See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297575758 Vegetarianism and vitality in the work of Thomas Forster, William Lawrence and P.B. Shelley Article in Keats-Shelley Journal · January 2005 CITATION READS 1 97 1 author: Sharon Ruston Lancaster University 40 PUBLICATIONS 106 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Translating Chronic Pain: A Critical and Creative Research Network View project All content following this page was uploaded by Sharon Ruston on 16 July 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Vegetarianism and Vitality in the Work of Thomas Forster,William Lawrence and P.B. Shelley SHARON RUSTON HE recent publication of Thomas Love Peacock’s collected letters, edited by Nicholas Joukovsky, has brought into the public domain correspondence between Peacock and one of his earliest friends, Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster (–).₁ Forster is hardly mentioned in the major critical or biographical accounts of the life and work of Peacock or P.B. Shelley,and yet dur- ing the formative years – it seems likely that he was an important figure in both their lives, connecting them to such politi- cally-inflected scientific issues as vegetarianism and animal rights that would continue to feature in their life and work.² Forster was a nat- uralist, with a dizzying array of interests and publications. Many of these interests dovetail with Shelley’s own concerns at this period in his life. Forster was a vegetarian, a follower of Franz Joseph Gall’s and Johann Caspar Spurzheim’s theories (he invented the word “phrenol- ogy”); he was interested in “atmospheric phenomena,” the effects of “spiritous liquors,”balloon travel and classical languages. He was also active in his efforts to prevent cruelty to animals, eventually helping Lewis Gompertz to set up the Animals’ Friend Society. He was the friend of William Lambe, the doctor who, with John Frank Newton, influenced Shelley’s vegetarianism. Indeed Forster’s scientific and . The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. by Nicholas A. Joukovsky, vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Forster is discussed in Nicholas A. Joukovsky,“Peacock before Headlong Hall: A New Look at his Early Years,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin (): –. He is mentioned once in Marilyn Butler’s Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), p. [ ] Keats-Shelley Journal medical acquaintances figure large in Shelley’s London and Bracknell circles of –. Forster also provides a link between his better-known contempo- raries and the debate on the nature of vitality,which took place in the Royal College of Surgeons from –, between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Forster had been the pupil of Abernethy, at St. Bartholomew’s hospital in London, and there, pre- sumably,met William Lawrence, who became Forster’s lifelong friend and Shelley’s friend and doctor.This essays builds on and confirms the research I have published in my monograph,Shelley and Vitality, offer- ing further evidence of the influence of the teachings of Abernethy and Lawrence on Forster’s and Shelley’s vegetarianism and interest in animal rights, and, indeed, finds suggestive similarities in the writings of Forster and Shelley.³ The work Timothy Morton has done in this area asserts a link between comparative anatomy, the study of differ- ent species of living creatures, vegetarianism and the fledgling animal rights’ movement, which Forster’s life and work, unknown to Mor- ton, confirms.⁴ In this essay, for the first time, Forster’s writings are discussed at length and compared to Shelley’s own writings on vege- tarianism and animal rights. The debate between Abernethy and Lawrence was at its most pub- lic during the second decade of the nineteenth century,when the two surgeons gave lectures to the Royal College of Surgeons on the nature of vitality, which they then published. In , after he had been denounced as a materialist and an atheist in a number of pamphlets issued in the wake of his Lectures on the Natural History of Man, Law- rence was suspended from his hospital posts.⁵ In his final, public word on their dispute, Abernethy alluded to a group of medical students who disagreed with his theories.₆ This group, whom he had previ- ously labeled the “Modern Sceptics,”had, like Lawrence, Forster and even Shelley,been taught anatomy and surgery by Abernethy,but they . Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (New York:Palgrave Macmillan, ), pp. –, –. .Timothy Morton,Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,). William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology,Zoology,and The Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London: J. Callow, ). John Abernethy, The Hunterian Oration for the Year , delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in London (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, ), p. Vegetarianism and Vitality openly expressed skepticism at what he presented as “Mr Hunter’s Theory of Life.”