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

“The Creator of ‘Uncle Tom’ ” (1911)

M [264] “The Creator of ‘Uncle Tom’” (1911) Anonymous The centennial of Stowe’s birthday in 1911 was marked by several celebrations across the United States, including one at Fisk University, where Stowe’s son Charles Edward Stowe gave the commencement address.1 A number of newspapers and magazines published articles about her life and career, including the New York Observer and Chronicle and the Independent, in which Stowe had published many articles and stories. In one of several articles in the New York Times, the author rather flatly observed that Stowe was “not a great or original thinker” but called Uncle Tom’s Cabin “a good story, a novel of exceptional spirit and force.”2 An article mostly devoted to Stowe’s writing in the Washington Post termed Uncle Tom’s Cabin “an epoch maker in an epochmaking day.”3 In an admiring article in the New England Magazine, the writer and playwright Constance D’Arcy Mackay recounted the familiar details of Stowe’s life and stressed her achievements as a writer despite the demands of her family. The major event of that centennial year was the appearance of a new family biography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life, by Stowe’s son and grandson, Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe. As Charles Edward Stowe had done in his earlier biography, they drew on letters, family papers, and other biographies such as Annie Fields’s Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897) and The Autobiography and Correspondence of Lyman Beecher (1865). The following review of the new biography in the New York Times suggests the extent to which the Beecher family continued to work in the twentieth century to shape the image of Harriet Beecher Stowe as a writer who was first and foremost a wife and a mother. This present year is remarkably full of anniversary days whose recognition quickens the emotions of those whose memories reach back a halfcentury , and for the younger generations clothes historical events with fresher colors. Since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had so much to do with the making of those events, it is very fitting that the centenary of her birthday (June 14th ) should be recognized in this semicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War. Anonymous [265] “The Evening of a Fruitful Life—Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Her Dream Children.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 6 April 1889, p. 140. Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut. A new book4 concerning her life and character is the joint work of her youngest son, Charles Edward Stowe, and her grandson, Lyman Beecher Stowe, and, while a good deal of its material has been drawn from previous volumes about her and her father, her son has been able to add, out of his own recollections, many fresh facts and intimate views. The authors characterize their book very truly when they say that they have not attempted to write an ordinary biography, but rather “the story of a real character ; tell, not so much what she did as what she was, and how she became what she was.” As a chronicle of Mrs. Stowe’s seventy-five years of varied, incessant and untiring labors the book is not at all complete, and the impress it leaves upon the mind is rather scrappy and unsatisfactory, but it does make a remarkably real and vivid picture of the woman herself, of the environment which helped to mould her character and of the conditions which compelled her to do nearly all of her literary work at a tremendous disadvantage . By copious quotations from her letters the authors have allowed her stowe in her own time [266] to reveal much of her own heart and soul; and, for the rest, their intimate knowledge has made it possible for them to interpret actions and facts into the language of character and temperament. Equally successful they have been, also, in which would seem nowadays to be a task of much difficulty—the sympathetic description of a New England Calvinistic household of a century ago. They devote considerable space to the surroundings and influences of Harriet Beecher’s childhood under the strictly orthodox teachings of her father, and they do not make the picture a repellant one. On the contrary, they contrive to put into it so much cheer, good nature and general joyousness that the reader does not once feel that sympathetic pity for the youngsters of the Beecher family to which...