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Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic

Timothy Morton

Romanticism, Volume 12, Number 1, 2006, pp. 52-61 (Article)

Published by Edinburgh University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rom.2006.0006

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199846

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Timothy Morton

Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism

And the poor beetle that we tread upon Ritson’s day. Percy may appeal to fans of In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great Baudrillard, but Percy is not the only As when a giant dyes. antiquarian on the block. , Measure for Ritson was an English Jacobin.4 He supported Measure, III, i, 78–80, quoted in the French Revolution and was known in jest as Joseph Ritson, An Essay on ‘Citizen Ritson’. As well as issuing editions of Abstinence from Animal Food, ballads, he wrote books on atheism and as a Moral Duty,p.501 vegetarianism – subjects dear to many republican hearts. Vegetarianism was many The antiquarian Joseph Ritson (1752–1803, see things during the Romantic period: a cutting fig. 1) opposed the bibliographical practices of edge of bourgeois consumer style; a thread of his rival, Thomas Percy. It was an era during continuity from the religious radicalism of the which the past was constructed and contested, seventeenth century; a logical extension of and the category of the domestic antique was Enlightenment discourse on the rights of born.2 If as Nick Groom has suggested Percy women and men. Thomas Percy’s copy of An was the Malcolm McLaren of his era, a brilliant Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food (1802) entrepreneur who masterminded a great contains Sayer’s satirical cartoon of him pasted balladic swindle, Ritson was XTC’s Andy onto the front board. In it, Ritson is treading on Partridge, finding in the ballads an authentic the Bible (and Percy’s Reliques) in open-toed English countercultural tradition.3 Ritson’s sandals while a cow leans through the window, attitude to the text was deeply political. His breaking the boundary between human and sense that they should be preserved in their animal realms, and munches on one of Ritson’s authenticity is interwoven with his carrots. In real life, Ritson had a dog whom he republicanism, which insists upon the genuine called – Ritson. The 1960s, it seems, had voices of equal participants. Deconstructionists happened before. Vegetarianism and abstinence may balk at this: but let us remember that from alcohol were signs of revolutionary Jacques Derrida always insists upon a careful sobriety, a straight, masculine civic humanism, scrutiny and history of the text, his own not the effeminate weakness that it signified tortuously slow prose manner serving to later.5 fetishise it, but also to make it visible in all its Richard Phillips, the vegetarian and parts – a technique that makes deconstruction publisher of Paine’s Rights of Man, published resonate with the sceptical empiricism of Animal Food. The book is radical republican in Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism 53

Figure 1. (1748–1823), caricature of Joseph Ritson, c. 1803. Bodleian Library, Shelfmark Montagu 551, opposite page 177. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Staring at a frog that looks like a witch’s familiar, Joseph Ritson is using gall to write religious and literary slander in his commonplace book about the Bible, Parsons, and the antiquarians Percy, Warburton and Warton, while treading in open toed sandals on a copy of his rival Thomas Percy’s ballads. In his pocket is ‘The Atheist’s Pocket Companion’. A starving cat on the top shelf (next to a copy of Ritson’s Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food) is prevented from catching rats by a chain. A cow leans through the window and munches lettuce from a bowl that rests on a bill of fare featuring ‘Nettle Soup / Sour Crout / Horse Beans / Onions Leeks’. The caption below the cartoon reads: ‘Impiger iracundus inexorabilis acer / Blakgardos skurrilos Graniverosq macer’; for some reason ‘Blakgardos skurrilos Graniverosq’ is in Greek script. This is cod rhyming and alliterative Latin- Greek for ‘Impetuous, irascible, severe, bitter, / Scurrilous blackguard and eater of ’. One line below we read: ‘Fierce meager pale no Commentator’s Friend [space] Purs Lit. [a quotation from a comment on Ritson in Thomas James Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature, 1800] / Let his portion be with the Beasts in the Grass of the Earth Let his heart be changed from Man’s / and let a Beasts heart be given unto him [space] And he was driven from Men and did eat / grass till his hairs were grown as Eagles feathers and his Nails like Birds Claws / 4th Ch David’ (the description of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel 4.15–16, 33). 