Henry S. Salt (1851 – 1939)
English writer and reformer

Although he is probably best known as the vegetarian author of Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), Henry Salt was a man with many roles—teacher, biographer, literary critic, and energetic advocate of causes he grouped under the title of humanitarianism. These included pacifism and socialism as well as vegetarianism , anti-vivisectionism, and other attempts to promote the welfare of animals. Late in his life, Salt also advocated efforts to conserve the beauties of nature , especially wildflowers and mountain districts.

Salt was born in India in 1851, the son of a colonel in the Royal Bengal Artillery. When his parents separated a year later, Salt's mother moved to England, and he spent much of his childhood at the home of her well-to-do parents. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he embarked on an apparently comfortable career when he returned to Eton as an assistant master. While teaching at Eton, however, Salt met some of the leading radicals and reformers of the day, including William Morris, John Ruskin, and George Bernard Shaw, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. During this period Salt became a vegetarian. He also read Henry David Thoreau's Walden, which inspired Salt and his wife to leave Eton and move to a country cottage in 1885 to lead a simple, self-sufficient life. For Salt, the simple life was far from dull. He became a prolific writer, although his efforts brought little financial profit. In addition to Animals' Rights, his works include a biography of Thoreau, studies of Shelley and Tennyson, a translation of Virgil's Aeneid, and an autobiography, Seventy Years Among Savages (1921), in which he examined English life as if he were an anthropologist studying a primitive tribe. Another book, A Plea for Vegetarianism, came to the attention of Mohandas Karanchand Gandhi when he was a student in London. Gandhi, who was raised a vegetarian, later wrote in his Autobiography that Salt's book made him "a vegetarian by choice." Salt apparently met Gandhi in 1891, then corresponded with him in 1929 during Gandhi's nonviolent struggle for the independence of India—a struggle inspired, in part, by Thoreau's essay, "Civil Disobedience."

Perhaps the best statement of Salt's views is the address he wrote to be read at his funeral. Declaring himself "a rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian," Salt disavowed any belief "in the present established religion," but acknowledged "a very firm religious faith" in "a Creed of Kinship:" "a belief that in years yet to come there will be a recognition of the brotherhood between man and man, nation and nation, human and sub-human, which will transform a state of semi-savagery...into one of civilization, when there will be no such barbarity as warfare, or the robbery of the poor by the rich, or the ill-usage of the lower animals by mankind."

[Richard K. Dagger ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Hendrick, G., and W. Hendrick, eds. The Savour of Salt: A Henry Salt Anthology. Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1989.

PERIODICALS

Jolma, D. J. "Henry Salt and 100 Years of Animal Rights." The Animals' Agenda (November–December 1992): 30–2.