Vegetarian Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Abstract Victorian vegetarians envisioned the evolutionary progress of the human race from a cannibal past towards a vegetarian future, moralizing evolutionary science to vindicate their cause. This essay explores this rhetoric of vegetarian evolution and how it conjoined vegetarian identity with British identity by reinventing vegetarianism as a practice of individual liberty. The main archives I examine are the Dietetic Reformer and Vegetarian Messenger (1860–1887), a major vegetarian journal from the period, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), a work of speculative fiction that represents vegetarian utopianism from an evolutionary angle. My reading of the Dietetic Reformer reveals that Victorian vegetarians imagined themselves to be at the vanguard of human evolution, with their conscious, mindful, and individual practices of vegetarianism operating as a progressive departure from what they perceived as the communal and anti-modern vegetarianism of the non-Western world. By doing so, they reshaped human evolution not only into a teleological progress, but also into a humanized process, on which individual subjects had a direct bearing through their control over daily food consumption. The rhetoric of vegetarian evolution thus addressed a deeper cultural anxiety about individual agency in the Victorian period, provoked by the Darwinian turn. This vegetarian resolution, however, as my reading of The Coming Race uncovers, contained incongruities within its rhetoric. Bulwer-Lytton’s literary representation of an evolved vegetarian species as a homogeneous heap rather than a society of self-governing individuals discloses the inherent difficulty in reconciling individual moral agency with the framework of evolutionary vegetarianism.