Harriot Beecher Stowe

 Harriot Beecher Stowe 

Who to choose or should that be whom to choose?

Sometimes in meetings or dinner parties or staff rooms when the conversation revolved around new curtains or fitted carpets or even someone's new car I, in my pomposity would try to introduce as I thought more interesting topics. One was ,"How many coutries are there in Africa?" Few people knew. Most guesses were way off the mark. I also  asked who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?  The answer I frequently got was Mark Twain. As I am sure that in this room you all know that it was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This leads me to my first mini biography. 

I went to an all girls’ Grammar school and have often wondered throughout my reading life why many of the interesting world changing women never featured in my education. ‘They’ say that we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. I never knew and still don’t who ‘they’ are but here is one woman writer and  activist on whose shoulders we are standing.

She was a woman of tremendous insight, wisdom and compassion. She had six children, ran a large household, campaigned tirelessly against slavery and after her husband’s death supported the household financially by her writing.

In 1850 an act was passed which mandated that the slaves who escaped to freedom in the North be returned to their masters. Stowe was outraged and she was moved to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly. It was first published as a serial in an abolitionist newspaper, the National Era. Her aim she said was to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible, slavery in all its reverses and changes.

Unlike the modest reception anticipated by Stowe the book was a publishing phenomenon. In 1852 the year of publication 5,000 copies sold in two days and 20,000 copies were sold in less than three weeks. Estimates say that three million copies were sold in the United States and it was translated into many languages. When ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’ was first published it sold more quickly than any book ever printed except the bible. 

She was recognised at the time. Longfellow wrote, ‘How she is shaking the world with Uncle Tom’s Cabin…..Never was there such a literary coup-de-main as this.’ The English historian Thomas Macaulay called it,  ‘the most valuable addition  America has ever made to English literature.’ Tolstoy considered it the highest achievement of moral art and put it on the same level as  Les Miserable and  A Tale of Two Cities. Theatre stages were flooded with dramatisations and continued to be performed until 1930. It was the first American best seller. Puritan prejudice which considered fiction as worthless entertainment was changed. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was used to convince the legislators of the evils of slavery. Abraham Lincoln referred to her as, ‘The little lady who had made this big war.’  

So what changed? The book moved millions but it seems that the overt appeals to emotion and it’s political message caused it to be labelled propaganda and was therefore considered of little merit. I have also heard the arguments that it is now considered racist because of the stereotyping. But her aim was to open peoples eyes to the evils of slavery and this she achieved in a forceful way.

Jane Tompkins in the Heath Anthology of American Literature calls it ‘the most powerful book written by an American’. So, why has it not come down to us as an American literary classic? Could it possibly be that it is because she was a woman? What a pity, no what a tragedy, that it has been excluded from classical literature.

Harriet was more than the woman who wrote ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. 

‘The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe’  was written in her life time at her request by her son Charles. He was able to use her letters and journals so she considered it to be autobiographical. In it we learn of the active life she lead, of the campaigns she fought and the interesting people of her time with whom she corresponded, George Elliot for example.  

Quotes

If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it 

Women are the real architects of society.

 "Common sense is seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be."

"Most mothers are instinctive philosophers."