Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Stowe and race
- 2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the south
- 3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Renaissance
- 4 Reading and children:Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Pearl of Orr’s Island
- 5 Uncle Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe in England
- 6 Staging black insurrection: Dred on stage
- 7 Stowe and regionalism
- 8 Stowe and the law
- 9 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the American reform tradition
- 10 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the dream of the great American novel
- 11 Stowe and the literature of social change
- 12 The afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
5 - Uncle Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe in England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Stowe and race
- 2 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the south
- 3 Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Renaissance
- 4 Reading and children:Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Pearl of Orr’s Island
- 5 Uncle Tom and Harriet Beecher Stowe in England
- 6 Staging black insurrection: Dred on stage
- 7 Stowe and regionalism
- 8 Stowe and the law
- 9 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the American reform tradition
- 10 Harriet Beecher Stowe and the dream of the great American novel
- 11 Stowe and the literature of social change
- 12 The afterlife of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Series List
Summary
Shortly after the US publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin on March 20, 1852, and following the publication of the novel in serial form, an employee at the New York publishing house of Putnam's mailed a two-volume set of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a contact in England. With no transatlantic copyright law to hinder them, British publishers began to bring out their own editions of the novel as early as July 8, 1852. And after “lying dormant on the bookshelves for several weeks,” the novel “exploded into favour.” Various British periodicals record the momentous nature of the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin: the Morning Chronicle writes “of illustrated editions, and newspaper printed editions, and editions in parts and numbers, ” concluding that Uncle Tom's Cabin is “the book of the day” and its “circulation . . . a thing unparalleled in bookselling annals.” The Eclectic Review records the novel's “marvellous popularity”: “its sale has vastly exceeded that of any other work in any other age or country”; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine describes the sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin as “the most marvellous literary phenomenon that the world has witnessed.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe , pp. 96 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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