54 Romanticism style as well as in content. Ritson consistently Universe’.8 Queen Mab was one of the pieces of puts ‘god’ in the lower case, demoting him to documentary evidence submitted to Chancery from proper-name status to that of a mere on 10 January 1817. His first wife’s suicide by concept, and superstitious one at that. Likewise, drowning and the blasphemous character of Ritson refers to himself as ‘i’ in the lower case. Queen Mab put him in danger of losing his He tended to use phonetic spellings, bringing to children. The case against him was in part that mind the revolutionary debates over language he wanted to ‘educate them [his children] as he conducted by Lord Monboddo and Horne thinks proper’ (726r). This would literally have Tooke: ‘approximateëd’, ‘allmost’, ‘Engeland’ meant, for Shelley himself if not for the judges, (pp. 12, 33, 88; so many that a liberal use of sic that his children would become vegetarian would have made this essay look ridiculous). atheists, little Ritsons. Shelley marked passages Animal Food is typographically egalitarian. in Ritson pertaining to the diet of children The book reads like a republican assembly of (Ritson, pp. 49, 83). quotations, juxtaposed without hierarchy, Shelley may have used Ritson’s book without much guiding narrative interference. to defend his integrity as well as his In this fashion it set the stage for later vegetarianism – to defend, in other words, vegetarian publications, such as Howard his integrity by means of his vegetarianism Williams’s (1883), whose (see Ritson pp. 42–3), before Lord Eldon in anthologising technique similarly brings a Chancery on 24 January 1817.9 Eldon made number of voices to participate equally in a up his mind against Shelley two months later, symposium, an assembly: Porphyry, the delivering his judgement on 27 March. To Church Fathers, Schopenhauer and Percy Shelley’s mind, vegetarianism could guarantee Shelley speak to one another across nations his character, just as for Rousseau Plutarch’s and across times.6 biographies show their subjects’ integrity by No wonder Ritson’s book appealed to Percy displaying their private behaviour. Animal Shelley when he started to compose Queen Food could also be used to vindicate Shelley’s Mab; perhaps even earlier, at Oxford, or during treatment of his children, defending the idea his residence at Poland Street in London that children should be brought up on a (ironically, the restaurant currently occupying vegetarian diet. It cuts both ways. Ironically, the space below his old lodgings looks distinctly Shelley’s own declaration in Chancery carnivorous). So attached was he to Ritson, and (2 February 1817) itself breaks off tantalizingly: such a case did he think it made for an ‘my notions of the education of children with impeccable ethical stance, that he and one of respect’ – to marriage? religion? Or was it his lawyers, Basil Montagu, a friend of the with respect to diet?10 The master’s report of Wordsworths and a Godwinian, marked it up 1 August by William Alexander exaggerated during the custody trial for his children with Eldon’s judgement against Shelley, and Harriet.7 Or so the story goes. There is no bestowed upon Harriet’s family, the definite evidence of this specific event. The trial Westbrooks, the determination of the record stated ‘that Percy Bysshe Shelley avows upbringing of Eliza Ianthe and Charles Bysshe himself to be an atheist … he hath since his Shelley. It says nothing about diet, though said marr[iage] written & pub[lished] a certain there is mention of the need for little Ianthe Work called “Queen Mab” with notes & other and Charles to learn to say grace before and Works & that he hath therein blasphemously after meals in the arrangements made for their derided the truth of the Xtian Revelation & care.11 Shelley had had a brush with the highest denied the existence of a God as Creator of the legal authorities in the land, concerning the Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism 55 