I read it as a child. And now I look at how wordy Beecher Stowe’s unexpurgated version is, I’m pretty sure that it must have must been an abridged version that the 10 or 11 year old me read. Then Petroc Trelawny recently remarked on Radio 3 (I can’t remember the context) that nobody reads Uncle Tom’s Cabin any more. “Watch me,” I thought and ordered a paperback, since my late husband’s old copy, inscribed by a Deptford ancestor in 1854, was too foxed to see clearly and rather too fragile to handle.
Well in literary terms it isn’t much of a novel. Published in 1852, it was written with one intention: to expose the evils of slavery. It’s overtly didactic (the final chapter is effectively a sermon), characterisation often relies on stereotype and the plotting is weak. There are far too many characters whose lives don’t really intersect. They’re there to reinforce the Beecher Stowe message – and it’s an intensely powerful, painful one. That’s the whole point.
Moreover, it’s full of what has become the most emotive word in English because that’s how black people were referred to. It was also how most of them refereed to each other. In 1852 it was a descriptor rather than an insult. It’s no good getting vexed about it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (I reviewed Joan D Hedrick‘s biography in 1994 when I was doing a fair amount of work for Literary Review) came from a family of evangelical preachers and married a theologian. They lived in Maine where she, aged 39, in 1850 was bringing up five children and expecting another while writing bland, pious, short stories in her spare time. Slavery had already been abolished in the British Empire in 1833 and she fretted angrily about its continuation in the southern US states. Uncle Tom’s Cabin hammers home its evangelical agenda with commendable energy, even when it lacks plausibility.
It tells many stories, often clumsily left and returned to, like a poorly structured TV soap. The central character is the titular Tom although he disappears from view for quite long stretches. He and his family live happily together in Kentucky, the property of a Mr Shelby. Tom is decently treated, has a lot of responsibility and is, at a stretch, almost a family friend. But people in his position are never totally secure. Shelby gets into debt. Tom is his most valuable asset so, reluctantly, he is “sold down the river” – an expression I doubt I’ll ever be able to use again in the casual modern sense of being let down or conned. And every slave knows that conditions down in, for example, New Orleans are often appalling. Actually Tom strikes lucky with his first southern owner, a complicated man who doesn’t really believe in the system he’s trapped in so his servants/slaves have a pretty free rein. Beecher Stowe captures his position rather well although the lengthy discussions with his abolitionist cousin from the North are laboured. At least he has a sense of humour, though and that’s rare in this novel. Then the worst happens because the benign owner dies and his unfeeling widow simply sells Tom (and others) to the highest bidder. The outcome is deeply, hideously distressing.
The thing about Tom, though, is his Christ-like commitment to forgiveness and wanting everyone to repent of their sins and go the heaven he believes in so passionately – despite the terrible things they do to him. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. His pious passivity gets wearing.
Punctuating this narrative are many other stories quite vividly told. Cassie, with her long experience of sexual abuse is a strong character. Eva, though, is much too saccharine for the modern reader – she takes almost us into allegory territory. Even Dickens (Bleak House was published the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin) would never have sentimentalised a child quite as much as Beecher Stowe does sickly, golden haired Eva.
By far the best character in the novel is Topsy. Her defensive truculence and vulnerability are instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever worked with troubled children although her dramatic path to Christian redemption and a better life doesn’t quite ring true. It reminds me, in a sense, of Mad Margaret in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore: “I’ve given up all my wild proceedings”. But that, of course, is meant to be a comedy.
It’s easy to find fault with Uncle Tom’s Cabin but it’s worth reading for what it achieved. It sold 10,000 copies in its first week. Within a year nearly 300,000 had been sold in America and close to a million in England – including the one bought by, or given to, my husbands’ forebear. Many translations meant that by 1860 Beecher Stowe was the most famous writer in the world. And, thank goodness, it changed the way people thought. There is a story that when she met Abraham Lincoln in 1862 he said “Oh and here’s the little lady who started this great war”. It’s probably apocryphal but it summarises the feeling during America’s Civil War which was largely predicated on the slavery issue. Slavery was formally abolished in the US in 1865 but, as we all know, the ensuing battle for true equality continues. The aftermath of slavery is still with us 174 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall
