CHAPTER XX

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896)

SUGGESTED READINGS

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. Uncle Tom's Cabin. (May be obtained in Everyman's Library edition, E. P. Dutton & Company.)

See comment on reading novels on page 125 or page 226.

What is the plot in briefest terms?

Who are the leading four or five characters? In point of goodness or badness are they average or extreme types of people?

What sorts of backgrounds did Mrs. Stowe use? Did she invent these or copy from originals? How do we know?

Whom does Mrs. Stowe resemble more, Cooper or Hawthorne ? Was the story addressed to all Americans or to a definite fraction? Was it written to change opinions, to strengthen them, or both?

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Mrs. Stowe's chief title to fame

The early life of Mrs. Stowe

Girlhood

Cincinnati a New England outpost
Early authorship

The backgrounds for "Uncle Tom"
"Uncle Tom's Cabin"

Circumstances of publication

Mrs. Stowe's fame and influence
A piece of propagandist literature
Chief later novels

"The Minister's Wooing"

The religious theme

The historical background "Oldtown Folks"

Interpretation of New England

Picture of a bygone period

Last years of Mrs. Stowe

Mrs. Stowe's chief title to fame. The name of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is in all likelihood not so well known as the name of her most famous work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Millions upon millions have read her story, both for its interest and because of its place in American history. Yet relatively few have read her other novels, and today those who turn to them do so not so much for their own sakes as because

they contribute a minor chapter in the history of the American novel. She entered literature by the pathway of reform. "The heroic element was strong in me, having come down by ordinary generation from a long line of Puritan ancestry, and ... it made me long to do something, I knew not what: to fight for my country, or to make some declaration on my own account." Then, when the story-telling gift was developed and the reform was accomplished, she continued as a novelist, and a distinctly popular one in her own day.

The early life of Mrs. Stowe-girlhood. She was born in 1811 at Litchfield, Connecticut. Her famous brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was two years younger. After the death of her mother, when she was but four years old, she had a suc

cession of homes during girlhood: first with an aunt, then for some years under her father's roof after his remarriage, and next from 1824 to 1832 with her older sister, Catherine, who had established a school in Hartford. In all these experiences she lived under kindly protection and in somewhat literary surroundings, and in all of them she breathed an atmosphere which was heavy with the old-school Puritan theology. In 1832, when Harriet was twenty-one years old, her father, after a six-year pastorate of a Boston church, went to Cincinnati as president of a theological seminary, and the two sisters joined him there.

Cincinnati a New England outpost. This move into what was then the Far West was not, however, a banishment into the wilds, for Cincinnati was in those days a sort of outpost of Eastern culture. Harriet's father, Lyman Beecher, was one of many liberal Bostonians who lived there for a while. The Ohio River, which flowed by its doors, served as the great highway from the East to the Mississippi Valley. There were literary clubs in the town, good and prolific publishing houses, and, in the Western Monthly, the beginning of a succession of magazines. Catherine wrote back from an advance trip of inspection:

I have become somewhat acquainted with those ladies we shall have most to do with, and find them intelligent, New England sort of folks. Indeed, this is a New England city in all its habits, and its inhabitants are more than half from New England. . . . I know of no place in the world where there is so fair a prospect of finding everything that makes social and domestic life pleasant.

Early authorship. While the father was occupied in his work the two daughters started a school for girls, with the double promise of Catherine's Hartford experience and the type of people among whom they were settling. But Harriet was not to be a schoolmistress for long. In 1833 she was the winner of a fifty-dollar prize in a short-story competition conducted by the Western Monthly, and in 1836 she married the

Reverend Calvin E. Stowe, her father's colleague in Lane Seminary. How she persisted to combine authorship and motherhood in the next sixteen years is a marvel; none the less so because since the days of Anne Bradstreet (see page 27) an occasional woman has succeeded. In 1842 her husband wrote to her: "My dear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book of fate. Get a good stock of health and brush up your mind." In the next year her first volume, a book of selected stories, was published by Harper's; but by 1848 she had become the mother of six children, the oldest only eleven, and no more books had appeared.

The backgrounds for "Uncle Tom." Nevertheless, she was not to sink under the tide of home duties. She had visited in the South, witnessing the more kindly aspects of slavery, and in her own town she had seen the pursuit of fleeing slaves, the conscientious defiance of law by abolitionists, the violence of proslavery mobs, and had feared for the life of her brother, who was reported to have suffered death with his friend Lovejoy when the latter was shot in Alton. In these exciting times she came to feel more and more that her writing must be turned to good account. Toward the end of 1850 Mrs. Stowe came to her great resolve to write something that would arouse the whole nation; and at a communion service in February of 1851 there appeared to her, as in a vision, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin"-circumstances of publication. The story began its appearance in the National Era, an antislavery magazine, June 5, 1851, and was announced to run for three months; but as it was allowed to take its own course it was not actually concluded until April of the next year. Although it had already attracted the widest attention, the question of publication in book form was in some doubt until it was undertaken by an obscure Boston firm (for the Stowes had moved back to New England); and the outcome was so uncertain that the Stowes did not dare to risk half the cost of publication for a prospect of half the proceeds. Yet three thousand copies

were sold on the day of issue, and three hundred thousand in America within the first year. In England, also after a little hesitation, reprinting was soon started, and by the close of the year eighteen different houses had put out forty editions, and in the end a million and a half copies were circulated in Great Britain and the colonies. Various translations soon followed. Mrs. Stowe's fame and influence. Mrs. Stowe's "fortune was made" of course; but of quite as much moment to her was the fact that her influence was made in the great fight in which she was enlisted. In 1853 she sailed for what turned out to be a sort of triumphal tour in Great Britain, in the course of which large sums of money were given her for use in fighting slavery. Moreover, there was value even in the opposition she had aroused. Whittier wrote to Garrison: "What a glorious work Har

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

riet Beecher Stowe has wrought. Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better would it be for slavery if that law had never been enacted; for it gave occasion for 'Uncle Tom's Cabin."" And Garrison wrote in turn to Mrs. Stowe: "I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings. Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you." So much objection was directed at the honesty of the work that the author compiled a "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," in which she presented documentary evidence for every kind of fact used in the story; and of this she was able to write: "Not one fact or statement in it has been disproved as yet. I have yet to learn of even an attempt to disprove."