Background

Timothy Shay Arthur was born on June 6, 1809 in Newburgh, New York, United States. He was the son of William Arthur and Anna Shay. The family was large and his parents' means limited. While he was an infant they removed to the vicinity of West Point, and his first recollections were of Fort Montgomery on the Hudson. In 1817 occurred another removal, this time to Baltimore.

Education

Arthur was placed in the public schools, but proved exceedingly dull and slow, requiring several months to master the principle of simple addition. Upon his teacher's advice, he was taken from school and apprenticed to a watchmaker. Except for a brief attendance at night school his formal tuition now ceased, but he became an omnivorous reader.

Career

Before completing his apprenticeship, the combination of bench work and night reading so injured his sight that he never entered his trade. A friend obtained him light employment as a clerk in a Baltimore counting-room, and his ample leisure he employed in scribbling verse and sketches.

Meanwhile, he had joined the first temperance society in Maryland, and, though not himself a teetotaler, had become a convinced enemy of saloons. In 1833 seeking to improve his income, he went west as agent for a Baltimore bank, but was recalled by its failure.

By now he had begun to find that writing was a vocation rather than an avocation. Baltimore was the seat at that time of two distinct literary groups. One, the older, was led by John P. Kennedy, William Gwynn, and Lambert A. Wilmer. The younger group included Arthur, Dr. Nathan C. Brooks, Rufus Dawes, and W. H. Carpenter. Both groups had contacts with Edgar Allan Poe, who was in Baltimore 1831-1835. Arthur therefore did not lack encouragement and advice in his early literary efforts.

After his return from the West he became editor of the short-lived Baltimore Athenaeum. We then hear of him as having editorial charge of a succession of ephemeral literary enterprises.

He followed Poe's friend John H. Hewitt as editor of the Baltimore Saturday Visitor; later (1838-1839) he was associated with Carpenter and J. N. McJilton in editing the Baltimore Book and the Baltimore Literary Magazine; in 1840 Duff Green placed him in charge of the Baltimore Merchant, a Harrison campaign daily.

Arthur's contributions to Godey's Lady's Book had begun in the late thirties, and he had found a ready market in it and other magazines for domestic tales of a moralizing tendency. Leaving Baltimore in 1841, he went to Philadelphia and began pouring tales, essays, and verse into Godey's, Graham's Magazine, the Saturday Courier, and the newspapers.

He was now fully enlisted in the rising temperance movement, and his first book of importance (1842) was Six Nights with the Washingtonians: A Series of Original Temperance Tales. In 1845 he ventured to establish a monthly literary magazine called Arthur's Ladies' Magazine, which by the standards of the time had some genuine merit, but failed to attain a large circulation, and was soon abandoned. His pen had meanwhile never stopped.

In 1845 he brought out Married and Single: or Marriage and Celibacy Contrasted, a story to prove that celibacy is "opposed to every law of God and Man, " and results in misery.

In 1847 appeared The Lady at Home, and in 1848 The Maiden, the latter a novelette demonstrating that girls may pay a fearful price if they do not investigate carefully the moral antecedents of the men they marry.

His ambitions in the magazine world remained strong, and in 1850 he began the publication of a weekly, devoted half to fashion and half to letters, called Arthur's Home Gazette. It achieved a warm public favor; in 1853 it became a monthly, Arthur's Home Magazine, and Arthur was still editing it at his death. Just after the Civil War (1867) he began the publication of the Children's Hour, an illustrated juvenile periodical which also attained a high circulation.

Arthur was considered to have a marked talent for juvenile tales. From time to time he embarked upon other magazine enterprises. Thus he attempted in 1869 an eclectic review, Once A Month, modeled after Littell's Living Age, which lasted only a year. He at once followed it by The Workingman, a monthly journal for farmers and mechanics, which was intended to give these readers moral tales and instructive articles as a substitute for such "sensation" magazines as Bonner's New York Ledger. It gained a following, but Arthur shortly sold it. Such business ventures did not check the steady flow of didactic books, some of them astonishingly popular, from his pen.

