Henry Stephens Salt 1851–1939
Meet the writer and campaigner who converted Gandhi to vegetarianism
The son of an officer in the British Army, Henry Stephens Salt was born in India, although when he was still a baby his mother took him with her when she returned to England. Salt studied at Eton before reading classics at
King’s College, Cambridge, then after he graduated university he returned to the school in 1875 to teach the subject.
From about 1880, Salt became interested in the work of social reformers such as textile designer William Morris and playwright George Bernard Shaw, and gradually developed an affinity with vegetarianism. In 1884, he left
Eton and moved to Tilford, Surrey, with his wife. There he led a simple vegetarian life and wrote almost 40 books and pamphlets on a range of humanitarian issues. Salt’s important book A Plea for Vegetarianism, and Other Essays (1886) was read by Mahatma Gandhi when he studied in London (1888–1891). Gandhi stated that it “showed me why it was a moral duty incumbent upon vegetarians not to live upon fellow-animals”.
Salt was a socialist, a member of the Fabian Society and the founder of the Humanitarian League. His other key works included Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation
to Social Progress (1892) and the autobiography Seventy Years Among Savages (1921). He died in Brighton in 1939. You can download the aforementioned books for free from the Internet Archive at bit.ly/salt-plea, bit.ly/saltrights and bit.ly/salt-seventy respectively.