The Proslavery Social Problem Novel: Maria J. Mcintosh’s Narrative of Reform in the Plantation South

This essay reinterprets a little-studied proslavery novel, Maria J. McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1852), in the context of transatlantic debates over slavery and the global economy during the 1850s. I argue that The Lofty and the Lowly functions as a medium through which McIntosh attempts to reconcile two very different ideologies that circulated within antebellum southern society: the impulse toward economic (and thereby social) progress, and the desire to maintain a “traditional” South structured around slavery. To do so, McIntosh adapts the form of popular British social problem and industrial novels in order to bring slavery into conversation with modern modes of free market capitalism. Ultimately, this reading utilizes the intersection of economic history and literary genre as a way to highlight the centrality of debates over slavery to national and international discussions of economic modernization in the nineteenth century.