ON THE DANGERS OF DRINKING
JENKINS, Edward.
The Devil’s Chain … Twentieth Thousand. With twelve Illustrations by Barnard and Thomson.
[Southwark, M’Corquodale and Co. for] London and Belfast, William Mullan & Son, 1877.
8vo, xxiii, [1], 276, [4 (advertisements)], with ‘Preface to the Tenth Thousand’, frontispiece and 11 engraved plates; light foxing throughout, but a very good copy; bound in the original red-brown diagonal ribbed cloth, lettered in black with gilt device of devil perched on globe, front cover lettered ‘20th Thousand, illustrated'.
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The Devil’s Chain … Twentieth Thousand. With twelve Illustrations by Barnard and Thomson.
A reissue of the illustrated edition, from a different publishing house, of this lively narrative tracing the ‘universally ruinous effect of drink on all classes of the English population’ (Sutherland) by Member of Parliament, anti-slavery campaigner, and ardent imperialist Edward Jenkins.
The Devil’s Chain opens with ‘a mysterious (drink induced) suicide in London’s West End. As it unravels the mystery draws in the heir of a great brewing house, Henry Bighorne, his angelic sister and a secretary of state. The last is killed on a burning boat in the Channel (the captain and crew being hopelessly drunk. There is a vivid and bloody interlude in the steel-manufacturing and gin-sodden north of England’ (ibid.). Jenkins’s prose is complemented by Barnard and Thompson’s engraved illustrations, including the particularly gruesome frontispiece of the devil, lowering his chain of human bodies into the inferno. In the ‘Preface to the Tenth Thousand’ which reappears in this edtion, Jenkins attests to the book’s phenomenal success (‘the public has bought seven thousand in five weeks, and demands three-thousand more’, and defends it against its detractors.
Born in Bangalore, Jenkins studied at McGill in Montreal and at the University of Pennsylvania before being called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn. He found fame as a satirist with Ginx’s Baby, his Birth and other Misfortunes, which chronicles the sectarian tug-of-war over the religious education of an abandoned child and influenced the religious compromise in the Education Act of 1870.
