Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (review)

"Tom-Mania" was the phrase coined by The Spectator to describe the fascination in Britain and the US with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). In Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, Sarah Meer considers the "miasma" (7) of texts and products that surrounded Stowe's novel in the mid-nineteenth century. Her goal is to "uncover the 'cultural conversation'" between Stowe's original and "its many offshoots" (8). What she finds is that "Tom-Mania" drew on "traditions and motifs derived from outside the novel [that] recur as often as elements created by Stowe herself" (7). "Tom-Mania" was so powerful that it, and not the novel itself, "produced the meaning of Stowe's book" (8) in the popular imagination.

The main argument running through the volume is that Stowe drew on the minstrel tradition, particularly stock elements such as the "end man-interlocutor exchange" (12), and that this tradition is responsible for Uncle Tom's subsequent "ambiguities," "amorphousness," and "adaptability" (17). Meer goes so far as to attribute some of the success of the novel to "its debts" to blackface and the minstrel tradition: "blackface elements . . . can be seen to form part of the secret of Uncle Tom's broad popularity and apparently infinite adaptability" (11–12). She discusses minstrelsy's ambiguity about race and its demeaning representation of black people, but she also argues that Stowe's "radical use" of blackface elements "enable[d] fantasies of revolt" and "comically upset bourgeois values" (11–12). Because it was mediated by the minstrel form, Stowe's message, for Meer, "both advocated emancipation and licensed a plethora of racist imitators" (13).

Meer spends her initial four chapters discussing Uncle Tom's Cabin in the US. She traces and unpacks the use of minstrelsy within the novel, examines variations of the novel in minstrel shows, and looks at anti-Tom novels and theatrical versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In doing so, she attends to the ways that politics, form, and commerce produced adaptations that "ditch Stowe's domestic brand of defiance" and err "disturbingly on the side of racial denigration" (129).

The middle three chapters focus on Uncle Tom's cultural progeny in Britain; Victorianists will find these sections especially compelling. In the first of these, Meer discusses theatrical versions of the novel, with careful attention to the material and cultural specificity of British theater, to the range of Tom plays and audiences, and to the particular "cultural niche" (151) minstrelsy occupied in Britain. She describes the Tom plays as "a cross-class, even a family entertainment" (151) that, with their Cockney characters, were as much about class as they were about race, "testing the sympathies that blackface shows had already set up between London laborers" (151) and American slaves. The plays were an odd conjunction of "sentimentality, patriotism and antislavery opinions" in which the audience could celebrate slave rebellions secure in the "superiority of British laws and attitudes" while also laughing at "images of dim, deceitful, and inherently comical blacks" (158).

The next chapter explores the Stafford House Address; the Penny Offering; Stowe's association with Lord Shaftesbury and the Duchess of Sutherland; Stowe's travel book, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854); as well as stage performances by the black singer Elizabeth Greenfield and actress Mary Webb. Meer again reveals how Stowe's novel and its permutations via "Tom-Mania" "provoked questions about Anglo-American relations" (164) and raised issues of race, class, and gender. Meer also notices how African-American abolitionists and performers working in Britain struggled to balance attempts to capitalize on and to escape from the heavy shadow of Uncle Tom's success in order to garner attention for their own work, while anti-Tom material, such as Ebenezer Starnes's novel The Slaveholder Abroad (1860), depicted the American slave in Britain as a "blackface fool" (182) so as...