Download Danger by T. S. Arthur. A classic temperance novel about social drinking, family influence, and moral consequences. Available in PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and AZW3 formats.
About Danger
Danger by T. S. Arthur is a powerful 19th-century temperance novel published in 1875. Also known as Danger; Or, Wounded in the House of a Friend, it examines the destructive consequences of social drinking and argues that the roots of intemperance often lie within the home itself.
Why Read Danger?
Short Summary: In this earnest temperance novel, T. S. Arthur argues that the greatest dangers of drink may begin not in the saloon, but in the respectable home, where social customs quietly shape habits that lead to ruin.
Danger, published in 1875 and more fully titled Danger; Or, Wounded in the House of a Friend, is one of T. S. Arthur’s most direct and purposeful interventions in the literature of temperance. Where some reform novels focus on the public drinking-house as the chief site of corruption, Arthur deliberately presses deeper. In the book’s own prefatory argument, he insists that the real causes of intemperance often lie behind the saloon—in domestic habits, social entertainments, and the seemingly harmless customs by which young people are introduced to drink.
That shift in emphasis gives the novel its distinctive force. Arthur is not content merely to condemn visible vice. Instead, he examines the polite world that excuses, normalizes, and even encourages “moderate” drinking under the signs of hospitality, status, and good breeding. The result is a moral drama in which danger appears not first as scandal, but as habit—accepted, repeated, and woven into the fabric of family and social life until its consequences can no longer be contained.
Like Arthur’s other reform fiction, the novel works through vivid scenes of domestic and emotional crisis. He writes with urgency, but also with a keen sense of how ruin takes shape gradually. A choice made for amusement, fashion, or courtesy becomes the beginning of injury; a custom tolerated in the drawing room opens the way to grief, shame, and irreversible loss. The title itself is a warning cry. Arthur wants readers to see peril where society prefers not to look, and to recognize that what wounds most deeply may come, in fact, “in the house of a friend.”
The prose is accessible, serious, and shaped by a strong moral purpose. Arthur does not veil his reforming intent, yet the book’s appeal lies in more than argument alone. Its emotional energy comes from the clash between affection and blindness, between family tenderness and social negligence, and between the outward appearance of safety and the inward spread of harm. In that sense, Danger is both a temperance novel and a domestic tragedy of influence.
Readers interested in Victorian social reform, classic temperance fiction, and 19th-century moral literature will find this a striking and historically revealing work. It stands well beside Arthur’s better-known anti-drink books while making a sharper case against the culture of “respectable” drinking itself. For modern readers, it offers not only a period argument, but a clear example of how fiction was used to challenge social habits at their source.
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