By 1875 there was a list of some seventy titles. Pride and Prudence, or The Married Sisters, in 1850, employed his favorite device of contrast. So did Sparing to Spend; or, The Loftons and Pinkertons (1853). These were tracts against extravagance, vanity, worldliness, and disregard of the precepts of religion.

In The Wedding Guest: A Friend of the Bride and Bridegroom, he presented another anticipation of the Laura Jean Libbey school of sugared advice upon matters of domestic felicity. The flow of temperance stories was constant, and he edited such collections as The Crystal Fount, For All Seasons (1850), two volumes of tales and verse. But his greatest success was achieved in 1854 with Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There. This volume at once leaped to an enormous circulation. Its sale in the fifties was second only to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Like Mrs. Stowe's book it was dramatized and played throughout much of the country with great success; indeed, it is still sold and played. It satisfied the appetite for the sensational and lurid, and yet was endorsed by all the clergy. Dealing with a once-happy village, it narrated the sad ruin wrought by the "Sickle and Sheaf, " Simon Slade's tavern. Its characters included the drunkard, Joe Morgan; his noble wife, Fanny, and angelic little daughter Mary; Gambler Green, who met a dark and terrible death; Judge Hammond, wrecked by drink; and Frank Slade, who in a drunken passion killed his father.

Few Sunday-school libraries were considered complete without a copy. It was supplemented in 1872 with Three Years in a Mantrap, which describes the evils of drink in a great city.

The beginnings of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union crusade brought forth Woman to the Rescue (1874), a characteristic story of saloons closed by praying church-workers. Among Arthur's later publications in this field were Strong Drink: The Cause and the Cure, the first part of which was fiction and the second part a sketchy history of the temperance movement; and The Strike at Tivoli Mills (1879), a product of the industrial upheaval of 1877, which traced the workingman's chief miseries to drink.

Arthur's other books covered a wide range, from such didactic works as The Old Man's Bride; or, The Lesson of the Day, to the "cabinet histories" of various states which he and W. H. Carpenter hastily compiled from obvious sources and published between 1850 and 1856. In Cast Adrift (1873) he included an attack upon the continuance of the lottery evil in American cities.

From first to last he was an advocate of temperance by education rather than temperance by prohibitory legislation, and he did not support coercive enactments upon the subject. But for thirty years following 1840 his influence in the movement against liquor was powerful, and he accomplished quite as much with his pen as men like John B. Gough did from the platform.

At Arthur's death in Philadelphia he was still actively engaged in writing and editing.

At times he occupied minor civic positions, being a member of the executive committee of the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. But his title to remembrance rests upon his temperance fiction, and above all upon his Ten Nights in a Barroom.

Achievements

• Arthur was the founder of "Arthur's Home Magazine", he used his publication to publish hundreds of short stories, and was known as one of the most prolific writers of the pre-Civil War era.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Temperance Tales, or Six Nights With the Washingtonians (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Temperance Tales, or Six Nights With the Was...)

  • The History of Vermont: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The History of Vermont: From Its Earliest Se...)

  • Ten Nights in a Bar-Room

    (Next to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ten Nights In A Bar-Room was t...)

  • Arthur's Ladies' Magazine of Elegant Literature and the Fine Arts, Vol. 3: January to July, 1845 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Arthur's Ladies' Magazine of Elegant Literat...)

  • The history of Pennsylvania from its earliest settlement to the present time

    (The history of Pennsylvania from its earliest settlement ...)

  • Stories for Young Housekeepers

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Wife: A Story for My Young Countrywomen

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

  • In the Way of Temptation

    (In the Way of Temptation is one of Timothy Shay Arthur's ...)

  • Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper
  • Words for the Wise

Religion

Arthur was a leading member of the Swedenborgian Church of Philadelphia.

Views

It is known that Arthur was against alcohol.

Membership

Member of the Washington Temperance Society (1840).

Connections

In 1836 he married Ellen Alden, a daughter of Capt. James Alden of Portland, and a sister of Rear Admiral James Alden of the United States Navy. To them were born five sons and two daughters, of whom four sons and one daughter survived their father. The death in 1862 of the older daughter had been a sorely felt affliction.

Father:

William Arthur

Mother:

Anna (Shay) Arthur

Spouse:

Eliza (Alden) Arthur

Son :

Charles Arthur