upbringing of his children, their ‘diet’ in its Given my knowledge of Shelley’s hand in broadest sense (Greek: diaitia, way of life). manuscripts in the Bodleian, at UTA and elsewhere, I have concluded that this stroke Shelley’s copy of Ritson ——————— could indeed be Shelley’s.17 While some of these This essay will not rehash the arguments could be passages selected by Shelley and on Shelley and Ritson in Shelley and the Montagu for the trial, it is surely unlikely that Revolution in Taste, which I still regard as all of them could be. Who would want to take valid.12 Instead, I present some examples of up unnecessary time quoting from a book? the extent to which Shelley admired and pored Throughout the copy a harder mark appears over his copy. There is no sign that he had together with a softer mark: for example softer ordered it specifically in preparation for writing marks appear on page 44, harder ones on page Queen Mab, as he did with numerous other 45. I suspect that the softer mark is definitely texts.13 Nevertheless, there are borrowings from Shelley’s: it carries a trace of his characteristic and references to it in both his essays on autograph, a slight downward flick. They may vegetarianism and in the note to Queen Mab, indicate a hasty reading, or simply a scholar’s suggesting that he had thumbed through his slapdash use of a pencil. This is not to say that own copy for some time.14 Animal Food bulked the other marks are not by Shelley. so large in his life that at several points in his Montagu became interested in vegetarianism biography of his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg because of his work with Shelley; he himself feels provoked to rail against ‘Joe’ Ritson.15 was opposed to the death penalty and compiled Shelley’s copy of Animal Food is found and published readings against it.18 Mary at the Humanities Research Center of the Shelley had read some of these, most likely University of Texas at Austin, where it was on Percy’s recommendation.19 Montagu also acquired in 1946 or 1947. 16 On the title page published work on the deleterious effects of is written ‘Basil Montague’ (the name of alcohol.20 It is unlikely Montagu would have Shelley’s lawyer), top left, and just below it, honed in upon so many passages so pertinent to faintly visible, on the right, ‘Percy Shelley’ lines of poetry Shelley wrote after Queen Mab in his characteristic autograph. It looks as if and before the trial. These are very small signs, someone had at some stage tried to erase it. and I do not wish to push interpretation too far. Why? Montagu’s signature is also somewhat It is possible that Shelley marked the book erased. Leaving aside an accidental erasure by differently, more than once. Perhaps Shelley someone in the library, and the very unlikely marked it up and then gave it to Montagu to thought that a bookseller might have erased it demonstrate something. and devalued the book, we are left with various In what follows, I only quote from those possibilities. Although Mary Shelley might passages against which Shelley placed an have erased it, afraid of the publicity emphatic line. (Text in square brackets indicates surrounding her late husband, it is unlikely where the marking-up breaks off.) There are that she would have had access to what had approximately sixty marked passages. become Montagu’s copy. The book may have Following the marked text provides a simply been signed by Montagu to prevent its fascinating lesson in the reasons for and loss in the bustle of a trial. contexts of Shelley’s vegetarianism. At the start There is no marginal writing in the book, of the book, Shelley records his interest in but the text has been marked extensively. One Ritson’s presentation of different theories of kind of marginal line is formed by a swift short human origins: ‘Man, in like manner, may, with upward stroke followed by a downward one. equal propriety, be arange’d under the monkey- 56 Romanticism kind; there being the same degree of analogy lines. It is probable that Animal Food itself put between the man and the monkey, as between the idea of Paradise Lost 11 into Shelley’s the lion and the cat; and there being, allso, in mind: Ritson is explicitly describing ‘shocking each of these classes, intermediate animals of catalogue’ that was ‘exhibited to Adam’ different sizeës, ranks, or degrees, by which the (p. 39). several species, which compose it, are It is likely, on this evidence, that