---
title: "Howard Williams (1837-1931) - IVU - International Vegetarian Union"
description: "Howard Williams (1837-1931): Howard Williams was an English humanitarian and vegetarian, author of the book The Ethics of Diet (1883), a historical anthology of vegetarian writings, which includes excerpts from Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, Mandeville, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, St. Pierre,"
url: "https://ivu.org/history-of-ivu.html?view=article&id=2474:history-europe19b-williams&catid=59"
date: "2026-11-06T00:25:17+00:00"
language: "en-GB"
---

#  Howard Williams (1837-1931)

![Howard Williams (1837-1931)](https://ivu.org/images/legacy/history/banners/history-europe19b-williams.png)
 Howard Williams was an English humanitarian and vegetarian, author of the book *The Ethics of Diet* (1883), a historical anthology of vegetarian writings, which includes excerpts from Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, Montaigne, Mandeville, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, St. Pierre, Oswald, Shelley, Michelet, Lamartine and many other authors. His work was one of the first books on the History of Vegetarianism and was read by Gandhi and Tolstoy (who wrote an introduction for the Russian edition).

- [**The Ethics of Diet - A Catena**](https://ivu.org/hv-libraries-research-history-williams-index.html) *(html pages - partially online)* by Howard Williams, 1st published 1883, text from the 2nd edition, 1896.

A new edition of this work is now available by the University of Illinois Press (2003), with a new introduction by Carol J. Adams - *see right:*

A note on this archive. The history section of this website is drawn from a body of legacy content originally compiled by John Davis, former manager of the International Vegetarian Union. It represents his curation of historical material, and in places includes passages written by him directly.

Over the years, the IVU website has migrated between several different hosting servers. In the course of these migrations, a number of PDF files were unfortunately lost, and **some links to PDF documents may no longer function**. Where this is the case, we have chosen to leave the original link text in place, as it may itself carry information of historical value.

- Hits: 1553

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