Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Inscribed by Langston Hughes
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With sixteen full-page illustrations including reproductions from previous editions together with introductory remarks and captions by Langston Hughes. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, (1952).
8vo.; 16 illustrations; frontispiece portrait of Stowe; grey cloth, stamped in blue and gilt; spine darkened and lightly worn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition with Hughes’s introduction and captions; published exactly one hundred years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin made its first appearance. A presentation copy, inscribed in Hughes’s large handwriting across the front endpaper: For Bill—this great old book—Sincerely, Langston / New York, September, 1952.
In his introduction, Hughes sketches the history of its publication and reception: its sales, translations, notable advocates and detractors, and historical importance. “But in addition,” he writes, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin also happened to be a good story, exciting in incident, sharp in characterization, and threaded with humor.” Calling attention the role her gender played in its composition, he notes, “That is why is still lives…. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had six children, created out of mother love her Eva, her Topsy, Eliza’s baby, Harry, and the other unforgettable children in her book…. The love and warmth and humanity that went into its writing keep it alive a century later form Bombay to Boston.” He also writes of the persecution Stowe sufferance because of her gender: “Her friends and neighbors looked askance upon a woman who aspired to any sort of career outside the home, who took sides in national controversies, or participated in political issues. Slavery was a political issue.”
But Harriet Beecher Stowe … had helped her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, edit a paper which was forbidden in some part of the South. She had once aided a Negro woman to escape from a pursuing master. So she had already taken sides.
When she was almost forty she wrote a friend, “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. The Carthaginian women in the last peril of their state cut off their hair for bow-strings to give the defenders of their country, and such peril and shame as now hangs over this country is worse than Roman slavery. I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.” So she began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
He further notes that after its British publication, Stowe received a letter from Queen Victoria.
The sixteen illustrations in this edition include a frontispiece portrait of Stowe, facsimile manuscript from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and four title pages: from the Hebrew, Russian, German, and first editions. The balance of the images are textual illustrations, derived not just from previous international editions of the work, but also from printed promotional material from theatrical productions, and advertisements offering rewards for runaway slaves.
A remarkable copy of a scarce book.
(#6008)
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