Shelley had approximateëd or connected, like the links of a read and annotated his copy of Ritson before chain’ (p. 12). Shelley notes Ritson on human producing such texts as Queen Mab. The motif destructiveness: ‘Of all rapacious animals, man of nature as an emergency room was so strong is the most universal destroyer. The destruction to Shelley that he worked it into poetry of carnivorous quadrupeds, birds, and insects is, throughout the rest of his life (Morton, in general, limited to particular kinds: but the Shelley, pp. 57–60). In contrast, and perhaps rapacity of man has hardly any limitation. His significantly, Pope’s verse on vegetarianism empire over the other animals which inhabit remains free of marking (p. 54), though his this [globe is allmost universal]’ (pp. 30–3). essay in The Guardian on cruelty to animals There is much in Ritson that is Miltonic – is marked (p. 61).22 Thomson and Pope are an appropriate choice for a republican writer. marked, as is Ovid on the primitive diet of There are marked passages that resonate with ‘wild strawberries’ (p. 166) – fuel for Queen Mab: ‘[the tiger] tears the body for no ‘Mazhengi’? It is possible that Shelley learnt other purpose than to plunge his head into it, about the Essenes’ vegetarianism, a subject he and to drink large draughts of blood’. Ritson incorporated into his tale The Assassins,by has ‘panthers, ounceës, leopards’ stalking reading Ritson: ‘Josephus observes that the through this paragraph, as do numerous Essenes, a sort of Jewish monks, live’d ferocious cats in Shelley’ radical didactic poem commonly to a hundred years, by reason of tamed at last by human revolutionary impulses the simplicity of their diet, and regular life’ – the source for both may be Paradise Lost (p. 149). The list of longevity at the end of (p. 35).21 Ritson must have influenced Shelley’s A Vindication has a precedent on page 148. view of nature, which superimposes an ultra- Shelley marks Ritson on comparative materialist view (‘there is neither benevolence anatomy: ‘the teeth and intestines of man being nor intention in nature’) and something more like those of frugivorous animals, he should, intentional, where some animals are cruel, naturally, be range’d in this class’ (p. 41).23 some gentle (p. 37). Ritson is almost Ritson cites Rousseau’s account of Brassavolus’ Schopenhaurian: ‘The noxious multiplication report on the younger daughter of Frederick, of shel-fishes’ and the fact that ‘Every animal, king of Naples (p. 43): as soon as she put a bit man, beast, fish, fowl, appears to be infested by of flesh into her mouth, ‘she was seiz’d with a one or more species of lice’ demonstrate that vehement syncopé, and falling to the earth, and the whole is ‘a system for the express purpose rolling herself thereupon, would lamentably of preying upon each other, and for their shriek out. This she would continue to do for mutual misery and destruction’ (pp. 37, 38). the space of half an hour, after she was return’d Nature is a charnel ground, like the vision to herself’ (p. 43). Shelley’s mark explicitly given by the angel Michael to the fallen Adam emphasizes the final sentence, and one wonders in the eleventh book of Paradise Lost: ‘For man whether this is a precedent for the way Beatrice to have a just and perspicuous idea of the in his drama The Cenci speaks of having been bountys of nature, he should visit hospitals, and forced to eat the flesh of animals (2.2.64–9). not churches.’ Shelley places a tick next to these Shelley notes George Cheyne’s Essay on Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism 57

Health (p. 50), a vegetarian treatise by Samuel Benjamin Franklin had read Tryon on Richardson’s doctor. Cheyne had worked on his vegetarianism. There was a continuity between own obesity with a vegetarian diet. Later Tryon’s Puritan radicalism and the republican Shelley marks the citation from John vegetarianism of the later revolutionary period, Arbuthnot, Cheyne’s contemporary (p. 87). via such Tryonists as the young Franklin, let Other significant allegiances are evident. alone Tryon’s own rhetoric, which was anti- Despite his mocking of Adam Smith in Queen colonialist and pro-.25 Shelley Mab, Shelley ticks the margin at Ritson’s marks Ritson’s citation of Robert Pigot’s citation of him: ‘“It may, indeed,” says doctor Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of Adam Smith, “be doubted whether butchers- the French Republic, ‘seeing its influence