Anna Kingsford
Encyclopedia
Anna Kingsford, née Bonus (16 September 1846 – 22 February 1888), was an English anti-vivisection
, vegetarian
and women's rights
campaigner.
She was of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine, after Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
, and the only medical student at the time to graduate without having experimented on a single animal. She pursued her degree in Paris, graduating in 1880 after six years of study, so that she could continue her animal advocacy
from a position of authority. Her final thesis, L'Alimentation Végétale de l'Homme, was on the benefits of vegetarianism, published in English as The Perfect Way in Diet (1881). She founded the Food Reform Society that year, travelling within the UK to talk about vegetarianism, and to Paris, Geneva, and Lausanne to speak out against animal experimentation.
Kingsford was interested in Buddhism
and Gnosticism
, and became active in the theosophical movement in England, becoming president of the Theosophical Society
in 1883. She said she received insights in trance-like states and in her sleep; these were collected from her manuscripts and pamphlets by her life-long collaborator Edward Maitland
, and published posthumously in the book, Clothed with the Sun (1889). Subject to ill-health all her life, she died of lung disease at the age of 41, brought on by a bout of pneumonia after she was soaked during a rainstorm on her way to the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Her writing was virtually unknown for over 100 years after Maitland published her biography, The Life of Anna Kingsford (1896), though Helen Rappaport
wrote in 2001 that her life and work are once again being studied.
, Stratford
to John Bonus, a wealthy merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Schröder.
By all accounts a precocious child, she wrote her first poem when she was nine, and Beatrice: a Tale of the Early Christians when she was thirteen years old. Deborah Rudacille writes that Kingsford enjoyed foxhunting, until one day she reportedly had a vision of herself as the fox. According to Maitland she was a "born seer," with a gift "for seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people", something she reportedly learned to keep silent about.
She married her cousin, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford in 1867 when she was twenty-one, giving birth to a daughter, Eadith, a year later. Though her husband was an Anglican
priest, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1872, which he appeared not to mind. Having been left £700 a year by her father, she bought The Lady's Own Paper, and took up work as its editor, which brought her into contact with some prominent women of the day, including the writer, feminist, and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe
. It was an article by Cobbe on vivisection in The Lady's Own Paper that sparked Kingsford's interest in the subject.
. With the blessing of Kingsford's husband, the two began to collaborate, Maitland accompanying her to Paris when she decided to study medicine. Paris was at that time the center of a revolution in the study of physiology, much of it as a result of experiments on animals, particularly dogs, and mostly conducted without anaesthetic. Claude Bernard
(1813–1878), described as the "father of physiology", was working there, and famously said that "the physiologist is not an ordinary man: he is a scientist, possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea he pursues. He does not hear the cries of the animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea ..."
Walter Gratzer, professor emeritus of biochemistry at King's College London
, writes that significant opposition to vivisection emerged in Victorian England, in part in revulsion at the research being conducted in France. Bernard and other well-known physiologists, such as Charles Richet in France and Michael Foster
in England, were strongly criticized for their work. British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of François Magendie
, Bernard's teacher, who dissected dogs without anaesthesia, allegedly shouting at them — "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!" (Shut up, you poor beast!) — while he worked. Bernard's wife, Marie-Francoise Bernard, was violently opposed to his research, though she was financing it through her dowry
. In the end, she divorced him and set up an anti-vivisection society. This was the atmosphere in the faculty of medicine and the teaching hospitals in Paris when Kingsford arrived, shouldering the additional burden of being a woman. Although women were allowed to study medicine in France, Rudacille writes that they were not welcomed. Kingsford wrote to her husband in 1874:
Kingsford was distraught over the sights and sounds of the animal experiments she saw. She wrote on 20 August 1879:
, one of the most prominent vivisectionists of the period. She reportedly spent hours in wet clothing and developed pneumonia, then pulmonary tuberculosis. She travelled to the Riviera and Italy, sometimes with Maitland, at other times with her husband, hoping in vain that a different climate would help her recover. In July 1887, she settled in London in a house she and her husband rented at 15 Wynnstay Gardens, Kensington
, and waited to die, although she remained mentally active.
She died on 22 February 1888, aged 41, and was buried in the churchyard of Saint Eata's
, an 11th-century church in Atcham
by the River Severn
. Her name at death is recorded as Annie Kingsford. On her marriage in Sussex in 1867, her name was given as Annie Bonus.
Chapters
Animal testing
Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research, and in vivo testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments. Worldwide it is estimated that the number of vertebrate animals—from zebrafish to non-human primates—ranges from the tens of millions to more than 100 million...
, vegetarian
Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism encompasses the practice of following plant-based diets , with or without the inclusion of dairy products or eggs, and with the exclusion of meat...
and women's rights
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
campaigner.
She was of the first English women to obtain a degree in medicine, after Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, LSA, MD , was an English physician and feminist, the first woman to gain a medical qualification in Britain and the first female mayor in England.-Early life:...
