Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Inscribed for Julia Grant,
After The Death Of The President
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, the Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1881.
8vo.; full treed calf stamped in gilt; a.e.g.; marbled endpapers. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
New edition, with numerous steel engravings and a Stowe bibliography by George Bullen. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper by Stowe to Julia Grant to commemorate the death of her husband the previous year: Precious in the sight of the Lord, is the death of his saints Harriet Beecher Stowe 49 Forest St Hartford Conn Oct 24 1886.
Published serially in the National Era over the course of 1851 and 1852, this book was published in its entirety on March 20, 1852, and sold 10,000 copies in its first week and 300,000 by the end of the year. A decade later 2.5 million copies were sitting on American shelves. Stowe sold her books in a nation that numbered no more than 24 million. Her success remains the greatest in publishing history, in proportion to population, and will not soon be surpassed.
Written against the tumultuous backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Law controversy, Stowe’s words rushed out of her pen “with a vividness and importunity that would not be denied.” She enthralled her readers with vivid, if stereotypical, characters, melodramatic scenes shot through with religiosity and sentimentality, and dramatic confrontations and chase scenes that even 150 years later transform jaded modern readers into rapt page-turners. In spite of its contrived plot and melodrama, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is by no means a simplistic novel. Stowe was not out to demonize southerners – after all, Simon Legree was
a transplanted northerner, and Uncle Tom’s master, Mr. Shelby, is the picture of kindliness. Yet it is Shelby’s debt-driven choice to sell Tom and Eliza that sets the whole tragic plot in motion. It was precisely the destructive equivocations and moral complacency of such “moderate” slaveholders like Shelby that Stowe wanted to attack. She wanted to show Southerners that there was no way to be a humane slave owner, and she wanted to rattle northerners out of any belief in the possibility of coexisting with the peculiar institution. The whole enterprise had to be destroyed root and branch. “She aimed the novel at the evangelical conscience of the North,” historian James McPherson said of Stowe. “And she hit her mark.”
Nothing Stowe wrote after Uncle Tom matched it in terms of either salability or imaginative fervor. “If there is something to be said for the author’s claim that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by God,” Edmund Wilson said waspishly in Patriotic Gore, “it is evident that the nine novels which followed it were produced without divine intervention by Harriet Beecher Stowe herself.”
By the time Julia Grant received this gift, the novel’s presence in American letters was waning. Stowe’s royalty statements for the second half of 1887 showed 12,225 sales. By the early twentieth century the book was out of print, and was not reissued until 1948. Generations of Americans knew Uncle Tom only as a vulgar vaudeville act, with scenes from the novel wildly distorted, characters altered or made up, and the moral and political themes that animated Stowe entirely forgotten.
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