An unparalleled portrait of nineteenth-century social reform and the magnetic oratory that gave it force, told through the career of temperance advocate John B. Gough

John B. Gough was perhaps nineteenth-century America’s most famous ex-drunkard—a man who had hit rock bottom but then found the determination to recover and preach sobriety with unusual scope and impact. Through an exploration of Gough’s life, Thomas Augst investigates a world in which a public speaker could achieve immense fame by delivering a remarkable 12,000 popular lectures over his lifetime across the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Gough kept a voluminous archive of his comings and goings, day after day, speech after speech. Augst is among the first scholars to fully mine these materials, and he uses them to illuminate the redemptive power of storytelling in the lives of citizens. In the process, A Drunkard’s Story follows an itinerant journey through the cultural history of social reform. 

John Gough’s life was fascinating in its own right, but Augst’s exploration of it also opens a window onto a rich interplay among performance, autobiography, and celebrity. The ways that people flocked to hear Gough tell his tale, and the contagious enthusiasm with which he was greeted far and wide, might seem from another time—but also surprisingly contemporary in the age of the influencer.

Thomas Augst is associate professor of English at New York University. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States.

Introduction: Make Your Record
Chapter One: Becoming the Drunkard
Chapter Two: The Washingtonian Revolution
Chapter Three: An Expanding Audience: The Temperance Press and Public Lectures
Chapter Four: “A Brand from the Burning”: Conflicts over Religion and Class
Chapter Five: A Celebrity Memoir: The Storyteller in Print
Chapter Six: Gough’s Fall: Seven Days on Walker Street
Chapter Seven: Gough’s Resurrection: On the Road and On the Record
Chapter Eight: “A Spotless Temperence Statue”: Gough’s Eloquence and the Lecture System
Chapter Nine: The Living Word: The Star of the Lyceum
Conclusion: The Media of Charisma


Acknowledgments
Notes
Note on Sources
Index