On this day in vegan history · August 30, 1797
Frankenstein's Vegetarian Monster
Mary Shelley was born in London to two radical philosophers, and the creature she later invented turned down meat before most novelists thought to give a monster a diet at all.
The facts
- Born
- 30 August 1797, Somers Town, London
- Parents
- William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
- Frankenstein published
- 1 January 1818
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797 in Somers Town, London, the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Twenty years later, writing as Mary Shelley, she published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, now considered an early landmark of science fiction. In it, the creature tells his creator he needs no flesh to survive: acorns and berries, he says, are enough. It is a small line in a long novel, but it makes the era's most famous monster gentler about killing than the man who built him, and readers studying meat, mercy, and monstrosity have kept returning to it ever since.
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.
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My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.
The creature, addressing Victor Frankenstein, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Source: Wikisource
Why it still matters
Two centuries on, scholars still cite the creature's diet as one of English fiction's earliest vegetarian arguments: a monster who refuses to kill for food while the humans hunting him do not.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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