent, that Queen Mab, with its Note 17 concerning the justification of a natural diet, was not to be published “under pain of death,” but privately printed for friends, “because it is too much against every existing establishment” (quoted in Spencer 1993, 248). In his Life of Shelley, T.J. Hogg describes the poem and note as subversive and revolutionary, for it targets religion (Christianity in particular), political tyranny, the destructiveness of commerce and war, and the corruption of love by marriage and prostitution. Having known Shelley during the last year of his short life, Edward Trelawny wondered, “[W]as it possible this mild-looking beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world?” (Trelawny 1858, 26).

Shelley was as unconventional in his dress and coiffure as he was in ideology. “[T]here was something of singularity in his appearance, it must be admitted,” remarks Hogg (1858, II, 328), Shelley’s friend from university. He refused to wear shoelaces (Gilmour 2002). “His throat was often bare, the collar of his shirt open, in days when a huge neckcloth was the mode; other men’s heads, like those of private soldiers, were then clipped quite close, the poet’s locks were long. . . , streaming like a meteor. . .”  (Hogg 1858, II, 328). Hogg notes that Shelley’s “features, his whole face, and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small” but appeared bulky because his hair was long and bushy, which he often rubbed “fiercely with his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough” (Hogg 1904, 10-11).

Shelley’s diet, too, was quirky. He licked “with relish” the resinous turpentine (mastic) oozing from the bark of fir and larch trees (Bieri 2004, 297). When feeling hungry as a student at Oxford “he would dash into the first baker's shop, buy a loaf and rush out again, bearing it under his arm; and he strode onwards in his rapid course, breaking off pieces of bread and greedily swallowing them. But however frugal the fare, the waste was considerable, and his path might be tracked . . . by a long line of crumbs” (Hogg 1858, II, 319-20). Shelley complained to his first cousin and neighbor, Thomas Medwin, that a friend had refused his offer of bread. “I explained to him that the individual in question probably had no objection to bread in a moderate quantity . . . and was only unwilling to devour two or three pounds of dry bread in the street, and at an early hour” (Medwin1913[1847], 76). Shelley often carried raisins loosely in his waistcoat pocket. “He occasionally rolled up little pellets of bread [around the raisins], and, in a sly, mysterious manner, shot them with his thumb, hitting the persons — whom he met in his walks — on the face, commonly on the nose, at which he grew to be very dexterous.”  At home, “he would shoot his pellets about the room, taking aim at a picture, at an image, or at any other object which attracted his notice” (Hogg 1858, II, 320-21).

Shelley’s aliment consisted largely of bread in one form or another, and sometimes fruit and sweets. A French woman had taught him to make panada. “When the bread had been steeped awhile, and had swelled sufficiently, he poured off the water, squeezing it out of the bread, which he chopped up with a spoon; he then sprinkled pounded loaf sugar over it, and grated nutmeg upon it, and devoured the mass with a prodigious relish” (Hogg 1858, II, 321). “Like all persons of simple tastes, he retained his sweet tooth,” writes Hogg (1904, 114). “He would greedily eat cakes, gingerbread and sugar; honey, preserved or stewed fruit with bread, were his favourite delicacies.”  Shelley and Harriet’s fondness for penny buns and indifference toward the refinements of entertaining sometimes resulted in this being the only fare on the table when guests arrived (Symonds 1909[1878]).

Shelley’s friends and biographers refer to his “abstemious” diet. He was “utterly indifferent to the luxuries of the table, and, although he had been obliged for his health to discontinue his Pythagorean system, he still almost lived on bread, fruit, and vegetables” (Hogg 1858, II, 372-73). The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon recalled meeting Shelley at dinner: “I did not then know what hectic, spare, weakly yet intellectual-looking creature it was, carving a bit of brocoli [sic] or cabbage on his plate, as if it had been the substantial wing of a chicken” (Macdonald 1950, 337). In 1816 Shelley began keeping an account of his intake, writing in Mary’s journal that on October 26 he ate 22 ounces and the next day 24 ounces at lunch, dinner, and tea (Morton 1992, 92). One and a half pounds of food is but a fraction of the current American’s daily average of nearly five and a half pounds, much of it animal products (Wesley). Shelley’s fare was even less than the meager rations served to prisoners in New York state at the time consisting of bread and a cup of burned rye beverage for breakfast, ox head soup at mid-day, and mush, soup, and potatoes for the evening meal (One of the Inspectors 1811, 176).

Generally disinterested in food as such and also in mealtime rituals, Shelley ate only when hungry, if even then. Trelawny (1858, 65) reports his attempt to entice Shelley from his books to join him in a meal: “Putting his long fingers through his masses of wild tangled hair, he answered faintly, ‘You go, I have dined — late eating don't do for me.’  ‘What is this?’” asked Trelawny, pointing to a plate of food on a book shelf. “‘That,’ — colouring, — ‘why that must be my dinner. It's very foolish; I thought I had eaten it.’” Shelley’s habits continued with his second wife, partaking of food “when he felt like it, perhaps standing with a book in one hand. ‘Mary, have I dined?’ he would sometimes ask. . . . [S]he laid in a store of vegetarian foods, occasionally made him a passable pudding, without sugar, which they boycotted because it came from slave plantations. She liked her tea sandwiches cut neatly, but dinner with proper courses was a rarity unless they had company, and throughout their union friends complained about the quality of her table” (Sunstein 1989, 104). Moreover, “The restraint and protracted duration of a convivial meal were intolerable” to Shelley; “he was seldom able to keep his seat during the brief period assigned to an ordinary family dinner” (Hogg 1904, 114).