, and the only medical student at the time to graduate without having experimented on a single animal. She pursued her degree in Paris, graduating in 1880 after six years of study, so that she could continue her animal advocacy
Animal rights
Animal rights, also known as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings...
from a position of authority. Her final thesis, L'Alimentation Végétale de l'Homme, was on the benefits of vegetarianism, published in English as The Perfect Way in Diet (1881). She founded the Food Reform Society that year, travelling within the UK to talk about vegetarianism, and to Paris, Geneva, and Lausanne to speak out against animal experimentation.
Kingsford was interested in Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
and Gnosticism
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
, and became active in the theosophical movement in England, becoming president of the Theosophical Society
Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society is an organization formed in 1875 to advance the spiritual principles and search for Truth known as Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments has several successors...
in 1883. She said she received insights in trance-like states and in her sleep; these were collected from her manuscripts and pamphlets by her life-long collaborator Edward Maitland
Edward Maitland
Edward Maitland , English humanitarian writer, was born at Ipswich and was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. The son of Charles David Maitland, perpetual curate of St James's Chapel, Brighton, he was intended for the Church, but his religious views did not permit him to take holy orders...
, and published posthumously in the book, Clothed with the Sun (1889). Subject to ill-health all her life, she died of lung disease at the age of 41, brought on by a bout of pneumonia after she was soaked during a rainstorm on her way to the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Her writing was virtually unknown for over 100 years after Maitland published her biography, The Life of Anna Kingsford (1896), though Helen Rappaport
Helen Rappaport
Helen Rappaport is a British historian, author, and former actress. As a historian, she specialises in the Victorian era and revolutionary Russia.-Biography:...
wrote in 2001 that her life and work are once again being studied.
Early life
Kingsford was born in Maryland PointMaryland, London
Maryland is a location in east London. It forms the northeastern part of Stratford in the London Borough of Newham. The area borders Leytonstone to the north, Stratford New Town to the west and Forest Gate to the east, with the centre of Stratford to the south-west.-History:Maryland's earliest...
, Stratford
Stratford, London
Stratford is a place in the London Borough of Newham, England. It is located east northeast of Charing Cross and is one of the major centres identified in the London Plan. It was historically an agrarian settlement in the ancient parish of West Ham, which transformed into an industrial suburb...
to John Bonus, a wealthy merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Schröder.
By all accounts a precocious child, she wrote her first poem when she was nine, and Beatrice: a Tale of the Early Christians when she was thirteen years old. Deborah Rudacille writes that Kingsford enjoyed foxhunting, until one day she reportedly had a vision of herself as the fox. According to Maitland she was a "born seer," with a gift "for seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people", something she reportedly learned to keep silent about.
She married her cousin, Algernon Godfrey Kingsford in 1867 when she was twenty-one, giving birth to a daughter, Eadith, a year later. Though her husband was an Anglican
Anglicanism
Anglicanism is a tradition within Christianity comprising churches with historical connections to the Church of England or similar beliefs, worship and church structures. The word Anglican originates in ecclesia anglicana, a medieval Latin phrase dating to at least 1246 that means the English...
priest, she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1872, which he appeared not to mind. Having been left £700 a year by her father, she bought The Lady's Own Paper, and took up work as its editor, which brought her into contact with some prominent women of the day, including the writer, feminist, and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe
Frances Power Cobbe
Frances Power Cobbe was an Irish writer, social reformer, and suffragist. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.Frances was...
. It was an article by Cobbe on vivisection in The Lady's Own Paper that sparked Kingsford's interest in the subject.
Studies and research
In 1873, Kingsford met the writer Edward Maitland, a widower, who shared her rejection of materialismMaterialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
. With the blessing of Kingsford's husband, the two began to collaborate, Maitland accompanying her to Paris when she decided to study medicine. Paris was at that time the center of a revolution in the study of physiology, much of it as a result of experiments on animals, particularly dogs, and mostly conducted without anaesthetic. Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...
(1813–1878), described as the "father of physiology", was working there, and famously said that "the physiologist is not an ordinary man: he is a scientist, possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea he pursues. He does not hear the cries of the animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea ..."
Walter Gratzer, professor emeritus of biochemistry at King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
, writes that significant opposition to vivisection emerged in Victorian England, in part in revulsion at the research being conducted in France. Bernard and other well-known physiologists, such as Charles Richet in France and Michael Foster
Michael Foster (physiologist)
Sir Michael Foster was an English physiologist.He was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and educated at University College School, London....
in England, were strongly criticized for their work. British anti-vivisectionists infiltrated the lectures in Paris of François Magendie
François Magendie
François Magendie was a French physiologist, considered a pioneer of experimental physiology. He is known for describing the foramen of Magendie. There is also a Magendie sign, a downward and inward rotation of the eye due to a lesion in the cerebellum...
, Bernard's teacher, who dissected dogs without anaesthesia, allegedly shouting at them — "Tais-toi, pauvre bête!" (Shut up, you poor beast!) — while he worked. Bernard's wife, Marie-Francoise Bernard, was violently opposed to his research, though she was financing it through her dowry
Dowry
A dowry is the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings forth to the marriage. It contrasts with bride price, which is paid to the bride's parents, and dower, which is property settled on the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage. The same culture may simultaneously practice both...
