The Making of John B. Gough (1817-1886): Temperance Celebrity, Evangelical Pageantry, and the Conservatism of Popular Reform in Victorian Society
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The Making of John B. Gough (1817-1886): Temperance Celebrity, Evangelical Pageantry, and the Conservatism of Popular Reform in Victorian Society Xi Chen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: William J. Rorabaugh, Chair Richard Johnson R. Kent Guy Program Authorized to Offer Degree: History @Copyright 2013 Xi Chen University of Washington Abstract The Making of John B. Gough (1817-1886): Temperance Celebrity, Evangelical Pageantry, and the Conservatism of Popular Reform in Victorian Society Xi Chen Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. William J. Rorabaugh History Department The dissertation is partly a biography of John Bartholomew Gough, a transatlantic temperance celebrity and one of the most popular itinerant lecturers of the Victorian era. It is also a social history of Gough’s supporters and opponents, an intellectual history of the friction he incited between the temperance and prohibition factions, and a cultural history of the paradoxes inherent in the popularization of evangelical temperance reform. By focusing on the controversies surrounding Gough and through analysis of newspapers, pamphlets, memoirs, and private diaries and correspondence, the dissertation reconstructs the deepening socioeconomic and ideological fault lines that came to define the temperance movement in the mid-19th century. It re-evaluates the connections between evangelical temperance and radical reform issues, such as abolition and women’s rights. It argues that Gough’s rise to stardom was intertwined with the coming-of-age of the conservative evangelical mercantile class, and that the evangelical temperance ethos he championed became popular, as it iii was being diluted and commodified as a marker of social respectability and detached from social and political action. The dissertation examines closely the ideological origins of the evangelical retreat from legislative prohibition in the late 1850s and illuminates, through Gough’s involvement, the transatlantic reverberations of the collapse of the alliance for prohibition. The dissertation also studies Gough as a cultural phenomenon. It investigates how and why Gough’s clerical supporters tried to defend and justify his dramatic lectures while denouncing the theater. Drawing connections between the popular lecturer and the evangelical preacher, the dissertation suggests that the clergy’s formulation of Gough’s “anti-theatrical drama” and their obsessive defense of his authenticity signified an ambivalent acceptance of Realist theater and a deep-seated moral anxiety created by the tensions between the Puritan legacy and the new liberal theology. By tracing the (auto)biographical remaking of Gough’s public image and his influence in the elocution movement after 1860, the dissertation examines the Christianization and domestication of the self-made man, the tensions between authenticity and refinement in the new elocutionary “science,” and the merging of Gough and his brand of temperance advocacy into moral entertainment and the Victorian mainstream. iv Table of Contents Introduction. The Making of a Temperance Celebrity………………………………………….1 Chapter I. The Apostasy of the Apostle: The Social History of Gough’s New York Scandal, 1845- 1846………………………………………………………………………...........17 Chapter II. “St. Bartholomew” on Trial: Gough v. Lees (1858) and the Transatlantic Temperance Schism……………………………………………………………………………79 Chapter III. The Paradox of the Anti-Theatrical Drama: Dramatic Lecturing Defended and Justified………………………………………………………………………….122 Chapter IV. The Cult of John B. Gough: From Temperance to Moral Entertainment………..151 Conclusion. John B. Gough, the Man, the Lecturer, and the Victorian………………………..195 Appendix I. The Forgotten Reformers…………………………………………………………200 Appendix II. Friends and Foes, 1845-46………………………………………………………..205 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….211 i Figures Fig. 1. Procession of the London Temperance League in Honor of Gough…………..80 Fig. 2. Temperance Pavilion at Dunse………………………………………………..148 Fig. 3. Gough at Sadler’s Wells……………………………………………………… 149 Chart. 1. Gough’s Average Earnings………………………………………………….166 Fig. 4. Frontispiece showing “temperance, industry, education, and wealth”………...167 Fig. 5. Beauty and the Beer……………………………………………………………181 Fig. 6. Helen Potter as Gough………………………………………………………….188 Chart. 