Incessantly reading or writing, his “tea and toast . . . often neglected” (Hogg 1858, II, 28), Shelley was “a man who lived . . . totally out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas,” remarked Peacock (Brett-Smith 1909, 51-52). He had about as much interest in food as a later admirer of his principles, George Bernard Shaw, who admitted: “I am no gourmet, eating is not a pleasure to me, only a troublesome necessity, like dressing or undressing” (Holroyd 1988, I, 86).

Sustaining himself, often indifferently, on a bit of bread and a bite of broccoli, Shelley could with relative ease take up a vegetable-based diet devoid of flesh and elaborate preparations. As others have theorized (Bisogni et al. 2002:129), the use of food is a way that a person expresses an identity to self and others. Considerations in delineating a personal food system include the salience of food and eating, the extremeness of eating patterns, frequency of eating, body image, concern for health, and such personal attributes as values, emotions, and physiology. An individual’s identities, as well as eating behaviors, develop over time and are subject to monitoring, evaluation, and modification. Percy Shelley’s personal food system consisted of a small range of “simple fare,” eaten sparingly, erratically, and absentmindedly, frequently not at table, and typically in disregard of ordinary mealtime rituals. A vegetable diet was not for his immediate sensory gratification but rather food for thought as he developed his utopian vision, which is as relevant today as it was two centuries ago. He did not always adhere to a restricted diet, however. The reasons for his lapses also obtain among modern vegetarians.

CULINARY CELIBACY: CHALLENGES AND TRANSGRESSIONS

_______________________________________

“[November 14, 1883] Dear Mr. Kegan Paul, I think I remember my mother telling me that he [Percy Bysshe Shelley] gave it up to a great extent in his later years – not from want of faith, but from the inconvenience. I made two attempts when I was young myself – each time I was a strict vegetarian for three months – but it made me very fat and I gave it up. That was my only reason, and it took me several days to overcome my disgust for animal food when I returned to it. Yours, very sincerely, Percy F. Shelley.”

– (quoted in W.E.A. Axon 1891:7-8)

_______________________________________

Hogg writes in his biography of Shelley: “There are . . . contrarieties and contradictions in all schools of philosophers.” Shelley, “The Divine Poet, like many other wiser men, used to pass very readily and suddenly from one extreme to the other” (1858, II, 24, 422-23). Hogg describes meeting Shelley at an “humble inn” where Hogg had just ordered a repast. “‘I asked for eggs and bacon, but they have no eggs; I am to have some fried bacon,’” Hogg explained. Shelley “was struck with horror, and his agony was increased at the appearance of my dinner. Bacon was proscribed by him; it was gross and abominable. It distressed him greatly at first to see me eat the bacon.” Shelley slowly approached the dish, studying it. “‘So this is bacon!’ He then ate a small piece. ‘It is not so bad either!’ More was ordered; he devoured it voraciously. ‘Bring more bacon!’ It was brought, and eaten. ‘Let us have another plate.’” Eventually they exhausted the innkeeper’s larder. Shelley “departed with reluctance, grumbling as we walked homewards at the scanty store of bacon, lately condemned as gross and abominable” (Hogg 1858, II, 34-36).

Exaggerated by Hogg for comic effect, the account likely contains a grain of truth. Some ex-vegetarians today joke that bacon is “the gateway meat,” which has become nearly proverbial, claiming its aroma, texture, and flavor caused their recidivism (Willetts 1997). Hogg attributes Shelley’s transgression on this and other occasions to an impulsiveness in his personality: “He could follow no other laws than the golden law of doing instantly whatever the inclination of the moment prompted” (Hogg 1858, II, 426). An example involves his arriving at tea time at the home of poet Robert Southey who was partaking of “hot tea-cakes heaped up, in scandalous profusion, well buttered, blushing with currants or sprinkled thickly with carraway-seeds [sic] and reeking with allspice,” which “shocked [Shelley] grievously. It was a Persian apparatus, which he detested, — a display of excessive and unmanly luxury by which the most powerful empires have been overthrown, — that threatened destruction to all social order.”  Southey continued eating with obvious enjoyment. After putting his face close to the plate and “curiously” examining the cakes, Shelley “then took up a piece and ventured to taste it, and, finding it very good, he began to eat as greedily as Southey himself,” the two men in competition, until none remained. “Harriet, who told me the tale, added: ‘We were to have hot tea-cakes every evening “for ever.” I was to make them myself, and Mrs. Southey was to teach me’” (Hogg 1858, II, 32-34).

These instances of Shelley’s culinary indiscretion involved hunger or curiosity rather than thoughtless abandonment of the vegetable regimen and simple diet that he championed. Although Hogg’s report of tea with Southey is a third-hand narrative embellished with humor, Shelley sometimes did transgress his commitment to a non-flesh diet for several of the reasons that some current vegetarians do. While foodways researchers have largely overlooked this recidivism (Ruby 2012), the most frequently stated motives are lack of social support, declining health, inconvenience, and cravings for meat (Barr and Chapman 2002; Haverstock and Forgays 2012; Herzog 2011).

