Publication
The pamphlet was published by George Nicholson (1760–1825), a printer who had previously worked in Bradford before moving to Manchester. Rod Preece describes Nicholson as an early vegetarian and animal welfare writer who published a compilation of earlier vegetarian and animal protection material, On the Conduct of Man to Inferior Animals (1797), later expanded as On the Primeval Diet of Man; Arguments in Favour of Vegetable Foods; On Man's Conduct to Animals &c. &c. (1801). [1]
Remarks on Cruelty to Animals was published anonymously in Manchester in 1795, comprising 54 pages in duodecimo format. It was sold by T. Knott; and Champante & Whitrow in London. [2]
The tract appeared as part of a miscellany alongside John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters and a compilation titled Preceptive, Moral and Sentimental Pieces, intended to encourage readers to move from one work to the others. [3]
Content
Remarks on Cruelty to Animals presents itself as a compilation supported by "Quotations from History". It relies heavily on John Oswald's The Cry of Nature (1791), and also draws extensively on a range of other authors and works, including William Cowper's poetry, John Dryden's translation of Ovid, George Sale's translation of the Qur'an, Buffon's Natural History , James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775), Peter Simon Pallas's work on sheep (1794), and the medical writer George Cheyne. [3]
It opens with an appeal to humane conduct (including a quotation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile ) and argues that reliance on animal food is a luxury rather than a necessity, noting that poorer people often ate little or no meat for economic reasons. It combines moral arguments, historical examples of vegetarian practice in antiquity, and health claims about vegetarian diets, including assertions about digestion and the effects of meat consumption on the body and mind. [3]
The author also contends that killing animals is unnatural in the sense that people are typically averse to bloodshed, and the work includes examples intended to portray animals as sentient and capable of reasoning and social conduct, with the implication that slaughter should be regarded as murder. [3]
Legacy
In a 2020 post on a copy acquired by Senate House Library, Karen Attar described its themes as familiar in later pro-vegetarian writing, while noting that it does not address environmental questions and predates later economic arguments about land use. Attar also suggested that its cheap, portable format could have helped its circulation, but that any influence on later Manchester abstinence advocacy cannot be established. [3]
Remarks on Cruelty to Animals has been cited in scholarship on feminism and animal protection. In a discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft's emphasis on women's rationality and her scepticism toward the late-18th-century "cult of sensibility", Diana Donald cited John Oswald's The Cry of Nature alongside Remarks on Cruelty to Animals in relation to contemporary radical arguments for animal rights. [4]
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