⁷ As I have established in Shelley and Vitality, Shelley had decided to become a surgeon after being expelled from Oxford in and spent his time in London before his elopement with Har- riet Westbrook in the company of his two medical cousins, John and Charles Grove, attending Abernethy’s anatomical lectures and some- times accompanying them to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (pp. –). Forster had also been enrolled as a student physician in Bart’s.⁸ He, too, had attended Abernethy’s lectures on anatomy (Illustrations,p.). By Forster had met and become friends with Abernethy’s erst- while apprentice and demonstrator,William Lawrence.⁹ Abernethy’s teachings clearly influenced both Shelley and Forster, but their friendship with Lawrence, encouraged by shared political convic- tions, ensured their support of him in the ideologically-motivated debate concerning the nature of life.A mutual interest in comparative anatomy binds Forster, Lawrence and Shelley during this first half of the s, and Forster’s many publications offer a new source of evi- dence for Shelley’s circle and its interests in vegetarianism and animal rights. In this essay I first briefly examine the Romantics’ preoccupation with defining life and consider the ways in which the study of com- parative anatomy fed into the rights movements of the period. An early letter from Peacock to Forster offers an insight into their theo- ries on comparative anatomy at this time. New evidence drawn from . John Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr Hunter’s Physiology, and of his researches in Comparative Anatomy, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in the year (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, ), p. Forster writes that he was “entered as physician’s pupil at St.Bartholomew’s hospital”where he “was struck with the simple but effective practice of Mr. Abernethy,” Illustrations of the Atmospherical Origin of Epidemic Disorders of Health (Chelmsford: Meggy and Chalk, London:T.and G. Underwood, ), p. v. There is a “Mr. Forster” enrolled as a student of Abernethy in a register of students at Bart’s, for the – session (commencing October ). I am very grateful to Samantha Searle (Archivist for St. Bartholomew’s Hospital library) for this information, which was obtained from Ludford Harvey’s Jour- nal, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives MS, BHA X /.The preface of Illustrations, however, suggests that Forster began his studies at Bart’s earlier than , since he dates his interest in atmospherical phe- nomena from “About the same time”and suggests that it was his education at Bart’s that introduced him to Abernethy’s theories of the importance of diet (p. ). He published on these topics in and respectively. Thomas Forster, Recueil des Ouvrages et des Pensées d’un Physicien et Metaphysicien (Francfort sur le Mein, ), p. Keats-Shelley Journal Godwin’s diaries reveals more about Lawrence’s involvement in the London and Bracknell circles to which Shelley introduced Peacock. I then consider Forster’s publication on the destructive effects of alco- hol as evidence of his indebtedness to the work of Lambe and Aber- nethy.Shelley’s writings on vegetarianism are regarded similarly as the work of someone immersed in this circle. The question of what life was necessitated an investigation into how living beings differed from dead or inanimate ones. What was life, if it was experienced by creatures as diversely organized as humans, animals and plants? During the Romantic period, a number of scientific discoveries coalesced in a new perception of the term “life.”The possibility that life existed on other planets seemed a great deal more likely after Sir William Herschel’s assertions that the uni- verse was far bigger than had been thought and that the moon’s sur- face had both seas and volcanoes. Shelley understood both assertions as signs that the moon could potentially contain life. Conversely, microscopic study proved that the Earth was teeming with invisible microscopic lifeforms, and Thomas Paine, among others, argued that the existence of such life made the idea that space was also inhabited much more likely.₁⁰ In a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, in , Shelley wrote: I will say then, that all nature is animated, that miscroscopic [sic] vision as it hath discovered to us millions of animated beings whose pursuits and passions are as eagerly followed as our own, so might it if extended find that Nature itself was but a mass of organized animation.₁₁ The political implications of such statements are clear. Man was less the focus of attention than part of a new, all-encompassing “life” of which human life was simply one variant; Wordsworth’s and Cole- ridge’s view of the “one life” shared by all can be seen as a statement of this new understanding.