"THE TRUE HISTORY OF DEACON GILES'S DISTILLERY"
Rare imprint "The Dream, or, The True History of Deacon Giles’ Distillery and Deacon Jones’ Brewery: Reported for the Benefit of Posterity …", (New York: Printed for the publishers, ca. 1843). First published in Salem, February 1835, the text is interspersed with four engravings of goings-on at the hellish distillery. Also present is the 11" x 9" fold-out image which regrettably has a small hole at upper-right. Fold out and pages within the tract bears light dampstains at upper-right, largely away from text, covers discolored and detached. Worthy of conservation. In 1835 Rev. George B. Cheever (1807-1890), the pastor of a church in Salem, Mass. published, under the title of Deacon Giles’s Distillery, what purported to be a dream. Demons were represented as working in the deacon’s distillery, and manufacturing ‘liquid damnation,’ ‘murder,’ ‘suicide,’ etc., for the human employer. 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. Cheever was convicted and imprisoned for a few days, but on his release returned at once to the attack, publishing a follow-up "dream" about another deacon's brewery.