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Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism

The antiquarian Joseph Ritson (1752–1803, see fig. 1) opposed the bibliographical practices of his rival, Thomas Percy. It was an era during which the past was constructed and contested, and the category of the domestic antique was born. If as Nick Groom has suggested Percy was the Malcolm McLaren of his era, a brilliant entrepreneur who masterminded a great balladic swindle, Ritson was XTC’s Andy Partridge, finding in the ballads an authentic English countercultural tradition. Ritson’s attitude to the text was deeply political. His sense that they should be preserved in their authenticity is interwoven with his republicanism, which insists upon the genuine voices of equal participants. Deconstructionists may balk at this: but let us remember that Jacques Derrida always insists upon a careful scrutiny and history of the text, his own tortuously slow prose manner serving to fetishise it, but also to make it visible in all its parts – a technique that makes deconstruction resonate with the sceptical empiricism of Ritson’s day. Percy may appeal to fans of Baudrillard, but Percy is not the only antiquarian on the block. Ritson was an English Jacobin. He supported the French Revolution and was known in jest as ‘Citizen Ritson’. As well as issuing editions of ballads, he wrote books on atheism and vegetarianism – subjects dear to many republican hearts. Vegetarianism was many things during the Romantic period: a cutting edge of bourgeois consumer style; a thread of continuity from the religious radicalism of the seventeenth century; a logical extension of Enlightenment discourse on the rights of women and men. Thomas Percy’s copy of An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food (1802) contains Sayer’s satirical cartoon of him pasted onto the front board. In it, Ritson is treading on the Bible (and Percy’s Reliques) in open-toed sandals while a cow leans through the window, breaking the boundary between human and animal realms, and munches on one of Ritson’s carrots. In real life, Ritson had a dog whom he called – Ritson. The 1960s, it seems, had happened before. Vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol were signs of revolutionary sobriety, a straight, masculine civic humanism, not the effeminate weakness that it signified later. Richard Phillips, the vegetarian and publisher of Paine’s Rights of Man, published Animal Food. The book is radical republican in Timothy Morton