Victorian Periodicals Review

Abstract:

This essay examines how Francis William Newman used the formal characteristics of the press to introduce reforms to the Vegetarian Society in the 1870s. As president, Newman controversially restructured membership in the society along the model of serial instalments, harnessed the dialogism of the press to reimagine vegetarian eating as a conversation among its practitioners, and used the periodical's characteristic mixture of repetition and difference to expand the vegetarian palate. This paper demonstrates how Newman and the Vegetarian Society employed serial print media not to enforce total abstinence from flesh but to create new regimes of self-care and self-government, allowing readers to shape themselves into vegetarian subjects through their participation in the movement.