Edith Carrington


Edith Carrington was a prominent English animal rights activist and promoter of vegetarianism. She was for sometime an artist, but began to write books on animals from 1889. She was a vocal opponent of Eleanor Anne Ormerod's campaign seeking the extermination of the house sparrow and was an anti-vivisectionist.

Life and work

Carrington was born in Swainswick, Bath, Somerset to Henry Edmund Carrington and Emily Heywood Johns. Coming from a wealthy family, she was influenced by Charles Kingsley who introduced her to study natural history and took on herself the "wish for no higher mission than to live and die in the cause of God's beautiful and sinless mute creatures." She wrote regularly in The Animals' Friend and was a collaborator of Henry Stephens Salt and was a participant in the Humanitarian League .
Carrington's first book Stories for Somebody was written when she was thirty-five. She later wrote a number of animal stories for children. One series Animal Life Readers edited by Carrington and Ernest Bell was illustrated by Harrison Weir and others. She also ran a children's magazine called Our Animal Brothers.

Selected publications