Harriet Beecher Stowe´s Uncle Tom´s Cabin: The Creation and influence of a masterpiece

Harriet Beecher Stowe´s novel Uncle Tom´s Cabin, was one of the most controversial books, published in 1851/52 and put the debate on slavery more strongly in the center of public attention. It had great influence on other writers at that time. This paper deals with the writing and the publishing of Stowe´s masterpiece and the comparison with ist most popular stage adaptation by George L. Aiken. Similarities as well as differences will be presented as far as the structure, the characters and the themes are concerned.



Text Sample:

Chapterb2, The Writing and Publishing of Uncle Tom´s Cabin:

When Stowe began writing her famous novel she was about forty years old and in poor shape. She had been living in poverty with her family for a long time, was sick and exhausted from trying to fulfil her roles as a good wife, mother, and housewife. She had been subservient for all her life, felt miserable, and even compared her situation to that of a slave (Adams 44). In her own words, Uncle Tom´s Cabin was ,her declaration of independence, … her emancipation proclamation’ (Adams 27). ,Into Uncle Tom´s Cabin … Mrs. Stowe was able to pour her whole life … .’ Before the book´s success, she was harassed by debt and unknown; after it, she was wealthy and famous (Adams 45/46). And Uncle Tom´s Cabin made her more than just famous – it made her immortal.

Before she wrote Uncle Tom´s Cabin, Stowe had already published stories in which she treated the issue of slavery, e.g. ,The Freeman´s Dream: A Parable’. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of these works was rather weak. ,Compared with this crude effort, Uncle Tom´s Cabin would be a masterpiece of persuasion’ (Gossett 89). After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, which was part of the Compromise of 1850, Stowe at last set out to write an antislavery novel. It is said that her sister-in-law, Mrs Edward Beecher, exerted the final influence on Stowe when writing a letter to her toward the end of 1850. She is quoted as saying, ,Now, Hattie, if I could just use the pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is’ (Anthony 117). Reading the passage aloud to her family, Stowe ,rose from her chair, crushed the letter in her hand, and … said, I will write something. I will if I live’ (Gossett 90). And so she did, although it wasn´t easy for her. Still she had to care for her children and the house in Brunswick, Maine, where she had been living since the spring of 1850. And she was all alone, her husband Calvin being away in Cincinnatti. To him she wrote that she was thinking of writing a sketch for the National Era (Gossett 87-91). It wasn´t long afterward that Stowe imagined the character of Uncle Tom. There are different stories about how she imagined his death scene. Once she said that during a communion service in Brunswick, ,she had what she could only describe as a ´vision` of the scene which illustrated the worst possible evil of slavery – death by torture’ (Gossett 91). Another time she said that the scene arose before her when she was lying down to rest after lunch one day. ,In the introduction to the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom´s Cabin, Stowe told how she had written the whipping scene of Uncle Tom before anything else in the novel, (Gossett 92).

As she had planned it, Uncle Tom´s Cabin first appeared as a serial in the antislavery journal National Era. At the beginning she had no intention of writing a novel. To Gamaliel Bailey, the publisher of the newspaper, she wrote that she thought of her story extending through four issues of the weekly journal. In the same letter she explained that it would be a series of sketches about the ,patriarchal institution,’ and that the incidents described would have occurred in the sphere of her observation or her personal knowledge. Stowe was paid $300 for the story and received additional $100, as her story in the end didn´t extend through four, but through more than thirty issues of the National Era (Gossett 97). The journal printed Stowe´s story from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852 (Wurst 2451). In 1852 Uncle Tom´s Cabin was published in book form by J. P. Jewett (Hedrick 907). There were two volumes, ,with a woodcut of a negro cabin as the frontispiece’ (Anthony 117). Within the first week of its publication, ten thousand copies were sold. ,The first edition, consisting of 5,000 copies, was bought out in just two days, (Hill 53). Within a year, the story sold more than three-hundred thousand copies solely in the United States. The sales in Europe were not less phenomenal. In one year, forty different editions were published in Great Britain and its colonies; overall, 1.5 million copies were sold. The story was translated into dozens of languages and dialects. In Germany, a total of seventy-five editions were printed. Even in Italy, Stowe had great success with her first novel, although it was banned by the Catholic Church (Hill 53). Not only was Uncle Tom´s Cabin translated into many languages, and were hundreds of editions printed all over the world, but it was immediately put on stage, and ,embodied in popular culture in the form of songs, toys, and figurines’ (Hedrick 907).