Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mid-Nineteenth Century United States: Pen and Conscience

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was the critical event of literature and race relations in nineteenth century America. No other event had such an impact upon the slavery issue. While Mrs. Stowe wrote the weekly installments (a long serial in an antislavery paper) of Uncle Tom’s Cabin she was living in genteel poverty, the harassed mother of six married to a scholarly but impractical man. A devoted mother who identified with the slave mother, a devout Christian, a skilled and sensitive writer, Stowe was in fact even late in joining the antislavery movement. The historical and social contexts of the novel’s authorship, issuance, and reception are fully explored; characters, plot, sources and critics are examined as well.