The Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852–2002

Claire Parfait

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754655145
• eBook ISBN: 9781351883399
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Uncle Tom's Cabin continues to provoke impassioned discussions among scholars; to serve as the inspiration for theater, film, and dance; and to be the locus of much heated debate surrounding race relations in the United States. It is also one of the most remarkable print-based texts in U.S. publishing history. And yet, until now, no book-length study has traced the tumultuous publishing history of this most famous of antislavery novels. Among the major issues Claire Parfait addresses in her detailed account are the conditions of female authorship, the structures of copyright, author-publisher relations, agency, and literary economics. To follow the trail of the book over 150 years is to track the course of American culture, and to read the various editions is to gain insight into the most basic structures, formations, and formulations of literary culture during the period. Parfait interrelates the cultural status of this still controversial novel with its publishing history, and thus also chronicles the changing mood and mores of the nation during the past century and a half. Scholars of Stowe, of American literature and culture, and of publishing history will find this impressive and compelling work invaluable.

Chapter 1
From Inception to Serialization

“Will Writing Pay?”: Stowe's Early Career

Yes, writing will pay, just as any profession will pay, after you have learned it... Young writers must begin by giving away their writing while they are learning to write. In fact, some who are reaping large incomes now from writing began by sending articles to magazines, with no other expectation of remuneration than the insertion of them.¹

Stowe was essentially quoting from her own experience when, over a decade after the resounding success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she provided this answer to the queries of would-be women writers in Hearth and Home, a magazine she was co-editing with writer Donald G. Mitchell. The increasing division between the domestic (female) and public (male) spheres linked to industrialization and the concomitant decline of the economic role of women in the household, which Ami Douglas calls "feminine disestablishment," meant that the only jobs considered socially acceptable for middleclass women were connected to education—teaching—or those that could be carried out within the confines of the home: sewing or writing.² In her largely autobiographical novel. Ruth Hall, Stowe's former student Fanny Fern (the pen name of Sara Willis Parton) explores the above three avenues of employment before settling on a successful career as a writer.³

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher, born in 1811, daughter of the famous New England Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and sister of educator Catharine Beecher, was educated at the Litchfield Female Academy, and later at her sister's Female Seminars in Hartford, Connecticut, where she also began a career as a teacher. Stowe taught in Hartford until 1832. the year Lyman Beecher took most of the family to Cincinnati, where he had accepted the position of Head of Lane Theological Seminary. Stowe taught in Catharine's new school in Cincinnati until her marriage with Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical literature at Lane Seminary, in 1836.⁴

In 1833, Stowe authored a textbook entitled Primary Geography for Children.⁵ If this first published writing was initiated by Catharine, who had long complained about the lack of good geography textbooks,⁶ Stowe's literary apprenticeship proper took place under the auspices of the Semi-Colon Club. A social and literary club founded in Cincinnati in the late 1820s, it included both men and women. The club met once a week to hear and discuss the mostly-anonymous submissions of its members, and the evenings usually closed with a dance.⁷ Stowe submitted her essays and sketches to the Semi-Colon, which provided her with the first of innumerable periodical publications, in the form of the Western Monthly, edited by Judge James Hall, who was also a club member. Caroline Lee Hentz, yet another Semi-Colon member and also a contributor to the Western Monthly, was to produce one of the numerous pro-slavery fictional answers to Uncle Tom's Cabin (The Planter s Northern Bride, 1854).

In 1834, the Cincinnati weekly Chronicle, also published by a member of the Semi-Colon Club, began to reprint Stowe's essays and sketches from the Western Monthly, and in 1835 she started writing for The Evangelist (New York), a religious periodical, which often reprinted pieces from the Chronicle. The circulation of articles and stories from one periodical to another was extremely common and represented one way for writers to become, if not wealthy, at least better known, as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin was to explain to aspiring women writers in Hearth and Home in the late 1860s; although she quoted Hawthorne as a model, her own case could have served just as well to illustrate her point:

A young man (or woman), unknown, and without patronage or means of putting himself forward, writes a sketch or article, and sends it to a paper. If there is anything in it, he hears from it. Somebody is pleased, and lets him know it. The piece, perhaps, is copied into another paper, into a third; by and by, it goes traveling round the country. The paper he sent it to, seeing that it takes, writes for more of the same sort.⁸

