Of Victorians and Vegetarians provides a timely and deeply researched account of nineteenth-century Britons’ efforts to promote abstention from meat. In spite of the popular perception that western vegetarianism did not flourish until the mid-twentieth century, James Gregory (University of Bradford) traces the movement's longer roots in Victorian Britain. Unlike previous scholars—such as Stephen Nissenbaum, James C. Whorton, Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, and Albert Wirz—who have described food reform in both Britain and the United States primarily in terms of ideology and/or merely as a less significant offshoot of popular health reform, Gregory convincingly depicts vegetarianism as a distinct movement in its own right. He adeptly reviews the multitude of connections between vegetarianism and other Victorian reforms throughout the nineteenth century, but he does not use the simultaneous development of unorthodox medicine, temperance, women's rights, or anti-vivisection sentiments to explain the whole story. The book's strongest contribution to existing scholarship on early vegetarianism in Great Britain is its discussion of the creation of the vegetarian press, local and national vegetarian societies, and meatless restaurants. Furthermore, Gregory explores how Britons attempted to live out these beliefs in their everyday lives and how class and gender influenced the vegetarian movement.

The book begins with vegetarianism's development in Manchester and Salford, England, among a group of radical communitarians known as “The Concordium.” Building on Julia M. Twigg and Robert H. Abzug's works, Gregory shows how the establishment of the Vegetarian Society (VS) in the 1830s and 1840s represented the coming together of religious fervor and other social forces aimed at personal reform. In the VS's earliest years, its membership remained primarily limited to a small branch of Swedenborgians known as the Bible Christians or Cowherdites who promoted temperance reform (21). Although the United States was not the origin of British vegetarianism—in fact, quite the opposite was true—English vegetarians often utilized the writings of popular American health reformers, most notably William A. Alcott and Sylvester Graham. Among its most important early leaders were James Simpson, the first president of the (English) Vegetarian Society and Joseph Brotherton, a member of Parliament (31).

Gregory emphasizes the critical role of environment—namely, the increasingly urban areas of northern England and London where the movement historically gained the most adherents—in the emergence of vegetarianism throughout the nineteenth century. “Metropolitan vegetarianism,” he argues, benefited not only from the fears associated with urban life (e.g., threats of food adulteration, challenges to the traditional social order, and rampant immorality) but also from more positive trends such as greater access to education and openness to the formation of voluntary societies aimed at self-improvement (45). These first three chapters provide a useful but not entirely original—as Gregory acknowledges—overview of the movement's close connections to other Victorian reform efforts, most importantly temperance, health reform, and animal welfare. Gregory departs from previous renditions of this story, however, by closely looking at how Victorians attempted to institutionalize vegetarianism through the creation of local societies, publications, lectures, and public events in parts of England as well as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Although the early movement's influence remained very limited, Gregory shows how these early leaders and ideas provided the foundation for the movement's heyday during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

After a decline at midcentury, British vegetarianism experienced a widespread revival beginning in the 1870s. Victorians continued to emphasize the vegetarian movement's close associations with health reform and temperance principles, but as chapter 4 explains, “vegetarianism featured as part of that larger counterculture against capitalism, traditional gender relations and positivistic science” (113). The author describes the intersections between food reform and radicalism, in particular Victorian socialism and “anti-everythingarianism,” including popular criticisms of vivisection, vaccination policies, slavery, and war. Equally important, London began to overshadow Manchester as the institutional center/base for English vegetarianism, prompted by the formation of the London Vegetarian Society (LVS) and its wealthy patron, Arnold Hills. Initially established as a branch of the Manchester-based VS, the LVS developed important connections to nonvegetarian food reformers in London, and the groups officially split in 1888. The broader agenda promoted by Hills and the LVS, including their support for women's suffrage, also resulted in greater participation among women in the vegetarian movement itself. (Gregory points out that Victorian women were most likely active in the movement earlier on in the century, too, but their roles are harder to define due to the lack of female authorship and strong female leaders.)

Gregory devotes the next chapter to a much overlooked aspect of Victorian reform—how ordinary men and women attempted to integrate their ideals into everyday life. Here, the author relies on evidence from the plethora of meatless cookbooks and both the vegetarian and nonvegetarian press's descriptions of meatless restaurants. He also provides valuable insight into food reform propaganda and the commercialization of vegetarianism, but he ultimately fails to disclose much about how Victorian families experimented with meatless regimens in the home. Although Gregory's research reveals a wealth of vegetarian and health reform periodicals and books that have gone relatively unexamined by scholars, I regretted that he was not able to make better use of personal diaries and testimonies to illuminate more about how vegetarianism was “lived”—such as its effects on holidays and celebrations and whether or not it created tensions within the home between spouses or parents and children.

The last two chapters of the book take a step back and examine the vegetarian movement through the lenses of class, gender, and Victorian culture. Chapter 6 explores how ideas of class and gender influenced the emerging vegetarian movement, primarily in terms of its (failed) efforts to attract working-class families and the expanding role of women through groups such as the Women's Vegetarian Union.

In these chapters, the author also expands on his notion of Victorian vegetarianism as a distinctly urban phenomenon and its close development to Britons’ hopes and fears of industrialization. In chapter 7, the book takes a more interdisciplinary bent and addresses representations of vegetarians in Victorian fiction and scholarly works by philosophers and social scientists. This final chapter explores how notions of “modernity” contributed to the emergence of a distinct social movement to promote abstention from meat. Gregory also hints at the vegetarian movement's role in turn-of-the-century attempts to construct a cohesive national identity and culture for Great Britain. This theme, however, is not sufficiently explored. Nonetheless, there is still significant work to be done on vegetarianism as a means of “cultural nationalism” as well as both a pro- and antimodernity movements.

Gregory's work serves as an important step beyond recent scholars’ mere acceptance of vegetarianism and other “unorthodox” health reforms as legitimate subjects for historical analysis. The author successfully demonstrates the social, cultural, and political significance of the nineteenth-century vegetarian movement in Great Britain and raises new questions about the meanings of food and diet in the past.