Uncle Tom’s Cabin takes the literary world by storm
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s indictment of American slavery is proclaimed “the story of the age”
The impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is almost impossible to exaggerate. Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the mid-19th century, this passionately sentimental indictment of American slavery is often credited with changing millions of people’s minds, not just in the United States but around the world. It sold an estimated 300,000 copies within 12 months in Stowe’s native land; in Britain, even more strikingly, it sold a million.
Yet the book’s origins could hardly have been more obscure. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher and passionate abolitionist, was very far from being a household name when, in 1851, she began sending what she called “sketches” to an anti-slavery newspaper. Later that summer, a Boston religious publisher, John P Jewett, approached her for the book rights to what had become a long-running serial, which Stowe signed over in return for a royalty of 10 per cent.
The final version, entitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, first appeared in bookshops on 20 March 1852. It was “the story of the age”, proclaimed one advert. “For power of description and thrilling delineation of character, it is unrivalled.”
And the public clearly agreed. Some 3,000 copies changed hands on the first day alone, and the first two print-runs disappeared within a fortnight. As Jewett himself remarked: “Three paper mills are constantly at work, manufacturing the paper, and three power presses are working 24 hours per day, in printing it, and more than 100 book-binders are incessantly plying their trade to bind them, and still it has been impossible, as yet, to supply the demand.” Never had there been a phenomenon to match it.