Romanticism & Ecology

Henry Salt on Shelley: Literary Criticism and Ecological Identity

William Stroup, Keene State College

Notes

1  Two biographical studies of Salt exist, the most reliable being George Hendrick's Henry Salt: Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters (1977). This work seeks to introduce Salt to new readers, a task which is unfortunately still necessary. Hendrick also reprints a number of unpublished letters written by and addressed to Salt. Stephen Winsten's Salt and His Circle (1951) is made and marred by its association with G.B. Shaw, who wrote a preface for it at age 95 (!) and provided other materials in remembrance of his friend. Winsten's penchant for imagined dialogue and undocumented conjecture makes one appreciate the obsessive answerability of the best modern biographies.
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2  See Walters and Portmess's Ethical Vegetarianism: From Pythagoras to Peter Singer for a long-overdue anthology that brings Salt's "The Humanities of Diet" (1914) back into print. This book also features a large section of Shelley's Vindication of Natural Diet after a selection of his classical sources.
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3   Morton does, however, consider Shelley's importance for later aspects of the environmental movement, especially in "Shelley's Green Desert." Onno Oerlemans, in "Shelley's Ideal Body: Vegetarianism and Nature," helpfully discusses both Cameron's exceptionality as a biographer who takes diet seriously, and names Salt as the only serious defender of Shelley's vegetarianism (532).
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4   Thomashow's historical tracings of "Trees of Environmentalism" (see chart on 26) shares with much American environmental writing a foreshortened sense of history, with Thoreau and Muir as the deep roots of the tree. Are Wordsworth, Clare, and Darwin then soil?
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5  Morris certainly shared many of Salt's ideals, but asked crucial questions about the claims of the vegetarian movement: "Simplicity in life is good, most good, so long as it is voluntary; but surely there is enough involuntary simplification of life. To live poorly is no remedy against poverty but a necessity of it. If our whole system were to become vegetarian altogether the poor would be forced to live on vegetarian cag-mag, while the rich lived on vegetarian dainties" (qtd in Winsten 94).
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6  For a response to this passage in full disagreement with Bate's thesis as well as that of this essay see P.M.S. Dawson's "'The Empire of Man': Shelley and Ecology," in Bennett and Curran 232-239.
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