Howard Williams

Howard Williams was an English humanitarian writer and advocate of vegetarianism in the late nineteenth century. Educated at Cambridge, he devoted his scholarship to tracing the long tradition of argument against eating animals. His Ethics of Diet, published in 1883, is an anthology of writers from Hesiod and Pythagoras to the nineteenth century who opposed flesh-eating, each with a biographical note and extracts. Leo Tolstoy admired the book and wrote his essay The First Step as a preface to its Russian translation. Williams was also active in the humanitarian movement of his day.