Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Stowe’s Canonical Work
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852.
2 vols., small 8vo.; brown cloth, stamped in gilt and blind; extremities lightly rubbed, foxed. Housed in specially made leather slipcases.
First edition of a book that changed the course of history; 5000 copies, the entire edition: BAL 19343; #31 of Blockson’s 101 Most Influential Books.
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was published on March 20, 1852. Within days the entire edition of 5000 was exhausted. By January of 1853, sales had reached more than one million copies. “Uncle Tom” as a type was introduced into common parlance. Months later, in his keynote address to the annual convention of the American and British Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass offered one of the first of many assessments of the book’s global importance:
...Why, Sir, look all over the North; look South—look at home—look abroad—look at the whole civilized world—and what are all this vast multitude reading at this moment? Why, Sir, they are reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin...it were as well to chain the lightening as to repress the moral convictions and humane promptings [of] human nature. Herein...is our hope. (Frederick Douglass Papers, by John Blassingame, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, Vol.2, 435-6, p. 495)
Stowe was born in 1811 into an extraordinarily progressive family of Puritan stock. Harriet, the daughter of Congregational Minister Lyman Beecher, had in many ways a traditional upper class girlhood: she lived at home till age thirteen, when she was sent to study at her older sister Catherine’s female seminary in Hartford. She first trained as a teacher, though soon both she and her sister would turn to writing as a vocation. Like many 19th-century American women authors, Stowe came to literature through periodical writing: she was first published in her early twenties, when a short non-fiction piece won first prize in the Western Monthly Magazine. Throughout the 1830s and 40s, Stowe managed to place short fictions and articles (mostly about domestic matters) in the so-called “women’s press.”
As she entered adulthood and the climate of the country became more volatile, Stowe became increasingly drawn to the abolitionist cause. In 1850, fueled by her outrage over the infamous Fugitive Slave Law (which provided for the extradition of runaway slaves living in “freed” territories back to the slaveholding states from whence they came), she set to work on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The sentimental, melodramatic, yet affecting story follows the terrible life of a slave, Uncle Tom, who is the property first of the benevolent Mr. St. Clare and then of the evil Simon Legree, who eventually beats Tom to death.
Although many criticized the writing as mawkish, the novel was phenomenally effective in articulating and popularizing the anti-slavery position. It had a nearly indestructible impact upon the common American consciousness: according to Frederick Douglass, slaveholders “might take Uncle Tom’s Cabin out of ten thousand dwellings in this country and...set fire to them, and send their flames against the sky, and scatter their ashes to the four winds of heaven; but still the slaveholder would have no peace” (ibid.). And in a famous (though perhaps apocryphal) exchange, President Lincoln, upon meeting Stowe, is said to have observed: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” (AWH, p. 619).
While Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Stowe’s first and most notable success, it was not her last. She went on to write a “key” to her widely misunderstood text, a sequel of sorts (Dred, 1856) and a multitude of influential articles on both abolition and suffrage.
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