Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Inscribed by Stowe
“In memory of a visit to the British Museum”
Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Slave Life in America. London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1853.
8vo.; a.e.g.; blue cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt and blind; light wear to extremities. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Third English edition, first printing. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to Nicholas E.S.A. Hamilton: In memory of a visit to the British Museum. H.B. Stowe. With Hamilton’s pencil ownership signature, dated 1853, at the top of the page. Hamilton, one of England’s foremost paleographers, secured an asterisk in literary history when he determined that an annotated Shakespeare Second Folio (known as the Perkins Folio) was, in fact, a fraud. In 1859, he avowed that the British Museum’s recent acquisition, purportedly containing thousands of invaluable seventeenth century corrections, was, in fact, the handiwork of John Payne Collier, the preeminent nineteenth-century Shakespearean authority. Hamilton’s investigation was published as An Inquiry into the Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier’s Annotated Shakespeare Folio; and of Certain Documents Likewise Published by Mr. Collier (London: Richard Bentley, 1860).
Ten days after meeting Doctor Mussey, Stowe sailed for Europe. The invitation, extended by several British antislavery societies, had been precipitated by the foreign acclaim accorded Uncle Tome’s Cabin; in Great Britain alone sales had more than tripled those in the United States (totaling a million and a half copies sold within the first eighteen months). Stowe reached Liverpool in April 1853. For the next five months, she was exalted throughout Scotland, England, France, Switzerland, and Germany by commoner and nobility alike. (The unprecedented outburst of affection and admiration was surpassed only by Ulysses S. Grant’s reception abroad more than two decades later.)
When Stowe made an appearance at the annual meeting of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London, black abolitionist William Wells Brown attested that “there was a degree of excitement…that can better be imagined than described.” While gratified, she nonetheless resolved to remain “a very tame lion.” Rather than react to occasional abolitionist criticism about America’s peculiar institution, which provoked her tough-minded, minister-husband to denounce the hypocritical British consumption of his country’s slave-grown cotton (the “receiver is as guilty as the thief!”), Stowe worked to raise the necessary capital for future antislavery causes and reveled in European antiquity and culture.
In Sunny Memoirs of Foreign Lands, a sophisticated travel book designed to interpret the European experience for overseas Americans, Stowe sermonized about literary matters and her newly found appreciation for Continental art. After visiting several private galleries filled with “Titian…and all the rest of them,” the ordinarily conservative New Englander came to realize that the “beauty and worth” of “creators” like Rubens, Raphael, and Murillo were best judged “entirely independent of their moral character… That mystic quality that exists in these souls is a glimpse and intimation of what exists in Him in full perfection.
The memoir also disclosed Stowe’s boundless passion for Shakespeare, whose “wreathed involution of smiles and tears [was] … from the ‘deep and dreadful’ sub-bass of the organ to the most aerial warbling of its highest key….” Before returning to Boston in September, with upwards of twenty-thousand dollars pledged by antislavery zealots, Stowe took the opportunity to tour Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and the British Museum, where she inscribed this copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Nicholas Hamilton, the assistant keeper of manuscripts, in memory of the occasion.
After a thorough examination of official and unofficial sources—including the keeper of manuscripts’ private diary—
Print Inquire