'UNCLE TOM'S CABIN' BY HARRIET B. STOWE IS PUBLISHED

The Grandma arrives to the public library

Today, The Grandma and her friends have arrived to Barcelona. They are going to rest some days before starting a new travel. They haven't chosen the place, yet.

The Grandma has spent all day looking for a place for her new Canarian souvenirs and watching all the photos they took in the islands. Visiting Canary Islands has been a wonderful experience that she is going to remember forever.

Jordi Santanyí has invited The Grandma to assist to a conference about Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin a masterpiece that talks against slavering in the USA that was published on a day like today in 1852.

Before going to the conference, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Grammar 38).

More information: Making Comparisons I & II

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811-July 1, 1896) was an American abolitionist and author. She came from the Beecher family, a famous religious family, and is best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions for enslaved African Americans. The book reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and Great Britain, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stances and debates on social issues of the day.

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible. It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies in Great Britain.

In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called the most popular novel of our day. The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, So this is the little lady who started this great war. The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that The long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change.

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The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned mammy; the pickaninny stereotype of black children; and the Uncle Tom, or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress.

Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in The National Era, an abolitionist periodical, starting with the June 5, 1851, issue. It was originally intended as a shorter narrative that would run for only a few weeks. Stowe expanded the story significantly, however, and it was instantly popular, such that several protests were sent to the Era office when she missed an issue. Because of the story's popularity, the publisher John P. Jewett contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book. While Stowe questioned if anyone would read Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form, she eventually consented to the request.

Convinced the book would be popular, Jewett made the unusual decision, for the time, to have six full-page illustrations by Hammatt Billings engraved for the first printing. Published in book form on March 20, 1852, the novel sold 3,000 copies on that day alone, and soon sold out its complete print run. A number of other editions were soon printed, including a deluxe edition in 1853, featuring 117 illustrations by Billings.

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In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold. At that point, however, demand came to an unexpected halt.... No more copies were produced for many years, and if, as is claimed, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe in 1862 as 'the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,' the work had effectively been out of print for many years. Jewett went out of business, and it was not until Ticknor and Fields put the work back in print in November 1862 that demand began again to increase.

Uncle Tom's Cabin First Edition, 1853

The book was translated into all major languages, and in the United States it became the second best-selling book after the Bible. A number of the early editions carried an introduction by Rev James Sherman, a Congregational minister in London noted for his abolitionist views. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold equally well in Britain, with the first London edition appearing in May 1852 and selling 200,000 copies.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery. While Stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by Christianity, she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery.

Stowe sometimes changed the story's voice so she could give a homily on the destructive nature of slavery. One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery was how this peculiar institution forcibly separated families from each other. One of the subthemes presented in the novel is temperance.

Stowe made it somewhat subtle and in some cases she weaved it into events that would also support the dominant theme.

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Because Stowe saw motherhood as the ethical and structural model for all of American life and also believed that only women had the moral authority to save the United States from the demon of slavery, another major theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the moral power and sanctity of women. 

Stowe shows how she believed women could save those around them from even the worst injustices. While later critics have noted that Stowe's female characters are often domestic clichés instead of realistic women, Stowe's novel reaffirmed the importance of women's influence and helped pave the way for the women's rights movement in the following decades.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in the sentimental and melodramatic style common to 19th-century sentimental novels and domestic fiction, also called women's fiction. These genres were the most popular novels of Stowe's time and tended to feature female main characters and a writing style which evoked a reader's sympathy and emotion.

Even though Stowe's novel differs from other sentimental novels by focusing on a large theme like slavery and by having a man as the main character, she still set out to elicit certain strong feelings from her readers. The power in this type of writing can be seen in the reaction of contemporary readers.

Georgiana May, a friend of Stowe's, wrote a letter to the author, saying: I was up last night long after one o'clock, reading and finishing Uncle Tom's Cabin. I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child."

Download Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

It's a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.

Harriet Beecher Stowe