Queer Little People.
INSCRIBED TO HER DAUGHTERS
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Queer Little People. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
8vo.; front free endpaper is detached but present; publisher’s half-sheep and marbled paper- covered boards, black and red morocco spine labels gilt. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Second edition. The first printing in 1867 consisted of 2508 copies, with the imprint changed to 1868 on this second edition, of which there were 1060 copies
A presentation copy, inscribed by Stowe to her two eldest children, her twin daughters Harriet (known as “Hattie”) and Eliza: H. & E. Stowe from their Mother. The binding is almost certainly a publisher’s presentation binding, or at least one that was specially bound for Stowe.
Stories for adolescents, mostly about dogs and cats (some of them originally written to benefit animal humane societies and welfare organizations), the last volume in a trilogy of works for juveniles about domesticity and the importance of conducting a pleasant and ethical household that revolved around the fulfillment of one’s family. The other books in the trilogy were House and Home Papers (1865), and The Little Foxes (1866). Stowe early evinced a love of animals. Her first attempt at authorship was a poetic epitaph for a kitten, written when she was eight.
Neither of Harriet’s twin daughters married. They continued to live with their parents, traveling with their mother and managing the family’s households in Hartford (where they were next door neighbors to Mark Twain) and in Mandarin, Florida, near to where Stowe’s brother Charles Beecher had opened a school in Florida to teach emancipated blacks. After their mother’s death in 1896, Eliza and Hattie helped to administer her estate.
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