An Autobiography

The Autobiography of John B. Gough is the self-told story of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous temperance orators — a man who rose from ruinous alcoholism to draw enormous crowds on both sides of the Atlantic. It is both a confession of his years as a drunkard and an account of the pledge that remade his life.

Gough describes his hard early years: emigration from England as a boy, apprenticeship as a bookbinder in New York, and a slow descent into drink that cost him his work, his health, and — in a loss he never stopped feeling — his wife and child. He is candid about the shame and repeated failures of those years rather than smoothing them over.

The turning point came in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1842, when a stranger’s kindness led him to sign the temperance pledge. From there the book follows his emergence as a lecturer whose vivid, emotional speaking made him a celebrity of the temperance movement for decades — a public life built entirely on the private reversal the autobiography records.

Our edition offers a clean, readable modern presentation of this public-domain autobiography in clear type, with a free source linked so you can read Gough’s own words.

This edition follows John B. Gough’s An Autobiography as he published it at Boston in 1845, when he was twenty-eight and three years sober.

WHY NOT THE 1858, WHICH PROMISES MORE. That London printing is titled “with a continuation of his life to the present time”, and the obvious assumption is that the continuation is Gough’s. It is not. Set against the 1845, the 1858 carries 12,596 words the earlier book does not, and they are a third party’s: a narrative headed “Life of John B. Gough” that opens “the following narrative has been drawn up… Mr. Gough is public property.” Gough’s own three parts are the same book in both printings — 39,755 words against 39,274 — and the 1845 scan is much the cleaner, at one suspect word in 71 against one in 39. So the 1845 is the text here, and the 1858 is used as a witness to it.

WHERE GOUGH’S PEN STOPS, and this edition with it. At the end of Part Third he writes: “The concluding portion of this work, I have been compelled to leave in the hands of a friend, who has kindly engaged to prepare it for the press… I shall now lay down my pen.” What follows is that friend’s appendix — twelve thousand words of poems and tributes addressed to Gough by other people. It is not reproduced here. This is a library of first-person testimony, and the free scan linked from this book’s page has the appendix entire for anyone who wants it.

THREE SCANS OF ONE TEXT. The 1845 printing is the base; a second scan of it and the 1858 London printing are collation witnesses, and 373 readings in this edition come from them. Nearly all repair one fault: this scan reads a “w” as “Av”, so the page is full of “Avho”, “doAvn”, “Avill” and “Avhat”, and no lexicon can mend a word that has become another shape entirely. A second printing can, and did. Every change is recorded with its context in the collation logs kept with the edition.

A NOTE ABOUT SEMICOLONS, because this edition is where we found the fault. Gough’s printer sets a thin space before a semicolon, a colon and a question mark, as Victorian printers do — “an hitherto eventful life ; those incidents” — and one of our own cleaning passes had been treating a mark that floats like that as a speck on the page and deleting it. It was removing four hundred and five of them from this book alone. They are all here now, closed up to the word in front of them as the printer meant.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by Gough. Running heads, page numbers and the digitizer’s watermark have been removed; words broken at a line ending have been rejoined. His spelling and punctuation stand, including the quotation of Proverbs his printer sets with a lower-case word after each question mark.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.