Howard Williams was an English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

 humanitarian and vegetarian, and author of the book The Ethics of Diet, an anthology of vegetarian thought.

The book, first published in 1883, tells the history of vegetarianism

History of vegetarianism

Vegetarianism is the theory and practice of the voluntarily non-consumption of the flesh of any animal with or without also eschewing other animal derivatives, such as dairy products or eggs...

 since the writings of the first Pythagorean

Pythagoreanism

Pythagoreanism was the system of esoteric and metaphysical beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were considerably influenced by mathematics. Pythagoreanism originated in the 5th century BCE and greatly influenced Platonism...

 philosophers of the Ancient World until the author’s time.
Among the authors mentioned in the book are: Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

, Plutarch

Plutarch

Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...

, Porphyry

Porphyry (philosopher)

Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...

, Luigi Cornaro

Luigi Cornaro

Alvise "Luigi" Cornaro was a Venetian nobleman who wrote treatises on dieting, including Discorsi della Vita Sobria . Finding himself near death at the age of 35, Cornaro modified his eating habits on the advice of his doctors and began to adhere on a calorie restriction diet...

, Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...

, John Ray

John Ray

John Ray was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".He published important works on botany,...

, Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

, Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

, Percy Shelley, Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine was a French writer, poet and politician who was instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic.-Career:...

, Joseph Ritson

Joseph Ritson

Joseph Ritson was an English antiquary.He was born at Stockton-on-Tees, of a Westmorland yeoman family. He was educated for the law, and settled in London as a conveyancer at the age of twenty-two. He devoted his spare time to literature, and in 1782 published an attack on Thomas Warton's History...

, and Gustav Struve

Gustav Struve

Gustav Struve, known as Gustav von Struve until he gave up his title, , was a German politician, lawyer and publicist, and a revolutionary during the German revolution of 1848-1849 in Baden...

. Not all authors mentioned in the book were vegetarians (Thomas More

Thomas More

Sir Thomas More , also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councillor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor...

, for example, was probably not a vegetarian), but they all had critical views of meat-eating).

It was of some importance at the time. As Jon Gregerson wrote in Vegetarianism: A History, “Not unimportant in the momentum gathered by the Vegetarian Movement in late Victorian England was a book by one Howard Williams entitled The Ethics of Diet, which was published in 1890”. It was read by India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n spiritual leader

Spiritual leader

Spiritual leader is a form of title that is used to refer to religious leaders.In Buddhism, spiritual leaders are usually the people who have attained high level of spiritual awareness. Those spiritual teachers can guide people on their path toward spiritual awakening.Spiritual Leader may be a...

 Mohandas Gandhi, Russian

Russians

The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 writer Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

, English social reformer Henry Stephens Salt

Henry Stephens Salt

Henry Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer,...

, and Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 philosopher Jaime de Magalhães Lima (as he mentioned in his conference O Vegetarismo e a Moralidade das Raças).

Gandhi, who met Williams in Ventnor

Ventnor

Ventnor is a seaside resort and civil parish established in the Victorian era on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England. It lies underneath St Boniface Down , and is built on steep slopes and cliffs leading down to the sea...

, wrote in his autobiography

Autobiography

An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

: "My faith in vegetarianism grew on me from day to day. Salt's book Plea for Vegetarianism whetted my appetite for dietetic studies. I went in for all books available on vegetarianism and read them. One of these, Howard Williams' The Ethics of Diet, was a 'biographical history of the literature of humane dietetics from the earliest period to the present day'".

Tolstoy considered it an “excellent book”, and in 1892 he wrote the preface to the Russian translation. According to Tolstoy (1911, pp. 91–92) “The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act of fasting and of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity." Henry Stephens Salt commented that “Of all recent books on the subject of animals’ rights this is by far the most scholarly and exhaustive”. Jaime de Magalhães Lima, (a vegetarian and a Tolstoyan

Tolstoyan

The Tolstoyan movement is a social movement based on the philosophical and religious views of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy . Tolstoy's views were formed by rigorous study of the ministry of Jesus, particularly the Sermon on the Mount....

), used Williams book as a reference to write his 1912 conference O Vegetarismo e a Moralidade das raças .

In 1896 a new edition appeared with additional material (chapters on Asoka, Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith was an Irish writer, poet and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield , his pastoral poem The Deserted Village , and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man and She Stoops to Conquer...

, Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

, Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

, and Anna Kingsford

Anna Kingsford

Anna Kingsford, née Bonus , was an English anti-vivisection, vegetarian and women's rights campaigner.She was of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine, after Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and the only medical student at the time to graduate without having experimented on a single...

, among others). The book however became a rarity, only available in certain libraries. In 2003, the University of Illinois Press

University of Illinois Press

The University of Illinois Press , is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic projects...

 edited a new edition with an additional introduction by eco-feminism author Carol J. Adams.