350
Creator, the scientist, in Mary and Percy’s “Frankenstein: or, The Modern
Prometheus” (1818). And, in the Appendix of “Vindication,” suggests that, “All men
might be as healthy as the wild animals. Therefore, all men might attain to the age
of 152 years,” a calculation based upon the like of one ‘Old Parr’ stemming from
Shelley’s wide reading on cancer, on mortality rates in Iceland, on the “Nervous
Temperament,” data from Pliny’s Natural History, and countless other sources. And
it all comes down to his statement near the beginning of “Vindication,” namely,
“The language spoken however by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to
prove, that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the
purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event,
seems to have also been that of some great change in the climates of the earth, with
which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of
the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God, and the loss of
everlasting life, admits to no other explanation, than the disease and crime that have
flowed from unnatural diet”.
19
19 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Vindication Of Natural Diet,” in Shelley – Selected Poetry, Prose and
Letters, Edited by A. S. B. Glover, for The Nonesuch Press, London, 1951, p. 900.
39 Shelley’s Ecological Exile and His Utopia of Animal Rights
Creator, the scientist, in Mary and Percy’s “Frankenstein: or, The Modern
Prometheus” (1818). And, in the Appendix of “Vindication,” suggests that, “All men
might be as healthy as the wild animals. Therefore, all men might attain to the age
of 152 years,” a calculation based upon the like of one ‘Old Parr’ stemming from
Shelley’s wide reading on cancer, on mortality rates in Iceland, on the “Nervous
Temperament,” data from Pliny’s Natural History, and countless other sources. And
it all comes down to his statement near the beginning of “Vindication,” namely,
“The language spoken however by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to
prove, that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the
purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event,
seems to have also been that of some great change in the climates of the earth, with
which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of
the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God, and the loss of
everlasting life, admits to no other explanation, than the disease and crime that have
flowed from unnatural diet”.
19
19 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Vindication Of Natural Diet,” in Shelley – Selected Poetry, Prose and
Letters, Edited by A. S. B. Glover, for The Nonesuch Press, London, 1951, p. 900.
39 Shelley’s Ecological Exile and His Utopia of Animal Rights