Introduction

Western veganism and vegetarianism originated in nineteenth-century modern Britain. Early societies faced a diffused activist base and a generally ignorant public. Editorial teams were key movement leaders responsible for defining a path for social change, conceptualizing concepts and philosophies, and generally manifesting social movement ideas in a tangible way. Magazines, journals, newsletters, cookbooks, and other print items served as important artifacts that immediately tied the reader to ideas and collectives that were often well beyond their immediate communities. Indeed, readerships became their own communities, often stretching across entire nations or across oceans.

There are far too many society publications to summarize here. Instead, this chapter highlights the early works of the Vegetarian Society in Britain, its offshoot, The Vegan Society (TVS), and their American reverberations. These organizations funneled most (if not all) of their meager funds into printing, recognizing their multifunctional role in carving out a movement and achieving desired goals. Their commitment to the literary face of the movement and their influence over movement dynamics mark them as suitable case studies. The discussion herein reflects a convenience sample of early issues of The Vegan (TVS) and Food, Home and Garden (Vegetarian Society of America [VSA]) supplemented by celebratory chronicles such as that of the American Vegan Society (Dinshah and Dinshah) and insight from movement historians, namely Adam Shprintzen, Colin Spencer, and Joanne Stepaniak. Although vegetarian history is relevant to the chronicle of vegan literary studies, I lend my attention most heavily to the efforts of TVS for obvious reasons.

The aforementioned scholars take interest in the materials produced by organizations and collectives given their function in defining problems, outlining solutions, and shaping activist identity. Yet movements are not the only shapers of identity (Gamson 242). Outside players including media influencers, government institutions, industries and advertising, and the public can also advance resonant characterizations. For Nonhuman Animal rights activists (Einwohner 258) and vegans (Cole and Morgan 134), the influence of so many external actors has entailed a diminishment of their ethical impetuses and spurred a general stigmatization. Defining vegan identity and resisting pejorative outsider-imposed depictions was key to sustaining the movement. The society was founded in 1944 by a group of disaffected members of the Vegetarian Society. At this time, nutritional science was just coming into its own with the discovery of vitamins and the consequences of their deficiencies (Carpenter 3023).