Cranks, Clerks, and Suffragettes: The Vegetarian Restaurant in British Culture and Fiction 1880-1914

Vegetarian restaurants were part of the city landscape of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Most meat-free eateries were located in London, numbering around thirty by 1890, but similar establishments could also be found in Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester. Drawing on fictional representations, newspaper articles, advertisements and health reform literature, this article explores the cultural meanings attached to vegetarian dining in this period. Following the establishment of the first Vegetarian Society in 1847, the meat-free cause was embraced as part of a broader progressive scene that encompassed temperance and labor rights, pacifism and socialism. Restaurants were key to furthering the meat-free movement, but they also served city clerks in search of cheap meal and women workers in need of somewhere respectable to dine. Mapped back onto the urban imaginary, the vegetarian restaurant emerges as discursive site in which the complex politics of consumption were negotiated.