is meat is any where / a necessary of life”’ (p. 81). so considerable and so hapy [sic] on beauty The seventeenth-century Behmenist vegetarian of person, and tranquility [sic] of soul’ (pp. Thomas Tryon, who had also written against 83–4).26 Shelley also marks a passage on John slavery, is marked: ‘“The eating of flesh,” Oswald, the vegetarian Jacobin, whose poor [Tryon] adds, “and killing of creatures for children were literal ‘sans culottes’ (pp. that purpose, was never begun, nor is now 199–200). He also marks a passage on the continue’d for want or necessity, or for the vegetarian publisher Richard Phillips, who had maintenance of health, but chiefly because the gone to prison for publishing Thomas Paine high, lofty, spirit of wrath and sensuality had (pp. 201–2). Ritson put Shelley in touch with gotten the dominion in man, over the meek the radical vegetarian fraternity. love, and innocent harmless nature, and being Shelley was interested in Ritson’s castigation [so rampant, could not be satisfy’d except it of blood sports: ‘[The barbarous and unfeeling had a proportionable food]”’ (pp. 82–3).24 Tryon sports (as they are call’d) of the Engleish, their reappears in a grisly citation about a meat horse-raceing,] hunting, shooting, bul [sic] and market, whose ambience resembles Shelley’s bear-baiting, cock-fighting, boxing-matches, descriptions of martial carnage. Tryon contrasts and the like, all proceed from their immoderate the market with ‘a herb-market’: attraction to animal food. Their natural temper is thereby corrupted, and they are in the In one a thousand pieceës of the dead habitual and hourly commission of crimes carcaseës of various creatures lye stinking, against nature, justice, and humanity, at which the chanels [sic] running with blood, and a feeling and reflective mind, unaccustom’d to all the placeës ful of excrements, ordure, such a diet, would re-volt; but in which they garbage, grease, and filthyness, sending forth profess to take delight. The kings of Engeland dismal, poisonous scents, enough to corrupt have from a remote pe[riod been devoteëd to the very air. In the other, you have delicate hunting; in which pursuit one of them, and the of most excellent tastes, wholesome son of another, lost his life]’ (p. 88). Shelley’s medicinal herbs, savoury grains, and most own essay ‘On the Game Laws’ also contains beautyful, fragrant flowers, whose various vegetarian language. scents, colours, &c. make at once a banquet The end of A Vindication alludes to Ritson to all the senseës, and refresh the very souls on Pythagoras: ‘never take anything into the of such as pass through them, and perfume stomach that once had life’.27 Ritson’s all the circumambient air with redolent Pythagoras shines through Shelley’s prose. exhalations. This was the place, and food, Shelley marked the following passage: ‘the ordain’d for mankind in the beginning. Samian philosopher, a man of universal (p. 221) knowledge, who flourish’d about 500 years 58 Romanticism before Christ, forbad to kil, much more to eat, synthesized the two poles, declaring that the liveing creatures, that had the same prerogative reign of absolute freedom was also that of of souls with ourselves: and ate nothing himself absolute terror. Shelley’s vegetarianism, like his that had had life. The truth is, he enjoin’d men atheism, was very provocative to a class that not to eat of things that had life, but to refused even Hegel’s form of understanding of accustom themselves to meats that were the phenomenon of the French Revolution. In easeyly prepare’d, quickly at hand, and soon addition, I have identified seventeen writers on got ready without the help of fire’ (p. 170). vegetarianism who do not seem to have been Shelley’s Plutarch is also striking similar to practitioners (twenty including Rousseau, Ritson’s (p. 48). It is perfectly possible to Hegel and Schopenhauer).29 Add to this deduce that Shelley used this copy to compose numerous groups, and eleven writers on animal A Vindication. Furthermore, Shelley gleaned rights who were not explicit vegetarians or direct knowledge of Orphism from Ritson writers on the subject.30 The result is a list of (p. 170). This is very significant, given the forty-nine figures in total, excluding groups. central place of Orpheus (language as an We can only assume that this is the tip of the ‘Orphic song’, for instance) in such works as iceberg. Prometheus Unbound (4.415). One need look Romantic