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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) - original name Harriet Elisabeth Beecher |
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American writer and philanthropist, best-known for the famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52). Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the work in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the return of slaves and giving shelter or assistance to an escaped slave became a crime. The old man, "Uncle Tom" of the title is bought and sold three times and finally beaten to death by his last owner. The book was quickly translated into nearly 40 languages and it sold in five years over half a million copies in the United States alone. Play adaptations, "Tom shows" of the novel had a phenomenal success, too. "Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk of twilight. The grey mist of evening rising slowly from the river, enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and the swollen current and floundering masses of ice presented a hopeless barrier between her and her pursuer. Haley, therefore, slowly and discontentedly returned to the little tavern, to ponder further what was to be done. The woman opened to him the door of a little parlour, covered with a rag carpet, where stood a table with a shining black oil-cloth, sundry lank, high-backed wood chairs, with some plaster images, in resplendent colours, on the mantel-shelf, above a very dimly-smoking grate; a long hard-wood settle extended its uneasy length by the chimney, and here Haley sat him down to meditate on the instability of human hopes and happiness in general." (in Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly, New Illustrated Edition, with Frontispiece by John Gilbert, Ornamental Title-page by Phiz, and 150 Engravings on Wood by Matthew Urlwin Sears, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, MDCCCLIII, p. 72) Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, into a large family. She had two sisters (Catharine and Mary), one half-sister (Isabella), five brothers (William, Edward, George, Henry Ward, and Charles), and two half-brothers (Thomas and James). Harriet herself was the seventh child of her parents, Lyman and Roxana Beecher. "Wisht it had been a boy!" said her father to a neighbor after her birth. (Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Beecher Preachers by Jean Fritz, Scolastic, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994, p. 7) Lyman was a controversial Calvinist preacher, a fiery man who saw himself as a soldier of Christ. Roxana, a granddaughter of General Andrew Ward, died of tuberculosis at 41 – Harriet was four at that time. Two years later a stepmother took over the household. Stowe was named after her aunt, Harriet Foote, who influenced deeply
her thinking, especially with her strong belief in culture. Samuel
Foote, her uncle, encouraged her to read works of Lord Byron and Sir
Walter Scott. At night, she listened to the wind whistling through the
chimneys and rats scratching in the walls of the old house. When Stowe was eleven, she entered the seminary at Hartford, Connecticut, kept by her elder sister Catharine. The school had advanced curriculum and she learned languages, natural and mechanical science, composition, ethics, logic, mathematics, subjects that were generally taught to male students. Four years later she was employed as an assistant teacher. Her father married again – he became the president of lane Theological Seminary. Catharine and Harriet founded a new seminary, the Western Female Institute. With her sister Stowe wrote a children's geography book. In 1834 Stowe began her literary career when she won a prize contest of the Western Monthly Magazine, and soon Stowe was a regular contributor of stories and essays. Her first book, The Mayflower, appeared in 1843. In 1836 Stowe married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at her
father's theological seminary. He was a widower; his late wife had been
Stowe's friend. The early years of their marriage were marked by
poverty. Over the next 14 years Stowe had 7 children. In 1850 Calvin
Stowe was offered a professorship at Bowdoin, and they moved to
Brunswick, Maine. In Cincinnati Stowe had come in contact with fugitive
slaves. She learned about life in the South from her own visits there
and saw how cruel slavery was. In addition the Fugitive Slave Law,
passed by Congress in 1850, arose much protest. "In 1850 was passed the
cruel fugitive slave law. What deeds were done then! Then to our free
states were transported those scenes of fear and agony before acted
only on slave soil. Churches were broken up. Trembling Christians fled.
Husbands and wives were separated." (A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853, p. 215) And finally a personal tragedy, the death of her infant Samuel from cholera, led Stowe to compose her famous novel. Stowe's series of fictional sketches of slaves were first published in the anti-slavery newspaper The National Era, from June 1851 to April 1852, and later collected in a book form; the first print run was 5,000 copies. In the preface to the European edition of the novel in 1852 Stowe maintained that compromise on slavery was no longer possible. Attacks on the veracity of her portrayal of the South led Stowe to publish A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), in which she presented her source material. Stowe's vision of the South remained a sore point among many Southerners. Eventually the book was buried by Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. To some extent Stowe's
stories were based on true events and in addition to the life of Josiah
Henson, who had been born into slavery, and after escaping to
Canada told his story in his autobiography, published in 1849. According to her son, she often remarked: "I
could not control the story, the Lord himself wrote it. I was but an instrument in his hands and to Him should be given all the praise. (Studies in American and British Literature by Inez N. McFee, Chicago: A. Flanagan Company, 1905, p. 259) A popular anecdote claims that when
the author met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1862 the president
joked, "So this is the little lady who made this big war?" (Runaway to Heaven: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stone by Johanna Johnston, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1963, p. 357) Stowe was less than five feet high. Stowe's fame opened her doors to the national literary magazines. She started to publish her writings in The Atlantic Monthly and later in Independent and in Christian Union. For some time she was the most celebrated woman writer in The Atlantic Monthly and
in the New England literary clubs. In 1853, 1856, and 1859 Stowe made
journeys to Europe, where she became friends with Elisabeth Barrett Browning and Lady Byron. Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies in Great Britain than in America in the first year of its publication. However, the British public opinion turned against her when she stated in 'The
True Story of Lady Byron's Life' (1869) that Byron "fell into the depths
of a secret
adulterous intrigue with a blood relation, so near in consanguinity
that discovery must have been utter ruin and expulsion from civilized
society. From henceforth, this damning guilty secret became the ruling
force in his life, holding him with a morbid fascination, yet filling
him with remorse and anguish and insane dread of detection." Stowe
referred to Byron's half-sister. The article appeared in Macmillan's Magazine and in the September issue of Atlantic Monthly. Stowe further challenged the image of Byron in Lady Byron Vindicated (1870). The polemic caused nothing but trouble for both the Atlantic Monthly and Stowe. To evade the czarist censor Uncle Tom's Cabin was smuggled into Russia in Yiddish. Leo Tolstoy listed it in What Is Art? (1898) as an example of the highest art, "flowing from love of God and man". (What Is Art?