. In the end, she divorced him and set up an anti-vivisection society. This was the atmosphere in the faculty of medicine and the teaching hospitals in Paris when Kingsford arrived, shouldering the additional burden of being a woman. Although women were allowed to study medicine in France, Rudacille writes that they were not welcomed. Kingsford wrote to her husband in 1874:
Kingsford was distraught over the sights and sounds of the animal experiments she saw. She wrote on 20 August 1879:
Death
Alan Pert, one of her biographers, wrote that Kingsford was caught in torrential rain in Paris in November 1886 on her way to the laboratory of Louis PasteurLouis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies and anthrax. His experiments...
, one of the most prominent vivisectionists of the period. She reportedly spent hours in wet clothing and developed pneumonia, then pulmonary tuberculosis. She travelled to the Riviera and Italy, sometimes with Maitland, at other times with her husband, hoping in vain that a different climate would help her recover. In July 1887, she settled in London in a house she and her husband rented at 15 Wynnstay Gardens, Kensington
Kensington
Kensington is a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. An affluent and densely-populated area, its commercial heart is Kensington High Street, and it contains the well-known museum district of South Kensington.To the north, Kensington is...
, and waited to die, although she remained mentally active.
She died on 22 February 1888, aged 41, and was buried in the churchyard of Saint Eata's
Eata of Hexham
Eata , also known as Eata of Lindisfarne, was bishop of Lindisfarne from 678 until 685, and of Hexham from then until his death...
, an 11th-century church in Atcham
Atcham
Atcham is a village, ecclesiastical parish and civil parish in Shropshire, England. It is situated on the B4380 , 5 miles south east of Shrewsbury. The River Severn flows around the village...
by the River Severn
River Severn
The River Severn is the longest river in Great Britain, at about , but the second longest on the British Isles, behind the River Shannon. It rises at an altitude of on Plynlimon, Ceredigion near Llanidloes, Powys, in the Cambrian Mountains of mid Wales...
. Her name at death is recorded as Annie Kingsford. On her marriage in Sussex in 1867, her name was given as Annie Bonus.
Works
Books- Rosamunda the princess, and other tales. James Parker & Co., 1875.
- Kingsford, A. & Maitland, E. The Key of the Creeds. Trubner, 1875.
- Health, Beauty and the Toilet: Letters to Ladies from a Lady Doctor. F. Warne, 1886.
- Dreams and Dream Stories. 1888.
- Clothed with the Sun. J. M. Watkins, 1912.
- The Credo of Christendom and other Addresses and Essays on Esoteric Christianity. 1916.
- The Perfect Way, or the Finding of Christ. Watkins, 1909.
- The Perfect Way in Diet. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1881.
- Kingsford, A. & Maitland, E. Addresses & Essays On Vegetarianism. John M Watkins, 1912.
Chapters
- "Unscientific science—moral aspects of vivisection" in Colville, W. J. Spiritual Therapeutics Or Divine Science. 1890, pp. 292–308.
- "The Uselessness of Vivisection," 1882, in Hamilton, Susan. (ed.) Animal Welfare & Anti-vivisection 1870-1910: Nineteenth Century Woman's Mission. Taylor & Francis, 2004.
- "The City of Blood" in Forward, Stephanie. (ed.) Dreams, Visions and Realities. Continuum International, 2003.
See also
- Brown Dog affairBrown Dog affairThe Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish women activists, pitched battles between medical students and the police, police protection for...
- EcofeminismEcofeminismEcofeminism is a social and political movement which points to the existence of considerable common ground between environmentalism and feminism, with some currents linking deep ecology and feminism...
- Frances Power CobbeFrances Power CobbeFrances Power Cobbe was an Irish writer, social reformer, and suffragist. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.Frances was...
- Hermetic Order of the Golden DawnHermetic Order of the Golden DawnThe Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a magical order active in Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which practiced theurgy and spiritual development...
- Isabelle de SteigerIsabelle de SteigerIsabelle de Steiger, née Lace , was an English painter, theosophist, occultist and writer. She became a member of several esoteric societies in London, and was a close friend and co-worker of Anna Kingsford.-Biography:...
- Louise Lind-af-HagebyLouise Lind-af-HagebyEmilie Augusta Louise "Lizzy" Lind-af-Hageby was a Swedish countess, feminist, and animal rights advocate...
- VeganismVeganismVeganism is the practice of eliminating the use of animal products. Ethical vegans reject the commodity status of animals and the use of animal products for any purpose, while dietary vegans or strict vegetarians eliminate them from their diet only...
Further reading
- Anna Kingsford website
- "History of Vegetarianism - Anna Kingsford M.D. (1846-1888)" (International Vegetarian Union).
- "Theosophy and Mysticism - Anna Kingsford" (Mysterious People)
- Maitland, Edward. The story of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and of the New Gospel of interpretation. Watkins, 1905.
- Pert, Alan. Red Cactus: The Life of Anna Kingsford. Alan Pert, 2006.
- Shirley, Ralph. Occultists & mystics of all ages. W. Rider & son, 1920.