Uncle Tom's Cabin: A True History, manuscript.
SEE HARD COPY; 8-page description - MH
The History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
Unpublished Manuscript Account by its Publisher
Contradicting Extant Versions
(Stowe, Harriet Beecher). Jewett, John Punchard. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A True History. By the original Publisher (John P. Jewett). Ca. 1880.
Slim 4to.; Criterion Composition Book; lined pages; 33 pp. covered in ink (17 leaves).
John Jewett’s fair copy manuscript defense of his dealings with the Stowes; written in his hand (pp. 20-33) and in that of his son Frank (pp. 1-19). Frank has signed the cover, F.P. Jewett/ Orange, N.J., added the title along the fore-edge (first few words missing due to chip), and the following warning at the top: “Preserve Carefully.” The inside cover is stamped with the details Frank’s business: “Landscape/ Architectural and Interior/ Views/ Duplicate Photos can be had at any time/ No. 10 Snyder Street/ Orange, N.J.”
Jewett’s history of his acquisition of the rights:
Jewett (1814-1884) composed this account in response to Stowe’s public insinuations that he had swindled her out of a fair share of the profits, which resulted directly from the interference of her sister Catharine E. Beecher, whose nefarious dealings with him absorb a full third of the text. Though Jewett often appears cartoonishly self-aggrandizing in his history, and though he likely condenses some events and embellishes others, he does clarify some of the muddied details of the book’s publication. His prefatory paragraphs merit quoting in full:
Many a time and often have I been urged to prepare for the public a reliable statement of my transactions as publisher with Mrs. H.B. Stowe, the author of this remarkable book, with sketches of sundry intermeddlers whose officiousness caused continual friction and effervescence, terminating in open rupture. Slurs, innuendoes and open attacks have been repeatedly made upon me by the relatives and friends of Mrs. Stowe, if not by herself, the evident intent being to create a false public sentiment unfavorable to me; insinuating that I had driven a sharp bargain with Mrs. Stowe, and by so doing had realized the lion’s share of the profits.
The following narrative, I trust, will dispel this delusion and convince an impartial public that the converse is the truth. I am induced at this late day, in justice to myself and to my family, who may survive me, to place on record this veritable statement.
By 1851, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin debuted in The National Era, Jewett had a strong relationship with the Beecher family. He had published Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects by Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher in 1846, and had followed it with the first of a multi-volume set of evangelical works by her father, Lyman Beecher. Though he was the New England agent for The National Era, published by his friend Gamaliel Bailey to a circulation of 15,000 (which ultimately doubled as a result of Stowe’s appearance), he claims that it was as an attentive husband, rather than as a literary entrepreneur, that he came to engineer the book publication of what has arguably become the best-known American novel—and unquestionably the most significant book by an American woman.
It was during the winter of ’51-’52 that my attention was called to this story by my noble and gifted wife, to whom the entire credit is due of its publication in book form, and but for my wife, and myself, it is very doubtful if it would ever have gone beyond the limited circulation it had in the columns of the Era, for three different publishing houses, to whom it had been offered by Mrs. Stowe or her friends, had positively declined to publish it, for three principal reasons: First, through fear of losing Southern trade. Second, from fear of personal violence, for those were martyr days to Abolitionists [and] their sympathizers; and Thi
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