Henry Stephens Salt, who died at Brighton on Wednesday at the age of 87, was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, afterwards returning to Eton as a master. Because of his vegetarian and Socialist views, however, he resigned his mastership and settled down in Surrey to a life of writing and humanitarian work, an existence which he found more congenial. Here he published books on Shelley, Tennyson, Thoreau, Jeffries and James Thomson; he translated in verse passages from Lucretius and later made a translation of the Aeneid. He was keenly interested in the activities of the Shelley Society, and Meredith and Swinburne, as well as other leaders of his time, were among his friends. As secretary of the Humanitarian League from its foundation until it ceased to exist in 1920, Salt directed all its activities, and the causes for which it worked were those that lay nearest his heart. In his autobiography, “Seventy Years Among Savages” (1921), Salt told the story of how his unconventional views came to be formed, and of his work as a reformer.
Unknown, April 22, 1939