STOWE (Harriet Beecher).
Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or Life Among the Lowly.
FIRST EDITION OF THE ABOLITIONIST LITERARY PHENOMENON
A very good copy of the first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s epic with all the issue points of the first printing.
Stowe was educated first at Litchfield Female Academy and later the Hartford Female Seminary. Proof of her talents were immediately evident in her written work and she found employment at Hartford upon graduation, teaching composition from 1829-32. A handful of things led to the creation of her master work: the suicide of her brother in 1842 led to a Christian re-awakening, which was followed seven years later by the death of her infant son and the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.
“In the emotion-charged atmosphere of mid-ninteenth-century America Uncle Tom’s Cabin exploded like a bombshell. To those engaged in fighting slavery it appeared as an indictment of all the evils inherent in the system they opposed; to the pro-slavery forces it was a slanderous attack on ‘the Southern way of life.’ Whatever its weakness as a literary work - structural looseness and excess of sentiment among them - the social impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the United States was greater than of any book before or since” (PMM).
The novel was initially serialized in the National Era between 5 June 1851 and 1 April 1852. It was printed in book form with an initial print run of 5000, though had “sold more than 300,000 copies in the United States during the first year after it was published” (ADB).
BAL, 19343; PMM, 332; Sabin, 92457.
