Uncle Tom's Cabin

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Lore & Background

Harriet Beecher Stowe was part of the religious Beecher family and an active abolitionist. She wrote the novel as a response to the passage, in 1850, of the second Fugitive Slave Act. Much of the book was composed at her house in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, taught at Bowdoin College. Stowe was partly inspired by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849). She was also inspired by the posthumous biography of Phebe Ann Jacobs, a devout Congregationalist of Brunswick, Maine, who was enslaved for most of her life. Another source was American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, co-authored by Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters. Stowe also conducted interviews with people who escaped slavery. She mentioned these inspirations in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a non-fiction book intended to verify her claims about slavery and point readers to publicly available documents detailing its horrors. The novel 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 but was expanded significantly due to instant popularity. Published in book form on March 20, 1852, it sold 3,000 copies on that day alone. In the first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the United States, with eight printing presses running incessantly to keep up with demand. The book sold equally well in Britain; the first London edition appeared in May 1852 and sold 200,000 copies. By 1857, it had been translated into 20 languages. Translator Lin Shu published the first Chinese translation in 1901, making it the first American novel translated into that language. The plot focuses on Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. Key events include Eliza escaping with her son across the ice of the Ohio River, Tom being sold to the St. Clare family in New Orleans, and his eventual sale to the vicious plantation owner Simon Legree. The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of negative stereotypes about black people, including that of the namesake character 'Uncle Tom', which came to be associated with an excessively subservient person.

Reader's Guide

Uncle Tom's Cabin is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the United States, it was the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible. The influence attributed to the book was so great that a likely apocryphal story arose of Abraham Lincoln meeting Stowe at the start of the Civil War and declaring, 'So this is the little lady who started this great war.' The novel remains a 'landmark' in protest literature, with later books such as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson owing a large debt to it. However, the later associations with the term 'Uncle Tom' have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical effects of the book as a 'vital antislavery tool'.

Did You Know?

• The novel first appeared as a 40-week serial in The National Era, starting June 5, 1851.
• In its first year, 300,000 copies were sold in the United States, with eight printing presses running incessantly.
• The first London edition appeared in May 1852 and sold 200,000 copies.
• By 1857, the novel had been translated into 20 languages.
• The first Chinese translation in 1901 made it the first American novel translated into that language.