Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Books That Killed Their Authors #5

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin twice.

Daguerreotype portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852. Public Domain

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was by far and away Stowe’s most famous and enduring work. Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial starting 5 June 1851 in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper. Originally, the serial was to appear for just a few weeks.

It was instantly popular. Stowe expanded the story significantly to what became a book-length work.

Publisher John P. Jewett contracted Stowe about turning Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a book. Jewett was certain the book would be popular and made the unusual and expensive decision to include six full-page illustrations by artist Hammatt Billings in the first printing.

Originally published in two volumes on 20 March 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book, sold 3,000 copies on the first day, quickly selling out its press run. At the time many books has press runs of 500 copies or less. A runaway bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the United States in the first year after publication.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared as a 40-week serial in The National Era, an abolitionist periodical, starting with this June 5, 1851 publication. Public Domain

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also a best seller in the United Kingdom, but Stowe didn’t earn a single pound. There were no international copyright laws at the time. English publishers copied the book without permission. First published in the U.K. in May 1852, it quickly sold 200,000 copies. More than 1.5 million copies of the book were in circulation in Britain within a couple of years. American publishers also pirated her book.

It would be translated into 20 languages within five years of its publication. In 1901, it became the first American novel translated into Chinese.

The book was socially relevant when it was published, despite the fact it would also perpetuate negative stereotypes about black people. This would be exemplified by the term Uncle Tom referring to an excessively subservient black person. Stowe’s father, husband and two brothers were Calvinist clergymen. Stowe believed the power of Christian love could destroy slavery.

Instead, destroying American slavery would require a Civil War.

Helping The Abolitionist Cause

Harriet Beecher-Stowe, American abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Circa 1870. Public Domain

The book helped fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s, at a time when in cities like St. Louis a white man could get lynched just for talking about abolition. Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in 1862 as the Civil War was beginning. The meeting, described as somewhat dull by Stowe, generated an apocryphal story that has Lincoln greeting Stowe, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

The role the book played in helping end slavery has been somewhat obscured by controversy over the stereotypes it engendered. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19th century in the United States, surpassed only by the Bible.

Stowe published numerous works in her lifetime.

Stowe wrote 30 books, including 11 novels, three travel memoirs and collections of both non-fiction articles and works of fiction.

Later Years And A Tragic Decline

However, Uncle Tom’s Cabin would come back to haunt her at the end of her life.

Harriet’s health declined rapidly after her husband, Calvin Stowe, died in 1886 at their home in Hartford, Connecticut.

In 1888, she was hard at work on Uncle Tom’s Cabin – for a second time. Stowe was 77 when she rewrote the novel verbatim, believing it was happening for the first time. She reportedly was excited, talking about her hope the book would be successful.

“She imagined that she was engaged in the original composition, and for several hours every day she industriously used pen and paper, inscribing long passages of the book almost exactly word for word,” according to an unbylined article published in 1888 in the Washington Post. “Even to the kind of pen, paper and ink used, Mrs. Stowe repeated the first composition, and if the manuscript could be compared with the corresponding portions of the original copy it is not likely that much difference of appearance would be discovered.”

The Freaks of Fancy Produced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Illness
http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/articles/n2ar19cmt.html 15 September 1888

Mark Twain was Stowe’s neighbor in Hartford. Twain wrote of Stowe’s final years in his autobiography.

“Her mind had decayed, and she was a pathetic figure. She wandered about all the day long in the care of a muscular Irish woman. Among the colonists of our neighborhood the doors always stood open in pleasant weather. Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect.” https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofm00twai_0/page/438/mode/2up

Uncle Tom’s Cabin obviously had such a powerful effect on Stowe that in the grip of apparent dementia it worked its way out of her a second time late in life. Researchers speculate she had Alzheimer’s disease and given the outward symptoms this seems quite plausible.

Stowe’s mind died, but not her body. She would live another eight years after writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the second time. Anyone who has dealt with a loved one with dementia can well imagine what a nightmare Stowe’s final years may have been.

Stowe died in Hartford, 1 July 1896, 17 days after her 85th birthday.