Temperance Texts

"Elsie Magoon, or The Old Still-House in the Hollow," by Frances Dana Gage, 1867

Amelia Bloomer's letter to T.S. Arthur, published "The Lily," 1849.

"Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story." Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1876.

Please note: The missing fifth chapter can be found at the following link. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the first African American woman to publish a short fiction piece in America: "The Two Offers" of 1859, presenting marriage through a feminist lens and considering the class and gender politics of the time. Her poetry was widely read, including "Bury Me in a Free Land," which, like much of her work, integrated her politics and creative writing, expressing her abolition sentiment and protest. Harper's temperance activism brought her to a prominent role in the WCTU, but leadership appeasement of Southern interests and marginalization of her attempts to integrate the organization demoted her. Her writing has a strong moral message, as demonstrated by "Sowing and Reaping," a temperance novel introduced as a serial in "Christian Recorder."

Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, "The Intemperate"

"The Reveille: or, Our Music at Dawn," 1854, by Sophia Louisa Robbins Little.

Noted in Griswold's "The Female Poets of America," her prose work was not so honored. However, much of women's work at this time has come under reconsideration; Eric Norton's "Temperance Friction" essay considers this text for its challenge to the "separate spheres" philosophy underlying much of temperance fiction. He writes: "Rather than depicting how women’s confinement to the home contributed to clean male living, Little tells a story of a woman who struggles face-to-face and hand-to-hand with powerful men in the public sphere in order to keep her family safe... For Little, the more salient political debates about alcohol abuse, sobriety, and temperance are not as important as a more holistic comprehension of the factors that disempower and disenfranchise women, an argument the novel has been tending towards throughout... For Mary,temperance is a mechanism by which she is able to gain and secure a greateramount of freedom and security and not one that necessarily disciplines her within the confines of white, middle-class domesticity."

Walt Whitman: Franklin Evans, 1842

Whitman's temperance novel, "Franklin Evans," was serialized in the Brooklyn Eagle while Whitman was editor; however, the original novel's temperance theme was all but edited out and the condemnation landed on urban corruption instead of alcoholic behavior. The story follows a hapless young man on his journey from Long Island farmland innocence and descends to gothic madness with a miscegenetic marriage to a Creole and into murder before Evans finds his way to sobriety. Whitman wholly repudiated the story, later stating that it was "written for the mass." He told Traubel, his biographer, that the book was “not the business” for him; Whitman came to reject temperance’s social activism, adamantly stating he “never was in” a temperance organization, and Franklin Evans was nothing more than “a species of entertainment."

Please note that the version offered in the Whitman archive, which is linked through the book cover image here, is the Brooklyn Eagle version, and NOT the origin book version, which is not widely available through online sourcing. The Eagle version expurgates much of the temperance theme to revise the story to one of a young man corrupted by the urban environment. Check your library for the excellent 2007 reprint edited by Christopher Castiglia for the unedited version.

"Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There." Timothy Shay Arthur, 1854.

"Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There." Timothy Shay Arthur, 1854. T.S. Arthur was arguably the most popular temperance writer of his period. He wrote prolifically on a variety of subjects, generally aimed at urging good moral conduct. He founded his own magazines, most notably Arthur's Home Magazine, which lasted from 1852-1898. His writing is earnest and in keeping with the genre's sensational and moral foci rather than literate sensibilities; his introduction to one story collection describes his tales as revealing "motives for self-denial and right action... Home is the centre of good as well as of bad influence. How much, then, depends on those to whom have been committed the sacred trust of giving to the home-circle its true power over the heart!" Poe described Arthur's writing as "not without a rich talent for description of scenes in low life, but is uneducated, and too fond of mere vulgarities to please a refined taste."

Kristin Boluch, A.B., M.A., Ph.D.

19th Century Women's writings and miscellaneous temperance texts