1 - Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Its Own Time

Summary

Some books become famous before being completed. In the turbulent years of 1851 and 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe serialized what was to become perhaps the most practically influential novel in American literature in the antislavery periodical National Era, and before the book was finished, reviews were already coming in. After several chapters had appeared, Stowe’s readers began to write in response to her work, in ways that illustrated the passion that the novel was arousing. Some of the earliest letters are instructive: on July 1, 1851, with the serialization of the novel still in its early stages, the National Era printed a letter from a reader whose religious sympathies were perhaps betrayed by the Quaker “thy,” which appeared at several points in the letter. The story Stowe was telling, the reader asserted, was characterized by “interest … pathos … [and] just and comprehensive views of slavery and its necessary consequences.” Because of its appeal to the heart, the letter writer proclaimed, this story was “peculiarly calculated to enlist the moral and religious sympathies, and call to action the latent energies of the female heart.” What makes this letter so striking is the fact that, even as Stowe was still in the process of writing her novel, readers who encountered, for example, the story of Eliza and her son, which the letter writer specifically cited, were making observations that would become central to critical arguments for and against Uncle Tom’s Cabin over the decades, and now even centuries, to come. The “appeal to the heart,” the creation of powerfully admirable female characters like Eliza and Mrs. Shelby, the intermingling of religious feeling and political action, and the sense that women could be powerful in their contributions to the antislavery movement in part because they were awakened by this novel would all continue to be important strands in Stowe criticism well over a century after her death. We are able to access this earliest of criticism on Stowe’s novel because of some of the very most recent scholarly work on the novel: my quotations from the National Era are from the collected letters to the periodical at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/erahp.html), a resource edited by Stephen Railton that provides a superb example of how digital scholarship is enabling scholars to encounter Stowe in new ways.