vegetarianism also had medical no further than page 173 (the citation of Ovid) determinants.31 Callow, the medical bookseller, for a precedent for the ecotopian vision in published A Vindication of Natural Diet. Queen Mab 8. Shelley was fascinated by Callow had issued the work of Shelley’s doctor, Ritson’s references to the poetic language of William Lawrence, and his vegetarian friend, the Golden Age (pp. 174). John Frank Newton. Some have argued that Shelley’s vegetarianism was entirely a product Romantic vegetarianism ——————— of his fear of syphilis.32 We would do well to Vegetarianism was pervasive during the consider it in a much broader medial context Romantic period. It inspired many different than this, since the culture of medicine in the classes and groups. John Tweddell, the classicist Romantic period was leading Shelley and his friend of Wordsworth in the 1790s, became circle, especially the Newton-Boinville set based one.28 It is possible that in Paris Wordsworth in London and Bracknell, near Windsor, to associated with John Oswald, the Scot who had adopt vegetarianism and various associated emigrated and become a vegetarian Jacobin. practices, such as the drinking of distilled and Oswald was averse to , but he spring water. , a doctor signed up to be a pikeman surrounding King connected to the circle, recommended the use Louis at the guillotine. Such juxtapositions of Malvern water.33 Ritson’s book recommends excited ridicule in the British reactionary vegetarianism for a multitude of ailments and imagination, a panicked inability to maintain for prolonging life to a ‘green old age’ (pp. a stable image of the enemy. James Gillray 159–61). depicts Jacobins both as vegetarians and as Anthropology and physiognomy were cannibals. Other vegetarian Jacobins, such as discourses that contributed to the practice Pigot, who appended vegetarian arguments at and theory of vegetarianism. In a form of the end of his political writings, were visible in primitivism, vegetarian food was thought to British culture. The British perceived their ideas be closer in form to the diet of early humans. of universal human rights and their For Lambe, it was a symptom of the relatively simultaneous desire to execute justice as developed but not yet decadent phase of asymmetrical, as queer. In Germany, Hegel agricultural society. Humans had emerged Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism 59 from the forests, but were not yet wasting emerging through the long eighteenth century, away in cities – an argument Lambe shared and that had reached a reflexive moment of with Thomas Trotter, the ships’s doctor consumerism by the Romantic period. turned specialist in diseases of the nervous Benjamin Robert Haydon was amazed to find temperament and of addiction. In Mary Shelley eating broccoli as if it were a piece of Shelley’s the creature eats in a chicken.36 That is the whole point: Shelley was primitivist manner, and specifies that he and ready to display his form of portable identity his mate will be vegetarians in their South in public. Identify had become decidedly liquid. American home.34 Ritson and Shelley shared Romanticism was not just the theory and the inconsistent logic of Romantic practice of a few poets. At one point in Animal vegetarianism – it was both a means to rise Food Ritson refers to ‘Man or brute’: ‘The above one’s carnal animality, and a way of onely mode in which man or brute can be returning to nature. This inconsistency is not as useful or hapy [sic], with respect either to the absurd as scholarship has persistently made it generality or to the individual, is to be just, out to be.35 For both writers, revolutionary from mild, mercyful, benevolent, humane, or, at least, the assembly room to the dinner plate, nature innocent or harmless, whether such qualities is an unfinished project that hails humanity are be natural or not’ (p. 40). We often speak of from the future. Enlightenment humanism, but the impulse of The scientific, diachronic view of early the Enlightenment, when pushed beyond a humankind could be mapped on to historical, certain limit, deconstructs the centrality of the social and synchronic views of the working human. What emerges from Shelley’s intimate classes and colonial subjects. Throughout attention to Ritson’s book is the seed of an vegetarian literature, including Ritson’s, the intensely politicized and philosophically Scots, Welsh and Irish find their place next to profound