Shelley’s “friends Hogg and Peacock, especially the latter, . . . did their best to laugh him out of his new system of diet . . .” (Salt 1888, 242). While they chided him, their bone of contention was his health about which they were genuinely concerned. At the end of August 1815, Peacock organized an excursion on the Thames lasting 10 days, but Shelley was feeling out of sorts. He had been “living chiefly on tea and bread and butter, drinking occasionally a sort of spurious lemonade, made of some powder in a box. . . .” Peacock told him that “if he would allow me to prescribe for him, I would set him to rights.” He recommended “Three mutton chops, well peppered.” Shelley “took the prescription; the success was obvious and immediate. He lived in my way for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life.”  Shelley, however, “gave all the credit to locomotion, and held himself to have thus benefited, not in consequence of his change of regimen, but in spite of it” (Brett-Smith 1909, 54-55).

Like Medwin and Hogg, Peacock relied on a common explanation at the time, blaming Shelley’s vegetable diet for his bouts of illness. “When he was fixed in a place he adhered to this diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree with him; it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination.” On the other hand, “While he was living from inn to inn he was obliged to live, as he said, ‘on what he could get’; that is to say, like other people. When he got well under this process he gave all the credit to locomotion, and held himself to have thus benefited, not in consequence of his change of regimen, but in spite of it” (Brett-Smith 1909, 38-39).

In sum, Shelley sometimes lapsed from his restricted diet because of the intervention of well-meaning friends, inconvenience when traveling, hunger, curiosity, or ill health. A fruitful comparison can be made with two of his friends. Both fellow poet Lord Byron and the barrister and Shelley’s future biographer Thomas Jefferson Hogg partook of a vegetable regimen, but without Shelley’s convictions and commitment. In addition, both described how they viewed themselves, relating their self-concepts to their eating habits; their behaviors confirm key elements in the model of food choice informing the present essay. Taken together, their contrasting food styles highlight the nature of Shelley’s own personal food system and the ideology he championed.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), claimed to be “a leguminous-eating Ascetic” (Gilmour 2002, 313). Often he was neither. He was mercurial, perhaps manic-depressive, and a member of a mentally unstable family (Grosskurth 1997). His great uncle, “the Wicked Lord,” killed his cousin over the best way to hang game. His admiral grandfather, “Foulweather Jack,” and his father, “Mad Jack,” were rakes; the latter “had an incestuous affair with his own sister Frances” (Baron 1997). Lord Byron’s governess, May Gray, sexually abused him when he was nine. Described by some as extraordinarily handsome, Byron became celebrated in legend. Purportedly at a ball in London a woman fainted at the sight of him, and other women warned their daughters not to cast their gaze upon him. He kept a lock of Lady Caroline Lamb’s pubic hair, and one woman, a Mrs. Wherry, cherished his as a memento. He is said to have had at least 200 women sexually after moving to Venice, Italy in 1817. One story has it that in 1938 a group of investigators examined the condition of Byron’s body in his coffin and discovered a male member “showing quite abnormal development” (Bostridge 2002).

Born club footed, which he attempted to hide, Byron worried about his teeth and slept with curlers in his hair: “I am as vain of my curls as a girl of sixteen” (quoted in Baron 1997). Bisexual, he was notorious for his compulsive affairs. As a young teen he fell in love with Mary Chaworth (having had a previous passion for his cousins Mary Duff and Margaret Parker) who married another man. In 1813 he had an affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh; their daughter, Madora, was born in 1814 when Byron proposed to Annabella Milbank whom he married in 1815, only to begin a liaison with Mary Shelley’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont, in 1816 (rumored to be Percy’s mistress), who gave birth to their daughter, Allegra. He pursued boys and young men (Hoeper 2002) as well as many women most of whom were married; this includes Lady Caroline Lamb, who referred to Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (Castle 1997).

Byron stood five feet eight and a half inches tall. By age 18 he weighed 202 pounds, his appetite for food competing with other cravings. He devised a weight loss program consisting of “violent exercise, & Fasting, as I found myself too plump,” eating only one small meal a day. In July 1811, weighing 137 ½ pounds, he wrote to his mother that “for a long time I have been restricted to an entire vegetable diet . . . so I expect a powerful stock of potatoes, greens, and biscuits. . .” (Paterson 1990, 133-34).

If Shelley’s “dietary was frugal and independent; very remarkable and quite peculiar to himself” (Hogg 1858, II, 318), then Lord Byron’s was unusual too, in his case for cosmetic rather than ideological reasons or owing to gustatory indifference. Often his “terror of getting fat was so great that he reduced his diet to the point of absolute starvation,” writes Trelawny (1858, 50). A “highly aberrant eater” (Jones 1998, 41), Byron would “exist on biscuits and soda-water for days together, then, to allay the eternal hunger gnawing at his vitals, he would make up a horrid mess of cold potatoes, rice, fish, or greens, deluged in vinegar, and gobble it up like a famished dog” (Trelawny 1858, 50-51). When with Percy Shelley and Mary in Switzerland, “His system of diet here was regulated by an abstinence almost incredible,” writes Thomas Moore (1839, 319, note 3). “A thin slice of bread, with tea, at breakfast — a light, vegetable dinner, with a bottle or two of Seltzer water, tinged with vin de Grave, and in the evening, a cup of green tea, without milk or sugar, formed the whole of his sustenance. The pangs of hunger he appeased by privately chewing tobacco and smoking cigars.” According to Lord Byron’s friend, the Countess of Blessington, “Nothing gratifies him so much as being told that he grows thin. This fancy of his is pushed to an almost childish extent: and he frequently asks ‘Don't you think I am getting thinner?’ or, ‘Did you ever see any one so thin as I am, who was not ill?’” (Blessington n.d.[1834], 152-53).