2. Google Ngram Search with “John B. Gough”……………………………......192 vi For Zhu Hong Acknowledgements The dissertation feels like a start rather than a finish. The moment I thought it completed, I began to realize how much more can still be done. I could not have come so far, though, without the help and emotional support of those who kept me company along the way. Steve Nissenbaum inspired me to become a historian. He and Dona Brown have imparted in me a passion for New England history and have given me their friendship and love. Bill Rorabaugh has overseen this project from its inception and he has been there for me every step of the way. I cannot thank him enough. Kent Guy, Richard Johnson, and Yomi Braester offered encouragement and valuable advice for revision in the final phase of the writing. I wish I had time to implement all the changes they suggested. I am indebted to the American Antiquarian Society and its staff, who provided me with a research fellowship and the best research assistance I’ve ever known. I am grateful to the research librarians and archivists who have helped me track down Gough’s correspondence, especially those who rendered their services for free, including Nan Card at the R. B. Hays Presidential Center, Olga Tsapina at the Huntington Library, and Bill Dupuis at the Boylston Historical Society. To my wife and partner, whose hard work has made my prolonged education possible and who has given me a life beyond academia, I owe too much. This dissertation is for her. vii Frontispiece: John. B. Gough. Steel-plate engraving in Platform Echoes (1886) from a life size painting by Sir Daniel Macnee, R.S.A., presented to Mrs. Gough, May 22, 1855. INTRODUCTION The Making of a Temperance Celebrity The dissertation examines the controversial life and career of John Bartholomew Gough (1817- 1886), a drunkard turned teetotal lecturer who transformed and dominated the temperance platform on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid to late 19th century. Gough was to the platform what Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was to the pulpit, though the boundary between the two professions was becoming increasingly porous in their lifetimes.1 Gough violated every norm of stately oratory, and yet he mesmerized a new generation and a new social class of audiences with his pathos and humor. He redefined the relationship between the speaker and his audience and avoided formal logic and high-toned declamation in favor of mimicry, anecdotal illustration, and cathartic commiseration. He injected theatre and commercialism into the temperance reform, as Beecher did in the evangelical pulpit, and he had been the first to make a living and a great fortune by temperance lecturing alone, a source of contention for much of his public life.2 This is a biography of a limited scope. It focuses on selective episodes and aspects of Gough’s career and relies mainly on published sources. As there is little reliable evidence to indicate that Gough had a private self independent from his public persona, this study is an 1 On Henry Ward Beecher, see the Pulitzer Prize biography by Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York, 2006) and a more interpretative work by William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870 (New York, 1970). 2 The resemblance does not end here, either. Both Gough’s and Beecher’s public careers were tarnished by high-profile scandals and widely-publicized court trials, and perhaps not surprisingly, they defended each other in times of trouble. 1 attempt to understand the temperance celebrity from the outside in, rather than from the inside out.3 With its selective focus, the dissertation takes aim at broader social and cultural issues, which Gough illuminated by virtue of his popularity and his controversies. His rise to temperance stardom was intertwined with the coming-of-age of the evangelical middle class and with their business acumen and conservative social agenda. He had come to embody not only the evangelical temperance movement but also the hopes and fears of his evangelical followers. In this light, the dissertation is also a study of the particular social class that constituted the mainstay of Gough’s fame, and it is a re-evaluation of the evangelical temperance movement, not at its radical fringes, but at its conservative core. This dissertation is also transnational in scope, as Gough’s popular support was not confined to a single region or nation. He made his name in the U.S., but he went on extended tours in Britain and its Canadian provinces. Though he had never visited Australia or New Zealand in person, his lectures (delivered by imitators) were received there with popular acclaim. Gough was a key figure in the international evangelical temperance alliance. This dissertation explores through him the close-knit network and the shared ideological and social agenda of conservative evangelicals in the English-speaking world. Gough has been the bearer more often than the center of my story. The narrative of his life, as was laid out,