Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Summary
Uncle Tom is a middle aged enslaved man of deep religious faith, sold away from his Kentucky home and family to settle his owner's debts. Sold down the river to New Orleans, he is bought by the kindly Augustine St Clare, whose young daughter Eva befriends Tom before dying of illness, urging her father on her deathbed to free his enslaved people; St Clare is killed before he can act, and Tom is sold again, this time to Simon Legree, a brutal plantation owner who has Tom beaten to death for refusing to betray two enslaved women who have run from him. A parallel plot follows Eliza, another enslaved woman on the same original plantation, who flees across the frozen Ohio River with her young son rather than see him sold away, and eventually reunites with her husband George and reaches freedom in Canada. Stowe interrupts the story often to address the reader directly, arguing the case against slavery as much as dramatising it.
The novel's popularity rested on exactly this directness, and it earns credit for putting the physical and moral horror of slavery in front of a mass Northern readership that had mostly been able to avoid thinking about it concretely. It is also, by modern critical consensus, a deeply flawed portrait: Stowe's characters, particularly the comic enslaved man Sam and the wild child Topsy, established racial stereotypes, including the pattern of excessive, submissive goodness that gave the phrase "Uncle Tom" its later insulting meaning, one Tom's own behaviour in the book, closer to quiet defiance than servility, does not fully support. A reader coming to it today should expect both a document that moved a nation and a book whose depiction of Black characters modern scholars, including Henry Louis Gates Jr, have had to work to reassess honestly.
It was published in book form in March 1852 after serialisation and became the best selling novel of the nineteenth century.
Historical Context & Significance
Serialised beginning in June 1851 and published as a book the following year, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold three thousand copies on its first day and three hundred thousand within the year, with a London edition selling two hundred thousand more, making it, after the Bible, the best selling book of its century. Charles Dickens wrote to Stowe that he had read her book with the deepest interest, and Frederick Douglass promoted it heavily through his own newspaper, while Southern booksellers who stocked it faced threats and forced relocation.
James Baldwin dismissed it in 1949 as a bad novel lacking real psychological depth, while George Orwell called it a good bad book, melodramatic and yet emotionally affecting and essentially true; both judgments still circulate. Its stage versions, so called Tom shows, toured America and Britain for decades under weak copyright law, with some five hundred companies on the road by the end of the century, and the story's influence on abolitionist sentiment in the years before the Civil War is widely credited by historians, whatever its literary and racial shortcomings by modern standards.