Novel
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe · 1852
Opening lines
Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P——, in Kentucky.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A Kentucky planter, in debt, sells two slaves to a trader: Tom, a middle-aged man of deep faith, and Eliza's little boy. The mother flees by night with the child and crosses the Ohio by leaping from ice floe to ice floe to reach the North. Tom refuses to flee, goes down the Mississippi, rescues a little girl who has fallen from the steamboat, whose father thanks him by buying him, and spends two peaceful years in their house in New Orleans. This master dies in his turn, Tom is sold again, and the third is a cotton planter who keeps his slaves in line through terror.
Context
The Fugitive Slave Act decides the writing. The text first appears as a serial in an abolitionist newspaper, The National Era, from June 1851 to April 1852, then in two volumes on 20 March 1852, and sells some three hundred thousand copies within the year. Its author poured into it the grief for a son who died of cholera at eighteen months. A sentence circulates about her meeting with Lincoln, in 1862, that of the little lady who supposedly started the great war: the meeting took place, but neither of the two reported the sentence, which was printed decades later.
Who it is for
A long novel, openly sentimental and preachy in tone. The debate over its representations is part of reading it, and stage adaptations have distorted its image.
Prizes and reception
The best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, and the best-selling book after the Bible. The name of its hero became, in the following century, an insult.
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