Byron was victim to numerous maladies including gonorrhea, scarlet fever, constipation, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, convulsions, kidney and liver complaints, severe sunburn, warts, and malaria. He died at age 36 while attempting to help the Greeks revolt against the Turks, having suffered an attack of marsh fever; his doctors bled him with leeches and administered laudanum, purgatives, and other nostrums that further weakened him (Baron 1997). Although anorexic and bulimic (Crisp 1997), and given to consuming strange concoctions repugnant to Trelawny, Lord Byron was something of a gourmand who hosted and was a guest at elaborate dinners (sometimes vomiting after gorging). Like Shelley, he alluded to food and eating in several poems but more in celebration or risibility than condemnation, for example his last work, Don Juan, referred to as “possibly the greatest (and funniest) English poem ever written” (Castle 1997) and recognized by Shelley as a masterpiece in which “every word has the stamp of immortality” (quoted in MacCarthy 2002, 399).

Shelley’s friend from university, Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792-1862), was a gourmand like Byron and, when the occasion required or “for the mere gratification,” a vegetable feeder. In June 1813, Shelley took Hogg to sup with the Newton family, advocates of a natural diet and nudism. Five unclothed children met them at the door. Mrs. Newton “privately practiced nude air bathing three hours a day but failed to convert Hogg who was more susceptible to her ‘delightful’ vegetable dinners” (Bieri 2004, 296). Shelley included Hogg in a radical community he established in January 1815 in which everything was shared. Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley composed the central relationship in this experimental commune, but Shelley encouraged other intimacies between Mary and Hogg and between himself and Mary’s half-sister Claire (who in April 1816 seduced Lord Byron). The ménage also included Peacock who was torn between his mistress and an heiress. By early 1815 Hogg and a pregnant Mary were exchanging love letters in anticipation of sexual intimacy after the birth of Shelley’s and her child, and perhaps they consummated it in April according to a note by Shelley (Holmes 1975). Not long before his death, Shelley met Jane Cleveland who was married to John Johnson, a ship’s captain, but living with army officer Edward Williams and calling herself Mrs. Williams. Her music and singing infatuated Shelley who dedicated several poems to her. After Shelley and Williams drowned while boating, Hogg developed a passion for Jane, the most recent of Shelley’s women he pursued; pregnant with his child, and needing financial support, she became Hogg’s common-law wife in 1827. Hogg died in 1862, corpulent and suffering gout (Garnett; Thoma 2004).

A barrister born into wealth, “I was never indifferent to the amenities of life; I had always been accustomed to comfort, — to a certain elegance,” Hogg writes (1858, II, 318-19). Because of his closeness to Percy Shelley and the fact that he was an epicure, there exists considerable information about both Shelley’s and his food choices and eating experiences. Hogg’s Life of Shelley (1858) is as much autobiography as biography. It contains numerous references to Hogg’s gustatory longings, disgust, and gratification. He scathingly reviewed several culinary efforts. “I know, as well as any man, and to my sorrow, what a bad breakfast is,” he contended, “and I assert with the hard-earned confidence of long and painful experience, that the breakfast at Conway was never surpassed. Vile bread, vile butter, and the vilest tea. . .” (Hogg 1858, II, 222).

Hogg also wrote derisively about a movement dedicated to the consumption of raw food, which once again is a fad. “Man should live, they told us, on raw vegetable substances: on salads, apples, peas, beans, and cauliflowers, uncooked; on raw meal, raw carrots, turnips, and potatoes. They rejected the discovery, or the theft, of Prometheus, banishing fire from their kitchens. According to the champions of the extreme party,” writes Hogg, attempting to satirize them, “nothing was to be cooked, except that which does not require cookery — water,” which was distilled (Hogg 1858, II, 422-23).

On at least one occasion Hogg’s preoccupation with food vied with other appetites. Among the guests at the home of a country clergyman was “a lovely young woman; healthy, comely, fair, and plump. . . .”  After the visitors departed, the hostess asked Hogg “what I thought of the handsome, well-fleshed girl.”  He replied, "I think that she is a beautiful creature!”  His hostess said, “She is, indeed, and she is as good as she is beautiful — so useful in a house.”  Hogg admitted, “I could not take my eyes off her all the evening; I am afraid she would think me rude, but I could not help it! I sat looking at her,” he said, “and thinking what delightful jellies she would make. . .” (Hogg 1858, II, 316-17).

