Spillars points out in her introduction that as a 'didactic narrative of the family,' the book fits into the reform programs of the late nineteenth-century women's movement. In a text punctuated with Bible passages and moral aphorisms, the narrative chronicles the gradual process by which alcohol disrupts and destroys the Burton family and makes orphans of the two protagonists. While admits that the novel does not satisfy post-modernist reader expectations for ambiguity and textual complexity, she believes its final exhortation for a new social order is one that readers will find surprisingly contemporary.