This chapter provides an overview of vegetarian and vegan practice from Ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first section focuses on the representation of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on the Aristotelian and Biblical depictions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals; the second explores Early Modern attitudes, including a discussion of the vegetarianism in More’s Utopia; the third offers readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; the fourth details the emergence of the word ’vegetarian’ in the context of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

The georgic in English is often said to have receded after the 1770s. This chapter argues that in the Romantic period the georgic does not disappear, but assumes a new form: the ‘rural complaint’, a lyrical lamentation on social conditions in the countryside. Georgics in a more conventional didactic and descriptive form continued to be written, such as Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy and James Grahame’s British Georgics, but these incorporated rural complaint interludes. At the same time, standalone rural complaint poems, following Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, consistently alluded to, and situated themselves within, a classical and neoclassical georgic tradition. Understanding the Romantic rural complaint as a form of georgic (rather than, or in addition to, pastoral) sheds light on the generic choices of poets such as Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and John Clare.