by Leo Tolstoy, translated from the original ms., with an introduction
by Aylmer Maude, New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company. 1904, p. 166). However, when Tolstoy first read the book he did not draw
parallels between the slaves on his own estate and the situation of
slaves in the novel, but wrote in a diary entry: "It's true
that slavery is an evil thing, but ours is a very benevolent evil." (Tolstoy by A. N. Wilson, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988, p. 102) Even after the Revolution, the novel remained enormously
popular in the Soviet Union, where more than one hundred editions have been published since 1857. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Stowe's second novel, told about a two Southern slave-owning families, and plotting a slave rebellion. The title character was inspired by Nat Turner, who lived in the Dismal Swamp after escaping from a plantation; the Appendix includes Turner's famous confessions. George Eliot reviewed the novel positively in the Westminster Review – she found it was clearly "animated by a vehement polemical purpose." (American World Literature: An Introduction by Paul Giles, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019, p. 96) These two authors never actually met, they corresponded over many years, and Stowe invited Eliot to visit her in the USA: "Don't be afraid of the ocean, now! I've crossed it six times, and assure you it is an overrated item. . . . Besides, we have the fountain of eternal youth here, that is, in Florida, where I live, and if you should come you would both of you take a new lease of life, and what glorious poems, and philosophies, and what not, we should have." ('September 26, 1872,' Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals by Her Son, Charles Edward Stowe, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889, p. 472) In Uncle Tom's Cabin the pious old Uncle Tom is sold by his well-intentioned Kentucy owner, Mr. Shelby, who has fallen into debts. The trader also singles out little Harry, Eliza's child, but Eliza takes Harry and heads for the river. Uncle Tom submits to his fate. He is bought first by the idealistic Augustine St Clare after saving her daughter, Little Eva, who falls from the deck of a riverboat. In his New Orleans house, Uncle Tom makes friends with Eva's black friend, the impish Topsy, who says: ". . . never had no father, nor mother, nor nothin'. I was raised by a speculator, with lots of others." (Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly, p. 266) Eva dies from a weakened constitution, and St. Clare is killed in an accident – he is stabbed while trying to separate two brawling men. Tom is sold to the villainous Simon Legree, a Yankee and a brutal cotton plantation owner. Two of Uncle Tom's female slaves, Cassy and Emmeline, pretend to escape and go into hiding. Tom will not reveal their whereabouts and Legree has his lackeys Quimbo and Sambo beat the unprotesting Tom to the point of death. Tom forgives them and dies, just as Mr. Shelby's son arrives to buy him back. "Who—who—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" are Tom's final worlds. (Ibid., p. 474) Shelby decides to fight for the Abolitionist cause. A parallel plot centers on Eliza, her little child, and her husband George who escape to freedom in Canada using the 'underground railroad.' Other important characters are Miss Ophelia St. Clare, a New England spinster, and Marks, the slave catcher. Cassy meets on the boat north Madame de Throux, sister of George Harris, Eliza's husband. The Harris family leaves for Africa and George Shelby frees his slaves. After the Civil War the sales of the novel declined. Stowe was criticized for her sentimentality and religiosity of her story. The term 'Uncle Tom' was used pejoratively, meaning white paternalism and black passivity, undue subservience to white people on the part of black people. On the other hand, Tom's passivity was compared to Gandhi's strategy of peaceful resistance. James Baldwin said in 1949 in an essay that Stowe's "book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are sp loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?" ('Everybody's Protest Novel' by James Baldwin, in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994, p. 150) In the 1970s Uncle Tom's Cabin, with its strong female characters, started to attract the attention of feminist critics, but otherwise Stowe had no defenders. Stowe's later works did not gain the same popularity as Uncle Tom's Cabin. She published novels, studies of social life, essays, and a small volume of religious poems. The Stowes lived in Hartford in summer and spent their winters in Florida, where they had a luxurious home. The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Old-Town Folks (1869), and Poganuc People (1878) were partly based on her husband's childhood reminiscences and are among the first examples of local color writing in New England. Poganuc People was Stowe's last novel. Her mental faculties failed in 1888, two years after the death of her husband. She died on July 1, 1896 in Hartford, Connecticut. The earliest film adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were made in 1903. Edwin S. Porter's short film from that year was produced by the Thomas Alva Edison Company.
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