Principally a flesh eater, Hogg “conformed” to the vegetable diet of Shelley and friends, he writes, “not through faith, but for good fellowship,” and as “an agreeable change.”  Fortunately, the vegetable dinners with the Newton family “were elegant and excellent repasts. . . . Flesh, fowl, fish, game, never appeared; nor eggs bodily in their individual capacity, nor butter in the gross. . . .The injunction extended to shell-fish” (Hogg 1858, II, 419-20). Indeed, Shelley is reported to have purchased crayfish from a street vendor only to release them into the Thames (Dowden 1887), which demonstrates his concern over animal welfare, a matter at the beginning and now conclusion of this essay.

ARE YOU WHAT YOU EAT? OR, DO YOU EAT WHAT YOU ARE?

_______________________________________

“How many meat eaters does it take to change a light bulb? None, they would rather stay in the dark about things.”

– Anonymous

_______________________________________

At his first meeting of the Shelley Society for which he served as secretary, George Bernard Shaw announced, “I am, like Shelley, an atheist, a socialist, and a vegetarian” (Davis 2011). In London at the end of the nineteenth century Shaw was able to dine at a number of vegetarian restaurants. Meals devoid of animal products could not always be assured a century earlier, however, owing to ridicule by flesh eaters, inconvenience when traveling, hunger, or ignorance of how the food was prepared. Writing in the third person in An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty (1802), which Percy Shelley had read (Morton 2006), Joseph Ritson contends that he had abstained from meat since 1772 when he was 19 years old, and “adhere’d to a milk and vegetable diet, haveing, at least, never tasted, dureing the whole course of those thirty years, a morsel of flesh, fish, or fowl, or any thing to his knowledge prepare’d in or with those substances or any extract thereof, unless on one occasion, when tempted, by wet, cold and hunger, in the south of Scotland, he venture’d to eat a few potatoes, dress’d under the roast; nothing, less repugnant to his feelings being to be had; or except by ignorance or imposition; unless, it may be, in eating egs, which, however, deprives no animal of life, though it may prevent some from comeing into the world to be murder’d and devour’d by others” (Ritson 1802, 201-02; emphasis added).

The treatment of animals horrified Ritson, like Shelley. There were traditional blood sports such as cock throwing, cock fighting, and bull baiting. Creatures destined for the table were often raised in pain and killed in agony. Battery farming was underway by the Elizabethan era. In some instances so many swine were confined in a pen that they had no room to turn over. Cattle might be kept in “an ox-house,” not stirring until slaughtered. Poultry and game birds were frequently confined in darkness, even blinded. Some housewives fattened geese by nailing the webs of their feet to the floor. To make their meat white, calves, pigs, and fowl were drained of blood by being stuck in the neck, the wound then staunched so they would linger for another day (Thomas 1983). A German visitor, Frederick Gerstäcker, described the sight at London’s Smithfield market, which contained 4,100 cattle, 30,000 sheep, and unnumbered pigs and calves crammed into the space. The butchers were “wading in blood and covered with it all over. Between them lay the skulls and bones, strewed about in wild confusion; the entrails, which were afterwards loaded upon waggons [sic] and carried off; and beyond . . . the unborn calves were lying, in a heap of perhaps thirty or forty; near which, boys standing up to their shoulders in blood, were engaged in stripping off the skin of the largest and most matured ones” (quoted in Tannahill 1973, 343). Growing affluence had led to eating higher up the food chain. As Ritson noted, “Many ranks of people, whose ordinary diet was, in the last century, prepare’d allmost [sic] entirely from milk, roots and vegetables, now require, every day, a considerable portion of the flesh of animals” (1802, 84-85). “Except for the poor . . . it is estimated that on average 147 ½ pounds of meat were consumed per annum per head. England had become the most carnivorous country in Europe and Europe led the world in meat consumption” (Spencer 1993, 214).

Several food-related beliefs, images, and symbols in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries persist. A recurrent metaphor is that of meat eating as ingesting a “burnt corpse” that defiles the temple of the body. As Thomas Tryon put it (1691, 258), those devouring meat are “making themselves the Sepulchres of the dead Bodies of Beasts,” an image not uncommon among vegetarians today (Twigg 1979). One of the beliefs past and present is that the characteristics of food are transferred to the eater, a form of symbolic osmosis (Oerlemans 1995) or magical transference (Hand 1980). In the words of William Smellie (1790, 60-61), those who are “pampered with a variety of animal food, are much more choleric, fierce and cruel in their tempers than those who live chiefly on vegetables.” Ritson phrased it simply as “the use of animal food makes man cruel and barbarous” (1802, 406). Or, as Lord Byron commented “in a grave tone of inquiry” to his omnivorous dining companion, the Irish poet Thomas Moore, “Moore, don’t you find eating beef-steak makes you ferocious?” (Williams 1883, 331).

Meat has long connoted aggression, strength, and power as well as dominance, particularly men over women and man over nature. In their diets Joseph Ritson and the physician George Cheyne replaced red meat with milk, associated in their thinking with women, motherhood, and nurturance. Debate continues over whether meat eating or a vegan diet leads to illness, and which regimen prevents and cures disease, but for many omnivores in Shelley’s day animal food was medicinal. Recall Peacock’s “prescription” to Shelley of “three mutton chops, well peppered,” the eating of which resulted in his “overflowing with animal spirits.”  Shelley could not swallow such claims about the beneficial effects of meat, however, holding firmly to the notion that a vegetable diet was superior by citing the “gentle feelings, rising from . . . [a] meal of roots” and observing of Newton’s five vegetarian children that “their dispositions are . . . the most gentle and conciliating” (1884[1813], 25).

