It’s little surprise that temperance advocates used mass entertainment to reinforce their messaging, too. Throughout the nineteenth century, hundreds of temperance dramas, ranging as Judith McArthur says, from “verbose wooden sketches for amateur players to elaborate five-act melodramas,” were written to provide audiences with some safe thrills and a sense of their own better morality. (Most of the scripts, McArthur notes, “were forgettable.”)
The plays shared a common structure, an “inverted arc” in which a young, working, family man is tempted to drink, then “slides into complete moral and financial degradation before renouncing alcohol and fulfilling his destiny as he rises on the ladder of economic success and social prestige.” While written in broad-brush schlock, the plays were nonetheless very popular. Hot Corn, for example, told the story of a poor child selling roasted corn on the city streets to support her drunken family—beginning life as an alleged exposé, the written pamphlet sold 50,000 copies in six months and was promptly adapted for the stage.
Since theater had a mixed reputation in early America, promoters like Moses Kimball in Boston and Barnum in New York used their popular museums to provide a safe, family-friendly entertainment environment to court middle-class patrons and their disposable income. In many cases, this meant showcasing moral subject matter, with the logic that it was both edifying and educational, and therefore respectable (Barnum showed not only temperance drama but a bowdlerized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). A melodramatic play to let middle-class patrons and tourists experience city toughs and tawdry slums while scaring them straight was just the thing.
The Drunkard was largely written by William H. Smith, who first staged it in 1844 at Moses Kimball’s Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts. It went on to be performed in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Brooklyn before opening in 1850 at Barnum’s. In the play, young, white-bread Edward Middleton has married Mary Wilson, and the couple is living in domestic idyll. Squire Cribbs, an evil lawyer with the snappy nickname “Razor Chops,” lusts after Mary and, since he has an axe to grind with the Middleton family, he decides to ruin Edward in revenge with a few glasses of brandy.
Instantly torpedoed, the debauched Edward wrecks his life and retreats in shame to New York City, where he’s rescued from urban squalor and the DT’s (always rendered especially dramatically by the actor, hollering about snakes and wanting to “poison it with rum”) by an inexplicably sunny and wealthy do-gooder named Arden Rencelaw. Restored to health and harmony, Middleton returns home while the neighbors sing temperance hymns as if it’s an episode of Glee.