practice of abstaining from animal the Tahitians and other indigenous peoples. food, which flourished in the early decades of This is not so much, or not necessarily, a the nineteenth century. Ⅲ straightforward critique of the centre by the The University of California, Davis margins: such a postcolonial reading omits the ways in which it could be very handy for Notes metropolitans to think of themselves as —————— I would like to thank Susan Rivers for invaluable primitives or indigenous peoples. There is a research assistance; and Rachel Howarth, Head of the correlation between the Rousseauvian myth of Reading Room at the Harry Ransom Humanities the noble savage and the bourgeois myth of the Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, self-made man. This correlation construes and Richard Oram, Librarian, for their very helpful society as a blank sheet or open space. In this support. I would also like to thank the members of the blank or open space, identity could be reduced Davis Humanities Institute seminar on food studies to simple matters of style: what one wore or for 2004–2005, who kindly commented on a version of this paper, and in particular: Cynthia Brantley, Jean- what one ate took on a greater and more reified Xavier Guinard, Lynette Hunter, Alice McLean, Janet significance. Thus, nowadays, we select between Momsen, Kimberly Nettles, Georges Van Den Abbeele different styles of identity in a postmodern and Michael Ziser. market where, say, being Chinese is attenuated 1. Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from to eating Chinese. Animal Food, as a Moral Duty (London: printed for Thus we return to vegetarianism. It was a Richard Phillips, 1802); William Shakespeare, Measure convenient form of social distinction in an for Measure, ed. by Brian Gibbons (Cambridge and increasingly consumer society that had been New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 60 Romanticism

2. Susan Stewart, ‘Notes on Distressed Genres’, 16. The card from the card catalogue reads: in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment ‘An/Sh44/Zz802r/Rare/Books/Col’; ‘RITSON, of Representation (Oxford and New York: Oxford JOSEPH, 1752–1803. / An essay on abstinence from University Press, 1991), pp. 66–101. animal food, as a / moral duty. By Joseph Ritson . . . 3. Nicholas Groom, ‘Never Mind the Ballads, Here’s London: Richard Phillips . . . 1802. Wilks and Taylor, / Thomas Percy: The Parergon Situation’, Angelaki, printers … / 2p.l., 236p. 21cm. // Signatures: 2 leaves 1.1 (1993), pp. 86–94. unsigned, B–P8, Q6. / Autograph of Basil Montague, 4. The principal biography is Bertrand Harris on t.-p. / Shelley and Montague, his lawyer, are Bronson, Joseph Ritson, Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols supposed to have used and marked this copy, during (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938). the trial for his children. // 1. Vegetarianism. // 86015 5. Orrin Wang, ‘Romantic Sobriety’, Modern TxU46/47-10675B1 9-R3-McV 9-23060.’ The Language Quarterly, 60.4 (December, 1999), pp. accession number is 86015. ‘Zz’ in the catalogue card 469–93. refers to a volume related to Shelley but not by him; 6. Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet: a Catena it was added to George Aikin collection. of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh- 17. While this is not an exact science, there have been Eating (London: F. Pitman, John Heywood and systematic attempts to account for marks in books. Manchester: J. Heywood, Deansgate and Ridgefield, See Roger E. Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated 1883). and Explained (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library, 7. Shelley’s other lawyers were Charles Wetherell, Harvard University, 1985). a lawyer for radicals, and a Mr Bell. 18. Basil Montagu, The Opinions of Different 8. Public Record Office Chancery Equity Suits Authors upon the Punishment of Death (London, C 33/638, ff. 726r–727r (f. 726r). 1809–12). 9. Edward Dowden provides an extensive account 19. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Journals of in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. by Paula R. Feldman Kegan Paul, Tench and Co., 1886), II, pp. 76–95. See and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon also Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols (New York: Press, 1987), I , p. 94. Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), I, pp. 418, 481–3, 489–97. 