Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854). by

Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There is an 1854 novel written by American author Timothy Shay Arthur. The novel is presented by an unnamed narrator who makes an annual visit to the fictional town of Cedarville. On his first visit, he stops at the new tavern, the Sickle and Sheaf. The proprietor, Simon Slade, is a former miller who gave up the trade for the more lucrative tavern. The business is a family affair, with Slade's unnamed wife, son Frank, and daughter Flora assisting him. The narrator also observes the town drunk, Joe Morgan. The father of a loving wife and family, he meets his moral downfall when introduced to alcohol. Morgan quickly becomes an alcoholic and spends most of his time at a bar. One day, his daughter begs him to return to his family. He initially ignores her desires until she is hit in the head by a flying glass as she goes to retrieve her father. Slade had initially thrown the tumbler at Morgan so, to a degree, her death is on his hands. On her deathbed, the daughter begs Morgan to abandon alcohol, to which he agrees. The novel progresses through the ruinous fall of more characters all at the hands of hard drink and other vices (gambling becomes another major reform notion in the text). Shay spends some time discussing corruption in politics with the corrupt "rum party" candidate from Cedarville, Judge Lyman. The narrator continually notes how even the drinkers in the story call for "the Maine Law" which will prohibit alcohol from being so temptingly available. The novel closes with the death of Simon Slade, already mutilated from an earlier riotous sequence of murders and mob mentality, at the hands of his son. The two had gotten into a drunken argument and Frank strikes his father in the head with a bottle. In the final scene the narrator sees the post with the once pristine and now gross and rotten Sickle and Sheaf totem chopped down after the town's moral fiber finally showed itself in a series of resolutions that led to the destruction of all the alcohol on the premises.............. Timothy Shay Arthur (June 6, 1809 - March 6, 1885) - known as T. S. Arthur - was a popular 19th-century American author. He is most famous for his temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854), which helped demonize alcohol in the eyes of the American public. He was also the author of dozens of stories for Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular American monthly magazine in the antebellum era, and he published and edited his own Arthur's Home Magazine, a periodical in the Godey's model, for many years. Virtually forgotten now, Arthur did much to articulate and disseminate the values, beliefs, and habits that defined respectable, decorous middle-class life in antebellum America...........