On this day in vegan history · July 8, 1822
Shelley Drowns Weeks After Writing His Case Against Eating Animals
The poet who told England that meat fed both cruelty and starvation went down in a storm off the Italian coast at twenty-nine, his argument for a plant-based world barely a decade old.
The facts
- Date of death
- 8 July 1822, off the coast near Livorno, Italy
- Age
- 29
- Boat
- The Don Juan, a custom-built open sailing boat
- Key text
- A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)
On 8 July 1822, Percy Bysshe Shelley sailed his small boat, the Don Juan, out of Livorno bound for Lerici with his friend Edward Williams and a boat boy. A storm caught the inexperienced crew and the boat was lost; Shelley's body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later, identified by the clothing and a copy of Keats's Lamia still in his jacket pocket. He was not yet thirty. Nine years earlier he had published A Vindication of Natural Diet, arguing that eating animals was tangled up with both cruelty and the economic squeeze on the poor. It was a fringe pamphlet from a poet already notorious for atheism and scandal, but it planted an argument that outlived him.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
Is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings, rising from his meal of roots, would take delight in sports of blood?
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, 1813
Source: Project Gutenberg -
The peasant cannot gratify these fashionable cravings without leaving his family to starve.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Vindication of Natural Diet, 1813
Source: Project Gutenberg
Why it still matters
Shelley's pamphlet linked animal cruelty and human poverty as one problem a quarter century before organized vegetarianism existed in Britain. Wikipedia notes his life and work helped inspire the founding of the Vegetarian Society in England in 1847.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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