20. Basil Montagu, Some Enquiries into the Effects 10. MS. Shelley adds. c.5, fols 96–7; in The Bodleian of Fermented Liquors (London, 1818). Shelley Manuscripts: A Facsimile Edition, with Full 21. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, in The Poems Transcriptions and Scholarly Apparatus, ed. by Alan of Shelley, ed. by G.M. Matthews and Kelvin Everest, Weinberg (New York and London: Garland, 1997), 3 vols (London and New York: Longman, 1989–), p. 97v. I, 8.79 (tigress) 8.124 (lion). 11. Public Record Office C38 1148, 234v–235; 22. Alexander Pope, ‘Cruelty to Put a Living Creature C33/672 9881, 1488. Shelley eventually prevailed in to Death’, The Guardian, 61 (21 May 1713). the choice of guardians, after a petition to Lord Eldon 23. There are other markings in Ritson’s chapter on on 28 April, confirmed on 25 July. He also maintained comparative anatomy (pp. 44–9). some visitation rights (once a month). 24. According to Ritson, this is from Thomas Tryon’s 12. Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Way to Health, p. 267. Boehme was very influential Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge on early modern vegetarianism. See Ken Albala, ‘Jacob and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. Boehme and the Foundations of a Vegetarian Food 152–7; Timothy Morton, Radical Food: The Culture Ideology’, AHA Conference Washington, D.C. January and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1780–1830, 3 vols 2004. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), I, pp. 1–32 25. Timothy Morton, ‘The Plantation of Wrath’, in (16–17). Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: 13. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by From Revolution to Revolution, ed. by Timothy Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Morton and Nigel Smith (Cambridge and New York: Press, 1964), 1, pp. 342–3, 344–5. Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 64–85. 14. Shelley’s Prose: Or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, 26. In inimitable radical antiquarian style Ritson ed. by David Lee Clark, (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), hypercorrects the prose of others. The citation is from pp. 84, 90, 95. Robert Pigot, Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders 15. See Morton, Shelley, pp. 67, 71. of the French Republic (London 1797), p. 194. Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism 61

27. Poems, I, p. 422. (radical underground newspaper), Samuel Jackson 28. I am grateful to Nicholas Roe for pointing this out Pratt, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Young. to me. 31. Onno Oerlemans has recently stressed this aspect 29. Anon., Bruce’s Voyage to Naples (1802), William of vegetarianism in Romanticism and the Materiality Blake, Henry Brougham, James Burnet (Lord of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Monboddo), John Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, 2002). David Hartley, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Thomas 32. Nora Crook and David Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Jefferson Hogg, James Henry Leigh Hunt, Thomas Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Medwin, Benjamin Moseley, Thomas Love Peacock, 1986). Horace Smith, Thomas Taylor, John Trelawny, Thomas 33. Reports of the Effects of a Peculiar Regimen on Trotter. Scirrhous Tumours and Cancerous Ulcers (London: 30. Robert Browning, Church of Swedenborgians in printed for J. Mawman, 1809), pp. 37–8. Salford (Henry Cowherd), Newton-Boinville set in 34. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or the Windsor (Harriet de Boinville and her family, the Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text, ed. by J. Rieger Newtons, the Shelleys and others), Richard Phillips’s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, family, Harriet Shelley, John Tweddell, Members of 1974, 1982), p. 142. the (founded 1847), and, of course, 35. See, for example, Harris Bronson, Ritson I, p. 165. by necessity, the emerging working class; Samuel 36. Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Autobiography Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Henry Crowe, and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon Thomas Lord Erskine, Rev. C. Hoyle, James (1786–1846), ed. by T. Taylor, 2 vols (London: Peter Montgomery, John Lawrence, Anon. in The Medusa Davies, 1926), I, p. 253.