Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt is best known today for Animals’ Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892), although he also published widely on other social and humanitarian causes. Peter Singer hails this volume as “the best of the eighteenth and nineteenth century works on animal rights” (viii), noting further that there is little that subsequent animal rights advocates can add to this prescient and pivotal text. In his own day, Salt was also known for his literary criticism, publishing two volumes on Percy Bysshe Shelley alone, as well as other biographies and analyses of Alfred Tennyson, Thomas de Quincey, and the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau in particular was to prove influential on Salt’s life and work.
Salt was born in Nynee Tal, India, to Colonel Thomas Salt and Ellen Matilda Salt; the latter returned to England with her young son in 1852, her husband remaining in India. Salt spent the majority of his early years with his maternal grandparents, the Allnatts, in the Shrewsbury area. Despite writing two autobiographies – Seventy Years Among Savages (1921) and Company I Have Kept (1930), Salt himself was rather reticent on his early years. Biographer George Hendrick notes, however, that Salt’s childhood was happy and filled with valuable friendships made in Shrewsbury, and at both Eton College and Cambridge University, where he majored in classics ( Henry Salt 9).
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Amy Ratelle
Yellow Nineties 2.0, 2014, 6 pages