RARE AMERICAN ANTI-ALCOHOL RELATED PAMPHLET. [c.1840’s].
“Enquire at Amos Giles Distillery…..Deacon Giles was a man who loved money, and was never troubled with tenderness of conscience. His father and his grandfather before him had been distillers, and the same occupation has come to him as an heir-loom in the family. The still-house was black with age, as well as with the smoke of furnaces that never went out, and the fumes of tortured ingredients ceaselessly converted into alcohol.”
[CHEEVER, George Barrell, (1807-90)]. The Dream: Or The True History of Deacon Giles’s Distillery, and Deacon Jones’s Brewery. Reported for the Benefit of Posterity. “It was a Dream, yet not all a dream”.
Folding frontispiece illustration, numerous woodcut engravings within the text.
Interior: light soiling, light soiling, spotting.
Binding: Original yellow wrappers. (Binding frail, text block hanging by a thread in places, wrappers detached, some chipping and tearing with loss, soiling).
32pp. 8vo. New York and Boston: Printed For the Publisher’s. [no date c. 1843-48].
This from www.biblicalcyclopedia.com:
“In 1835 Rev. George B. Cheever, then the youthful pastor of a church in Salem, Mass., published, under the title of Deacon Giles’s Distillery, what purported to be a dream. Daemons were represented as working in the deacon’s distillery, and manufacturing “liquid damnation,” “murder,” “suicide,” etc., for the human employer. The stinging satire took effect. Mr. Cheever was assaulted in the streets of Salem, and was also prosecuted for slander by a certain rum-distilling deacon, who thought he recognized his own portrait in the deacon Giles of the dream. Mr. Cheever was convicted and imprisoned for a few days, but on his release returned at once to the attack in another dream concerning Deacon Jones’s Brewery, in which devils are described as making beer, and, as they dance about the caldron, chanting the spell of the-witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth”.
Incredibly rare.
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