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L 131 5 Sentiment without tears uncle tom’s Cabin as History in the Wake of the Civil War . . . now that slavery is only a historic thing, while peace and complete reunion assure the calmness needed for true criticism, we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin with clearer eyes . . . —J. H. Beadle, “Harriet Beecher Stowe” (1889) this chapter explores the renewed appeal of Stowe’s novel for commentators, editors, and publishers toward the end of the century. it also sharpens my focus on two methodological questions that consistently inform this study: how can the paratextual material of individual editions (prefaces, introductions , illustrations) serve as a basis for general claims about the way a text was read and used at a particular historical moment? to what extent can we see the comments and editorial choices of literary professionals as evidence of culturally typical reading practices and as factors that shape the responses of others? these questions come to the fore in this chapter because Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a different book by the 1890s. But while literary professionals agreed on new meanings for Stowe’s tale, other readers demurred. editions are no direct proof of reading habits. in Roger Chartier’s influential formulation, “readers use infinite . . . subterfuges to . . . read between the lines, and to subvert the lessons imposed on them.”1 over the last twenty-five years scholars from a variety of disciplines (history, literature, sociology) have analyzed historically specific acts of reading and effectively explored some of the gaps between a text’s manifest content and the diverse meanings that readers derive.2 Readers may resist the didactic messages or protocol of reading inscribed in a text, along with interpretive guidelines offered by textual accompaniments. they may misunderstand, recast, or refuse explicit prescriptions formulated by teachers, reviewers, and writers of advice literature. nonetheless, prescribed modes of reading are useful indicators of a cultural climate and, when set in diachronic perspective, they reflect shifts in social norms and interpretive conven- 132 K Chapter 5 tions as well as developments in the literary marketplace. Responses by dissenting readers complicate the picture. in the 1880s and ’90s a consensus emerged (among professional white readers ) about why and how Uncle Tom’s Cabin should be read. this consensus had its roots in changing perceptions of slavery, race, the plantation South, and the reconstituted nation. Commentators began to give Uncle Tom’s Cabin partial credit for emancipation and the Civil War when the dust had barely settled. in 1866, an article about gamaliel Bailey, editor of the National Era, praises Uncle Tom’s Cabin as part of the “advance-guard . . . of the armed boats who at last won the victory for humanity.”3 Stowe’s novel was much celebrated in postbellum print culture. at the same time it was selectively reread as a gloss on the benign aspects of slavery, and as evidence for african american docility and loyalty. in the public sphere the book thus served the cause of reunion and tranquility on the one hand, segregation and racism on the other. the reasons for praising Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1880s and ’90s were quite different from those proposed by commentators of the antebellum period. in 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was generally understood to be an evangelical abolitionist text that attacked slavery as a sin and enjoined white readers to look inward, to the state of their souls, as well as outward, to dangerous rifts in the nation’s moral and social fabric. By contrast, late nineteenth-century commentators explained away or skirted both the political and religious agendas of the book. a sketch of Stowe, published in Literature: A Weekly Magazine in 1889, suggests that contemporary readers in the peaceful, reunified united States will find it difficult even to comprehend the tendentiousness of Stowe’s work. underscoring the distance between the antebellum and the postwar nation, the article notes that Stowe’s “intellect reached its maturity in an age of most furious controversy. . . . Slavery and temperance, the divine unity or trinity, grace, free will and predestination, were debated with a heat and bitterness to which this generation is happily a stranger.”4 Many late nineteenthcentury readers were unmoved by Stowe’s evangelical fervor—or uncomfortable with it. a “Biographical Sketch” of Stowe, published in an edition of 1896 explains that the centrality of religion in the society of “harriet Beecher’s . . . girlhood . . . led to an introspection and analysis of motive which often passed into morbid self-consciousness.”5 Both the...

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