Henry Stephens Salt (1851-1939), social reformer and Vice President of the Vegetarian Society, wrote in his monograph on Shelley (1888, 242), “The importance of a man's dietetic tastes and habits in their bearing on his intellectual development and moral character is too often overlooked or underestimated by critics and biographers.” In regard to Byron, Hogg, and Shelley there certainly seems to be a correlation between character and alimentation, although ascertaining the relationship invokes the question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  Are you what you eat? Or, do you eat what you are? 

Lord Byron remarked, “[W]hat I think of myself is, that I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long, I am such a strange mélange, that it would be difficult to describe me” (Marchand 1957, 1066). Celebrated for his poetry, renowned for prodigious feats of riding and swimming, and notorious for his sexual escapades, he was a master at self-promotion and manipulating his image (including having his portrait painted in a colorful Albanian folk costume). Obsessed with his appearance and in “terror of getting fat,” he starved himself on crackers and soda water, gorged and purged, or whipped up a “horrid mess” of cold vegetables, fish, and rice “deluged in vinegar.” An erratic eater, his alimentary behavior was as frenzied as his other activities including his sex life.

Hogg, a specialist in law, a flesh-eater, and a self-proclaimed epicure given to gluttony, occasionally dined on vegetables to ingratiate himself with the Pythagoreans, especially Shelley, and as “an agreeable change.” Regarding his self-presentation he writes, “So long as I observed the vegetable rule myself, I observed it very exactly . . . because my mind was naturally disposed for precision and strictness” (Hogg 1858, II, 425). In his biography of Shelley he portrays the poet as “impulsive” and himself as the rational prop for him to lean on. Hogg derides the “bloodless church” and its “votaries” opposed to killing and eating animals, and scorns “Joe” Ritson for calling “sheep, oxen, and pigs ‘our fellow creatures’. . .” (1858, II, 425). Research exploring attitudes and eating behavior of current omnivores and vegetarians indicates a propensity of the former, like Hogg, to emphasize “self-control and rationality,” “endorse hierarchical domination,” and place “greater emphasis on social power . . . whereas those tending toward veganism or vegetarianism,” such as Shelley, value “equality, peace, and social justice” (Allen et al. 2000, 405, 417, 419; see also Hamilton 2006; Haverstock and Forgays 2012; Ruby 2012).

Percy Shelley is the only one of the three friends to adhere to a vegetable regimen, and to do so with more consistency than did the manic, bulimic Lord Byron who used the diet to lose weight and Hogg who mocked vegetarian beliefs but partook of the food as culinary diversion or to ingratiate himself socially. Of the major considerations people weigh in food choice decisions (Connors, Bisogni, Sobal, and Devine 2001), Shelly emphasized health and, prior to inheriting £1,000 per annum, cost; Lord Byron seemed more interested in convenience, image, and managing relationships; and Hogg held taste or sensory perceptions as the primary concern. When Shelley lapsed from his simple diet it was usually because of hunger, illness, inconvenience, or the intercession of friends. Living “out of the ordinary world and in a world of ideas,” the poet had little interest in food for his personal sustenance but realized that a way to peoples’ minds is through their stomachs. His vision was of a world of equality and spirituality, achieved by recognizing that the violence sustaining alimentation inures us to the violence pervading society. “The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous exultation in which news of a victory is related although purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men,” he writes (quoted in Oerlemans 1995, 547). This “spare, weakly” “beardless boy” carving a bit of broccoli as if it were “the substantial wing of a chicken” influenced, through his poems and prose, innumerable writers and reformers including one of the world’s most famous vegetarians and advocates of non-violence: Mahatma Gandhi.[ii]

Michael Owen Jones, folklorist, is Professor Emeritus of Folklore, History, and World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. He has published on folk art, traditional medicine, organizational folklore, foodways, and methods and theories in folklore research, e.g., People Studying People, Craftsman of the Cumberlands, Studying Organizational Symbolism, Folkloristics: An Introduction, Comfort Food Meanings and Memories, and Frankenstein Was a Vegetarian: Essays on Food Choice, Identity, and Symbolism. (mojones@ucla.edu)

This essay was first published in Journal of Folklore Research by Indiana University Press https://iupress.org/journals/jfr/

SELECTED REFERENCES

Allen, Michael W., Marc Wilson, Sik Hung Ng, and Michael Dunne. 2000. “Values and Beliefs of Vegetarians and Omnivores.” The Journal of Social Psychology 140(4):405-422.

Axon, William E. A. 1891. Shelley's Vegetarianism. The Shelley Society, University College, London, November 12.

Baron, J.H. 1997. “Illnesses and Creativity: Byron’s Appetites, James Joyce’s Gut, and Melba’s Meals and Mésallilances.” BMJ [British Medical Journal] 7123 (December 20). http://www.bmj.com/content/315/7123/1697. Accessed January 12, 2014.

Barr, Susan I., and Gwen E. Chapman. 2002. “Perceptions and Practices of Self-Defined Current Vegetarian, Former Vegetarian, and Nonvegetarian Women.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 102(3):354–360.

