Drunkard's Progress

"Twelve-step" recovery programmes for a variety of addictive behaviours have become popular. According to John W. Crowley, the origin of these movements - including Alcoholics Anonymous - lies in the Washingtonian Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in the 1840s. In lectures, pamphlets and books (most notably John B. Gough's "Autobiography", published in 1845), recovering "drunkards" described their enslavement to and liberation from alcohol. Though widely circulated in their time, these influential temperance narratives seem to have been largely forgotten. This is a presentation of a collection of revealing excerpts from temperance texts, along with Crowley's own introductions. The tales, including "The Experience Meeting" from T.S. Arthur's "Six Nights with the Washingtonians" (1842) and the autobiographical "Narrative of Charles Woodman, A Reformed Inebriate" (1843), still speak with surprising force to the miseries of drunkenness and the joys of deliverance.