Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

[Stowe and the Success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin]

M [77] [Stowe and the Success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin] J. C. Derby Throughout her life, Stowe was friendly with the editors and publishers of her books. James Cephas Derby (1818–1892) began his career as an apprentice to a publishing firm in Auburn, New York, and eventually formed his own company , J. C. Derby & Company. In 1848, he formed another company, Derby & Miller, and moved to New York City, where he published a variety of books, including biographies, histories, and school books. Derby encouraged the popular Fanny Fern to collect her newspaper articles, and he published her best-selling Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1853). He published Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing in 1859. Derby, who knew Stowe and her family well, included the following chapter on her success in his lengthy autobiography, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books and Publishers (1884). The recollection includes extensive quotations from Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher and discusses, at some length, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the impact of the novel on Stowe and her family in the 1850s. This most famous writer of the Beecher family, and author of the most celebrated work of fiction ever published in America or indeed in the world during the present century, first became well known as an author in 1852, when the world-renowned Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared as a serial in the National Era, an anti-slavery paper then published in Washington. It was afterwards issued in two volumes in book form by John P. Jewett & Co. The sale of nearly a half million of copies in this country alone in five years, is without a parallel; this was more than thirty years ago, and its sale has continued unabated, many thousands being sold annually. That the interest in the story of Uncle Tom does not readily die out, is manifested by the continual representations in the theatres, for which it has often been dramatized. The sale of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in foreign countries is thus graphically described in a long article published in the Edinburgh Review, of April, 1855. Illustration for “Harriet Beecher Stowe” in Our Famous Women (1884), edited by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Love Library, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. J. C. Derby [79] The first London edition was published in May, 1852, and was not large; for the European popularity of a picture of negro life was doubted. But in the following September the London publishers furnished to one house 10,000 copies per day for about four weeks, and had to employ 1,000 persons in preparing copies to supply the general demand. We cannot follow it beyond 1852; but at that time, more than a million copies had been sold in England, probably ten times as many as have been sold of any other work, except the Bible and Prayer Book. In France, “Uncle Tom” still covers the shop-windows of the Boulevards , and one publisher alone, Eustance Barba, has sent out five different editions in different forms. Before the end of 1852, it had been translated into Italian , Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish and Magyar. There are two different Dutch and twelve different German translations, and the Italian translation enjoys the honor of the Pope’s prohibition. It has been dramatized in twenty different forms and acted in every capital in Europe and in the free States of America. The sales abroad have been so large that they cannot be computed, and on them no copyright returns have ever been received by the author. She has, however, something which she values more than the copyright, and that is, in addition to the place assigned her in English literature by the most eminent critics in the world, the letters and addresses which she has received from foreign states, cities and towns as noted below. The following statement appears in a bibliographical account prefixed to a late edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The next step in the history of “Uncle Tom” was a meeting at Stafford House, when Lord Shaftesbury recommended to the women of England, the sending of an “affectionate and Christian address to the women of America.” This address, composed by Lord Shaftesbury, was taken in hand for signatures by energetic canvassers in all parts of England, and also among resident English on the Continent. The demand for signatures went as far as the City of Jerusalem . When they were all collected, the document...