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Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt

Naini Tal, India, 1851 - 1939, Brighton

BiographyOxford National Biography: Salt, Henry Shakespear Stephens (1851–1939), classical scholar and publicist.
Salt, Henry Shakespear Stephens (1851–1939), classical scholar and publicist, was born in Naini Tal, India, on 20 September 1851, the son of Thomas Henry Salt, lieutenant in the Bengal artillery, and his wife, Ellen Matilda née Allnat. He was a king's scholar at Eton College (1866–71) and went in 1871 to King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Browne's medallist (Greek epigrams) in 1874 and gained a first in the classical tripos in 1875 (BA 1875). From 1875 to 1884 he taught classics at Eton.

In 1884, disenchanted with his life at Eton—he alleged Eton masters ‘were but cannibals in cap and gown’ (Venn, Alum. Cant.)—Salt decided to live at Tilford in Surrey and concentrate on a simple vegetarian life, following his many interests in the field of humanitarianism. For the next thirty-five years he published a spate of pamphlets and books on the subjects about which he felt strongly and the authors whom he admired deeply or disagreed with emphatically. In 1888 he published Flesh or Fruit? An Essay on Food Reform and in 1892 Animals' Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress. The Ethics of Corporal Punishment appeared in 1907 and he returned to this theme in 1916 in The Flogging Craze: a Statement of the Case Against Corporal Punishment.

In 1891 Salt published a pamphlet entitled Humanitarianism, a subject on which he frequently lectured, since it embraced all those matters about which he held strong opinions. In that year he founded the Humanitarian League, which became a channel for the promotion of his ideas. He worked as its honorary secretary until its demise in 1919 when, according to his own view in his Seventy Years among Savages (1921), ‘It ended as it began in its character of Forlorn Hope; we had the good will of the free-lances, not of the public or the professors’. Salt in his care for natural beauty and condemnation of the spoliation of the countryside was in advance of his time.

In politics Salt was a socialist and became a member of the Fabian Society shortly after it was founded in 1884. He had a wide variety of friends, including J. Ramsay MacDonald, W. H. Hudson, and M. K. Gandhi. In one of his letters to Salt Gandhi wrote that he had become a confirmed vegetarian after reading Salt's essays published under the title The Logic of Vegetarianism (1897).

In the preface to Stephen Winsten's Salt and his Circle (1951) G. B. Shaw said that ‘Salt was a born naturalist and never went out of doors without a binocular to watch the birds’. Salt himself expressed his love of natural beauty in books such as On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scawfell (1908) and Our Vanishing Wild Flowers (1928).

Salt's biographies and works of literary criticism include The Life of Henry David Thoreau (1890), Tennyson as a Thinker: a Criticism (1893), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Pioneer (1896), and De Quincey (1904). He could not resist the urge to criticize the Eton of his time; hence Eton under Hornby: some Reminiscences and Reflections (1910) and The Nursery of Toryism: Reminiscences of Eton under Hornby (1911). He also continued to demonstrate his early understanding of classical authors by translations of Lucretius (1912) and his masterly verse translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1928).

In 1879 Salt married Catherine Leigh Joynes (d. 1919), author of studies of Shelley, De Quincey, and Richard Jefferies, the daughter of the Revd James Leigh Joynes, a master at Eton. According to Salt's friend George Bernard Shaw, she refused to sleep with her husband and had a number of affairs with her women friends. In 1927 Salt married Catherine, daughter of Frederick Mandeville of Brighton. Salt died at Brighton Municipal Hospital, Elmgrove, Brighton, on 19 April 1939, survived by his second wife.

H. F. Oxbury, rev.
(Oxbury, H. F. “Salt, Henry Shakespear Stephens (1851–1939).” Roger T. Stearn In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman, 2004. Accessed July 14, 2015. www.oxforddnd.com).

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Last Updated8/7/24

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