Beardsworth, Alan, and Teresa Keil. 1992. “The Vegetarian Option: Varieties, Conversions, Motives, and Careers.” The Sociological Review 40:253–293.

Bieri, James. 2004. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Biography: Youth’s Unextinguished Fire, 1792-1816. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Bisogni, Carole A., Margaret Connors, Carol M. Devine, and Jeffery Sobal. 2002. “Who We Are and How We Eat: A Qualitative Study of Identities in Food Choice.” Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 34(3):128-140.

Blessington, Marguerite n.d. [1834]. A Journal of Conversations with Lord Byron. With a Sketch of the Life of the Author. 3rd ed., Boston: G. W. Cottrell.

Bostridge, Mark. 2002. “On the Trail of the Real Lord Byron.” The Independent. November 4. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/on-the-trail-of-the-real-lord-byron-603280.html. Accessed March 6, 2014.

Brett-Smith, H.F.B. 1909. Peacock’s Memoirs of Shelley, with Shelley's Letters to Peacock. London: Henry Frowde.

Castle, Terry.1997. “’Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.’” New York Times. April 13.

Cheyne, George. 1724. An Essay of Health and Long Life. Bath, England: J. Leake.

_____. 1733. The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, Etc. Bath, England: J. Leake.

Clark, David Lee. 1939. The Date and Source of Shelley’s ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet.’” Studies in Philology 36(1):70-76.

Connors, M., C.A. Bisogni, J. Sobal, and C.M. Devine. 2001. Managing Values in Personal Food Systems. Appetite 36(3):189-200.

Crisp, Arthur. 1997. “Commentary: Ambivalence Toward Fatness and Its Origins.” BMJ [British Medical Journal] 7123 (December 20). http://www.bmj.com/content/315/7123/1703. Accessed January 12, 2014.

Cutler, David, Angus Deaton, and Adriana Lleras-Muney. 2006. “The Determinants of Mortality.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(3):97-120.

Davis, John. 2011. Shelley – “The First Celebrity Vegan.” http://www.vegsource.com/john-davis/shelley---the-first-celebrity-vegan.html. Accessed November 18, 2013.

Dowden, Edward. 1887. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. London: Kegan Paul; Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.

Exvegetarian.com. Accessed November 20, 2013.

Furst, T., M. Connors, C. Bisogni, J. Sobal, and L. Falk. 1996. “Food Choice: A Conceptual Model of the Process.” Appetite 26(3):247-266.

Garnett, Richard. “Hogg, Thomas Jefferson.” In Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, vol. 27. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hogg,_Thomas_Jefferson_(DNB00). Accessed February 28, 2014.

Gilmour, Ian. 2002. The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time. London: Chatto and Windus.

Grosskurth, Phyllis. 1997. Byron: The Flawed Angel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Guerrini. Anita.1999. “A Diet for a Sensitive Soul: Vegetarianism in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23(2):34-42.

Hamilton, Malcolm. 2006. “Eating Death: Vegetarians, Meat, and Violence.” Food, Culture, and Society 9:155–177.

Hand, Wayland D. 1980. Magical Medicine. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Harris, Rhian. 2012. “The Foundling Hospital.” “http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/foundling_01.shtml. Accessed January 28, 2014.

Haverstock, Katie, and Deborah Kirby Forgays. 2012. “To Eat or Not to Eat. A Comparison of Current and Former Animal Product Limiters.” Appetite 58(3):1030-1036. 

Haydon, Benjamin Robert. 1926. The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), edited by T. Taylor. 2 vols. London: Peter Davies.

Hayter, Alethea. 1980. “’The Laudanum Bottle Loomed Large’: Opium in the English Literary World in the Nineteenth Century.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 11(4):37-51.

Herzog, Hal. 2011. “Why Do Most Vegetarians Go Back to Eating Meat?” Psychology Today. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-us/201106/why-do-most-vegetarians-go-back-eating-meat. Accessed November 19, 2013.

Hoeper, Jeffrey D. 2002. “The Sodomizing Biographer: Leslie Marchand's Portrait of Byron.” http://web.archive.org/web/20030510053432/http://engphil.astate.edu/gallery/marchand.html. Accessed February 27, 2014.

Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. 1858. Life of Shelley. 2 vols. London: E. Moxon.

_____. 1904. Shelley at Oxford, edited with an Introduction by R.A. Streatfeild. London: Methuen & Co.

Holmes, Richard. 1974. Shelley, The Pursuit. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Holroyd, Michael. 1988. Bernard Shaw. 5 vols., London: Chatto and Windus.

Jones, Christine Kenyon. 1998. “’Man is a Carnivorous Production’: Byron and the Anthropology of Food.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 6(1):41-58.

Jones, Michael Owen. 2007. “Food Choice, Symbolism, and Identity: Bread-and-Butter Issues for Folkloristics and Nutrition Studies (American Folklore Society Presidential Address, October 2005).” Journal of American Folklore 120(476):129-177.

Lambe, William. 1810. “Reports of the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen in Scirrhous Tumours, and Cancerous Ulcers.” The Annual Medical Review and Register for 1809 II:146-150.

_____. 1828. “An Investigation of the Properties of Thames Water.” The Medico-chirurgical Review 13:268-270.

_____. ( 1815) 1850. Water and Vegetable Diet in Consumption, Scrofula, Cancer, Asthma, and other Chronic Diseases. New York: Fowlers and Wells.

