Introduction

This chapter examines the writings of vegetarians and those now called vegans, produced in the period known by modern scholars as the “long nineteenth century,” c.1789–1914. This analysis is done principally through study of British and American texts and with an emphasis on works produced from the 1840s onwards. Technological, political, and educational changes led to an explosion in affordable print by the mid-nineteenth century, which was also a formative period for vegetarian societies organized in Britain and America. The vegetarian “movement,” which was identified by outsiders as among radical or extreme social reform causes of the era (beyond more mainstream Anglo-American temperance and animal welfare, for instance), relied on oral communication through the public platform of lectures and discussion groups. There was also the performance of healthy and sociable living through such activities as banquets and vegetarian restaurants, and especially towards the end of the nineteenth century, in vegetarian athletic, cycling, and other physical activities. Literature played a critical role since actions gained wider value in nurturing the infant vegetarian cause and sustaining and winning converts, through the reporting and commentary in texts by vegetarian organizations or individuals. These ranged from pamphlets and periodicals, to books that included recipe collections, extracts from historic authorities, and poetry.

Vegan literary scholarship has largely focused on the traces of vegetarianism and veganism in the Novel or short story (see, for example Wright, and Quinn). Work has also been done on the pamphlet and periodical emanations of the early Vegetarian and Vegan Societies (see Wrenn, this volume). However, vegan literary scholarship must also take into account vegetarian-penned correspondence and essays published in the mainstream press, and the representation, satirical or otherwise, in newspapers and periodicals that were so important for the cultural life of a period before modern social media. Material objects beyond texts, of course, had critical roles in advancing individual and collective success in vegetarian reform. The British and American vegetarian movements sustained, with an increasing sophistication in advertising in the vegetarian press, a range of commodities sold by entrepreneurs providing foods or, for those espousing veganism avant la lettre, non-edible items such as clothing.