Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.
First Illustrated American Edition
Inscribed
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Illustrated edition. Complete in one volume. Original designs by Billings; engraved by Baker and Smith. Boston and Cleveland: John P. Jewett & Co., Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1853.
8vo.; black and white illustrations; a.e.g.; brown cloth pictorially stamped in gilt; very light wear to extremities; a beautiful copy.
The first illustrated American edition, with over one hundred wood cuts throughout; Hildreth page 12, BAL 19527; a very scarce book. Advertised as available in a less elaborate cloth binding and in full morocco; it is likely that Jewett, the publishers of the first edition the previous year, did up a small number for presentation purposes with a.e.g. and extravagant illustrations stamped in gilt on the spine and both covers. The image on the covers combines a figure of Christ similar to that appearing at the head of chapter 38, “The Victory,” with the image of three slaves praying that appears at the end of chapter 40, “The Martyr.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title: To Dr. and Mrs. Mussey from their affectionate friend H. B. Stowe. Boston March 20th 1853. Though late editions of Uncle Tom from the 1880s and ‘90s with late inscriptions by Stowe surface, presentation copies of pre-Civil War editions are scarce and copies of this vintage with inscriptions are rare.
Reuben Dimond Mussey (1780-1866), a temperance activist, medical doctor, surgical professor, and early advocate of the use of chloroform and ether as anesthesia, was born in Pelham, New Hampshire. After his 1803 graduation from Dartmouth College he stayed on to get his medical degree two years later, and completed post-graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania in 1809. His early career was spent as a teacher of medical subjects at Dartmouth and other eastern schools, from 1814-38, and as a professor of surgery at the Medical College of Ohio for the next fourteen years. When Stowe inscribed this copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to him in 1853, Mussey had just begun a five-year professorship at Miami Medical College in Cincinnati.
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