MacCarthy, Fiona. 2002. Byron: Life and Legend. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Macdonald, Malcolm Elwin, ed. (1853) 1950. The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon. London: Macdonald & Co.

Medwin, Thomas. 1824. Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron; Notes During a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822. London: Henry Colburn.

_____. (1847) 1913. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Oxford University Press.

Moore, Thomas. 1839. Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron. London: John Murray.

Morton, Timothy. 1992. “Re-Imagining the Body: Shelley and the Languages of Diet.” PhD dissertation, Magdalen College, Oxford.

_____. 1994. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. New York: Cambridge University Press.

_____. 2006. Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism. Romanticism 12(1):52-61.

Morton, Timothy, ed. 2000. Ethics and Politics. Vol. 1 of Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking 1790-1820, 3 vols. London: Routledge.

Newton, John Frank. 1811. The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies.

Oerlemans, Onno. 1995. “Shelley’s Ideal Body: Vegetarianism and Nature.” Studies in Romanticism 34(4):531-552.

One of the Inspectors of the Prison. 1811. “An Account of the State Prison, Or Penitentiary-House in New York.” The Belfast Monthly Magazine 7:38 (September 30):167-177.

Osborn, Sally. 2010. “Health in the 18th century.” http://18thcenturyrecipes.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/health-in-the-18th-century/. Accessed January 31, 2014.

Oswald, John. 1791. The Cry of Nature; or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals. London: J. Johnson.

Paterson, Willma. 1990. Lord Byron’s Relish: Regency Recipes with Notes Culinary & Byronic. Glasgow: Dog & Bone.

Peacock, Thomas Love. (1858-1862) 1970. Memoirs of Shelley, edited by Howard Mills. London: Hart-Davis.

Pottle, Frederick A. 1965. Shelley and Browning: A Myth and Some Facts. Hamden CT: Archon Books.

Preece, Rod. 2009. Sins of the Flesh: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Ritson, Joseph. 1802. An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty. London: Richard Phillips.

Roth, LuAnne. 2002. “‘Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner’: Vegetarians, Meat-Eaters and the Negotiation of Familial Relationships.” Food, Culture & Society 8(2):45-69.

Ruby, Matthew B. 2012. “Vegetarianism. A Blossoming Field of Study.” Appetite 58(1):141-150.

Salt, Henry Stevenson. 1888. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Monograph. London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. (1813) 1831. Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem, with Notes. New York: Wright and Owen.

_____. (1813) 1884. A Vindication of Natural Diet [Note 17 to Queen Mab], edited by H.S.S. [Henry Stevenson Salt] and W.E.A.A. [William Edward Armytage Axon]. London: F. Pitman.

Singer, Peter. 1976. Animal Liberation. London: Jonathan Cape.

Smollett, Tobias. 1772. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: W. Johnson and B. Collins.

Spencer, Colin. 1995. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hanover and London: Univ. Press of New England.

Sunstein, Emily W. 1989. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston: Little, Brown.

Symonds, John Addington. (1909) 1878. Shelley. London: Macmillan.

Tannahill, Reay. 1973. Food in History. London: Eyre Methuen. New York: Stein and Day.

Thoma, Carol L. 2004. “Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1792–1862).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13475. Accessed March 2, 2014.

Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. London: Allen Lane.

Trelawny, Edward John. 1858. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

_____. 1878. Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. Vol. II, London: Basil, Montagu, Pickering.

Tryon, Thomas. 1691. The Way to Health and Long Life. 2nd ed. London: Printed by H.C. for R. Baldwin.

Twigg, Julia. 1979. “Food for Thought: Purity and Vegetarianism.” Religion 9:13–35.

Wesley, Dan. “Food Consumption in America.” http://www.creditloan.com/blog/food-consumption-in-america/#ixzz10x3QOn3m. Accessed January 26, 2014.

Willetts, Anna. 1997. “‘Bacon Sandwiches Got the Better of Me’: Meat Eating and Vegetarianism in South East London.” In Food, Health, and Identity, ed. P. Caplan, pp. 111-130. London: Routledge.

Williams, Howard. 1883. The Ethics of Diet. London: F. Pitman.

[i] I am citing Shelley’s A Vindication that was edited with an introduction by Salt and Axon, 1884, which is available online at https://archive.org/details/vindicationofnat00shelrich and http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38727/pg38727.txt. A printed version of Shelley’s pamphlet is in Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking 1790-1820, vol. 1: Ethics and Politics, edited by Timothy Morton, pp. 274-85. 3 vols. London: Routledge, 2000.

[ii] See Oerlemans 1995. Spencer (1993:291) writes that Gandhi went to England in 1888 to study law. He stumbled upon a vegetarian restaurant where he “had his first big meal since leaving home. At the restaurant he was immediately impressed and influenced by what he read there, both Shelley and Henry Salt’s A Plea for Vegetarianism, two writers who fused abstinence from animal flesh with much greater social reforms.” Gandhi also read The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams. Salt published a monograph on Shelley, and Williams’ book includes chapters about many authors recommending a vegetable diet including Cheyne, Oswald, Lambe, Newton, and Shelley whose ideas are discussed in the present essay; it also has an Appendix containing comments by Tryon and Bryon, among others.