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  • Published: 1 November 2000
  • ISBN: 9780679641988
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 656
Categories:

Uncle Tom's Cabin





A bestseller on publication and one of the most influential novels ever written, key in helping to secure the abolition of slavery.

An international bestseller that sold more than 300,000 copies when it first appeared in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was dismissed by some as abolitionist propaganda; yet Tolstoy deemed it a great work of literature 'flowing from love of God and man.'

Today, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe's stirring indictment of slavery if often confused with garish dramatizations that flourished for decades after the Civil War: productions that relied heavily on melodramatic simplifications of character totally alien to the original. Thus 'Uncle Tom' has become a pejorative term for a subservient black, whereas Uncle Tom in the book is a man who, under the most inhumane of circumstances, never loses his human dignity.

'Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most powerful and most enduring work of art ever written about American slavery,' said Alfred Kazin.

  • Published: 1 November 2000
  • ISBN: 9780679641988
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 656
Categories:

About the author

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in 1811, one of ten children of famous minister Lyman Beecher. She moved to Ohio in 1832 and was introduced to the slavery debates, marrying the professor and staunch abolitionist Calvin Stowe with whom she had seven children. In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, punishing anyone who offered runaway slaves food or shelter – she drew on her anger from this to write UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, which first appeared in an abolitionist newspaper and was then published in book form. It was an immediate bestseller, selling ten thousand copies in its first week of publication and going on to become the second biggest bestseller of the nineteenth century after the Bible. It was hugely influential in the abolition debate, and catapulted Stowe into the spotlight. When President Abraham Lincolm met her he is reported to have described her as ‘the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War’. Over the course of her long career she wrote over thirty books and essays, poems and articles. She died in 1896.

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