"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911

Introduction: The Afterlife of a Book

Introduction the afterlife of a Book in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it . . . —Uncle Tom’s Cabin Between 1851 and the centenary of Stowe’s birth in 1911 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted for disparate ends by editors, publishers, and illustrators as well as other readers—men and women, northerners and Southerners, adults and children, black and white. this study explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of one book. it contributes to a history of reading in the united States by tracing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared and deeply intertwined assumptions about literacy, fiction, childhood, and race. these assumptions reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe’s narrative in the decades following emancipation and the Civil War. When Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared, as installment fiction in an abolitionist weekly paper, it was an ephemeral text in a rapidly expanding market. But Stowe’s tale soon gained the formidable status that St. Clare ironically attributes to tom himself: “all the moral and Christian virtues bound in black morocco complete.”1 the book’s initial popularity can be understood only in relation to what reading once meant as both private act and social practice. Reading was a crucially important activity in the antebellum united States, a site of cultural enthusiasm, conflict, and anxiety. in the 1850s many ministers, educators, and other commentators had deep reservations about fiction, precisely because of its growing popularity. Uncle Tom’s Cabin played an important but neglected role in the process by which the novel became a dominant genre in u.S. literary culture. in tracing that process i clarify the changing place of fiction in american society, and create an intimate view of the reading experience. L 1 2 K Introduction Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have been the most widely read book in the antebellum united States, with the possible exception of the Bible. over the last twenty-five years Stowe’s novel has become one of the most often taught and written-about texts in the u.S. literary canon. Much of the discussion has focused on Stowe’s essentialized understanding of race and the related problem of sentiment as an aesthetic and political strategy. Stowe’s stated aim in the preface to the first edition—“to awaken sympathy”—continues to dominate accounts of the book’s impact.2 Yet sympathy for “the lowly” was only one of many responses to her tale, even in the 1850s. While many antebellum readers closely followed Stowe’s instructions—using her novel to renew their Christian faith and sympathizing with the “poor slaves” (while maintaining their own sense of difference)—other readers violated her famous imperative to “feel right” by allowing a book to absorb them to a degree that (in theory) Stowe herself would not have approved. Such readers temporarily collapsed the imaginative distance between themselves and endangered slave figures. this kind of reading went beyond sympathy and contemplation ; it violated Stowe’s guidelines for reading and veered dangerously close to the loss of self and reality-sense that stirred anxiety in ministers, educators , and other anti-fiction commentators. in 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not only a novel that represented slavery as a moral and political atrocity; it was also an unprecedented publishing phenomenon . White northerners wept and could not put the book down; they neglected work and other obligations to finish it. Southerners often went to some lengths to obtain the novel, and read it surreptitiously. abolitionists considered the tale a significant asset, while Southern reviews and anti-tom narratives expressed outrage, confirming the book’s divisive racial, sectional, and political potential.3 By the 1890s, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had become a different story. Between the Civil War and the 1880s, Stowe’s novel was not much reprinted .4 immediately after the war slavery and sectional strife were unpopular subjects. the end of Reconstruction (1877) triggered hopes for social stability and the desire to look forward, not back. Writers, educators, and former abolitionists soon began to voice guarded optimism about developments in african american education and free enterprise in the “new South.”5 however , as discrimination increased in the north and racial violence in the South, L 3 Introduction optimism was replaced by anxiety about the long-term legacy of slavery and the war. interest in Uncle Tom...