In my book-in-progress on the origins of modern recovery narrative, I look closely at the stories that came out of the post-Civil War “gospel rescue missions,” especially in New York City. These weren’t the first evangelical missions to the urban poor, of course. Specifically, they were outgrowths of similar activity during the Second Great Awakening, such as the New York City revival of 1857-58. Nor did they represent the first movement of reformed drunkards with tales to tell, emerging a couple of decades after the heyday of the Washingtonian Society. But, founded by the converts themselves in collaboration with their religious sponsors, the postbellum rescue missions combined revival, temperance, and moral reform in an unprecedented and very influential way. They moved evangelical religion in a therapeutic direction, and they acted as rebuttals to fatalistic social theory. Their growth drew social reformers to the slums to witness first-hand evidence that the far-gone drunkard and the vicious immigrant really could be changed. By the 1890s, the ex-drunkards and their patrons had produced a lively literature of conversion narratives.
The published narratives were occasionally accompanied by a fascinating before-and-after imagery. These images in particular made me realize how many historical formulations of addiction and/or recovery produce a visual rhetoric that encapsulates its particular understanding or innovation. Photographic images of the redeemed were paired with sketched recreations of what they looked like as drinkers. The effect is a transparent example of the biographical phenomenon whereby a subject’s life is constructed to fulfill the meaning of an ideologically controlling turning point–in this case, salvation. Here are a few examples. > > > > Read More
