Tales and Sketches of New England Life.
Inscribed
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Tales and Sketches of New England Life. Comprising “The May Flower,” and other Miscellaneous Writings. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1855.
8vo.; one inch round abrasion to rear endpapers; frontispiece offset onto title page; brown cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; rubbed, especially spine. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of this collection of over forty tales and sketches, including the fifteen that appeared in her first collection, The Mayflower, in 1843, along with “other miscellaneous writings, which have from time to time appeared in different periodicals. They have been written in all moods, from the gayest to the gravest—they are connected, in many cases, with the memory of friends and scenes most dear” (dedication). BAL 19539 for the “Author’s Cheap Edition.”
A remarkable presentation copy, inscribed on the blank paper panel of an embroidered doily affixed to the front endpaper: With Harriet’s/ love to her/ Dear Friend/ Mary Elsey/ Dec.br 31st 55. Both the configuration of the inscription—on a hand-stitched doily created either by Stowe or Elsey—and the language—Stowe’s use of her first name—suggest the greatest degree of intimacy.
In their affectionate and anecdotal biography, her son and grandson note that Stowe “began her literary career as a delineator of New England life and character,” that she “was an artist by nature and would have been impelled to literary expression under any circumstances, and the field in which she would most naturally have exercised her talent was in portraying the people and life of New England.” To call the examination of slavery for which she became famous an “an accident of her life” might be overstating the role serendipity played in her career, but they are right that she got her in composing such tales, a form that she never abandoned.
Stowe dedicated this collection “with most affectionate remembrances…to the yet surviving members of The Semicolon,” noting, “There are those now scattered through the world who will remember the social literary parties of Cincinnati, for whose genial meetings many of these articles were prepared.” The Club was started by Stowe’s uncle, Captain Samuel Foote, in his Cincinnati home, where he hosted meetings at which artists, editors, and socially and politically liberal friends “read papers and stories, or discussed interesting topics previously announced.” Stowe’s second contribution, a satirical essay, so charmed the editor of the Western Magazine that he asked to publish it. Soon after, she won the Western’s story contest—and fifty dollars—with “Uncle Lot,” included in The Mayflower as well as this later collection. It was the first of many successes in this compositional vein, and her familial biographers point us to Lowell’s review of “The Minister’s Wooing,” in which he praises Stowe’s achievement with Uncle Tom’s Cabin but expresses “great satisfaction…that in ‘The Minister’s Wooing’ she has chosen her time and laid her scenes amid New England habits and traditions., There is no other writer who is so capable of perpetuating for us, in a work of art, a style of thought and manners which railroads and newspapers will soon render as palaeozoic as the mastodon, or the megalosaurians” (Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life, by Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe, Boston…: Houghton Mifflin, 1911, p. 243).
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