AN ESSAY ON ABSITINENCE FROM ANIMAL FOOD, AS A MORAL DUTY.

First edition, first printing. Contemporary quarter calf over marbled boards with vellum cornerpieces. Spine ruled in gilt with a ducal gilt crest to foot and red gilt morocco title label. A very good or better copy, the binding square and firm with minor cracking to the upper joint. The contents with a little light foxing are otherwise clean throughout and free from any previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. A choice example.

Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), a pioneering literary scholar, most notable for his edition of Robin Hood, which emphasised Hood's redistributive role in robbing the rich to give to the poor, was a dedicated republican and atheist who moved in the same radical circles as his friend William Godwin. In his "Essay on Abstinence", his last published work, he set out the reasons behind his vegetarianism, arguing that meat-eating was bad for both humanity's physical and moral health. The killing and eating of other animals, Ritson claimed, was part-and-parcel of the cultivation of a larger predatory instinct that encouraged the growth of a violent and unjust society. Tyranny, cruelty, exploitation, economic inequality and war were all results of the same system of predation that meat-eating embodied. He thus argued that any comprehensive social revolution - any movement towards a more peaceful, co-operative and egalitarian society - must include the rejection of violence towards other species. Although met with anger and derision by some contemporaries, this groundbreaking vegetarian work had a significant impact in shaping the thought of Percy and Mary Shelley, and their own ideas and later writings regarding the diet. A wonderful copy of one the earliest vegetarian manifestos.