The Drunkard's Progress

The lithograph is based on John Warner Barber's 1826 work The Drunkard's Progress, or The Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, & Ruin.

[3] Initially, temperance advocates pushed for people to abstain from drinking liquor, but by 1840, the focus on spirits was replaced with across-the-board teetotalism.

[9] In 1826, John Warner Barber published The Drunkard's Progress, or The Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, & Ruin, a four-part lithograph depicting a family's journey to the poorhouse due to consuming alcohol.

[9] According to the print, the path to ruin starts with a singular social drink provided to the protagonist by "a woman of evidently questionable virtue".

[18] In 1984, Tess Panfil, writing for The Berkshire Eagle, found the work to be overwrought in her review of a Currier and Ives exhibition.

[20] With The Drunkard's Progress, Currier established the plot arc used in temperance novels: a first drink quickly leading to a premature death.

Mary Grover, Or, The Trusting Wife: A Domestic Temperance Tale was explicitly written by Charles Burdett to turn the image into a book.

[23] One social studies teacher said he uses it because the progression of alcoholism depicted closely matches the message of anti-drug programing in schools such as D.A.R.E.