While Stowe had started writing for pleasure, she continued to do so in order to supplement her husband's income. Between 1836 and 1851, when she began work on Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe bore seven children—one of them, little Charley, succumbed to cholera in 1849. Calvin's salary, which decreased in the late 1830s as a result of both the 1837 financial crisis and problems at Lane Seminary, was insufficient to cover all household expenses as well as domestic help, which itself represented a hefty portion of the overhead of the household.⁹ In 1837, for instance,Stowe spent $220 on a wet nurse and a servant, 20 per cent of her husband's annual salary.¹⁰ To provide additional income, Stowe wrote for periodicals, for giftbooks, or annuals, that is elegantly-bound collections of poems and sketches, ornamented with engravings, which became the rage in both England and the United States in the 1820s.¹¹ That she wrote for money was unambiguously stated in her private correspondence. In 1838, she wrote her friend Mary Dutton, "if you see my name coming out everywhere—you may be sure of one thing, that I do it for the pay." Stowe had decided to become a professional writer, and had no doubt of success. She evidently had little difficulty reconciling her activity as a writer and her socially-prescribed duties as a homemaker. She rejected the conventions of her time (by refusing to become, in her own words, "a mere domestic slave") and the letter to Mary Dutton conveys her dislike for domestic responsibilities. At the same time, she justified her writing career on the grounds that it allowed her the means by which she could best provide for her family, a concern that fitted perfectly into the cult of "true womanhood."¹²

Between 1833—when both her geography textbook and the first contribution to the Western Monthly were published—and this 1838 letter, Stowe had turned from a timid literary amateur apprentice into a budding professional writer. Far from opposing his wife's schemes. Calvin encouraged her to write, and even went so far as to suggest the name she should sign to her writings:

[... ] drop the E out of your name, which only encumbers it and stops the flow and euphony, and write yourself only and always, Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is a name euphonious, flowing, & full of meaning; and my word for it, your husband will lift up his head in the gate, and your children will rise up and call you blessed.¹³

Calvin's support reflects the pride he felt in his wife's talents as an author. Comparing her to Swedish writer Frederika Bremer, whom he had just met, he told his wife, "You are a beauty to her, & can write better into the bargain, besides giving birth to so many bright, smart children!"¹⁴ Calvin also believed in the positive influence his wife's writings could exert on her contemporaries; in reference to a magazine to which she contributed, he assured her, "You have it in your power, by means of that little magazine, to form the mind of the West for the coming generation."¹⁵ Finally, Calvin, who at first viewed his wife's earnings as "pocket money,"¹⁶ gradually came to rely on his wife's earnings. When he was offered a position at his alma mater, Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 1850, he discussed the matter with his wife. The salary he was offered was low, $1,000 a year and, as he explained to Reverend Professor Upham, their expenses would exceed his income by $200 or $300. His wife could make it up by writing but she did not want to feel obliged to: "No—and she shall not feel so, while God gives me strength and opportunity to earn a living for my family."¹⁷ Hardly a year later, Calvin had changed his mind: the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, he wrote Reverend Justin Edwards, "has so changed my prospects in respect to Seminary matters, that another professorship with higher salary is not necessary to myself personally, as it was a year ago."¹⁸ Uncle Tom's Cabin had turned "pocket money" into a steady income that would increasingly supplement Calvin's salary.

Encouraged by Calvin,¹⁹ Stowe continued to write in the 1840s, because money was constantly in short supply. She sometimes chafed under the obligation to earn. and Calvin's letter to Professor Upham had been prompted by a letter from his wife in which she reassured Calvin that she could easily make up the few hundred that they would need to supplement his salary from Bowdoin and yet, as she told him, "[...] I don't want to feel obliged to work as hard every year as I have this—I can earn two hundred by writing but I don't want to feel that I must & when weary with teaching children tending baby buying provision settling bills cutting out clothes still to feel that I must write a piece for some paper ...."²⁰ Stowe wrote the letter at a time when she had almost single-handedly organized the house in Brunswick, had been delivered of her seventh and last child, and was, with her sister Catharine, co-managing a small school under her own roof. Calvin had stayed behind in Cincinnati, waiting until a replacement could be found for him at Lane Seminary. Stowe's letter is the thinly-veiled reproach an overworked woman—a housewife doubling as a professional writer—addresses to her husband. Stowe was gradually to become the chief breadwinner for the family, then its sole earner after Calvin retired in the early 1860s. She was fully aware of her responsibility, occasionally complained—"I work like a dray horse"²¹—and often worried that sickness might prevent her from writing, as she explained to one of her daughters in 1863: "... if my health fails, all will fail. For your father depends so on me for his very life and all the affairs are in my hands that if my health gives out there will be a general break up."²² At the same time, and for much of her writing career, Stowe depended upon her husband for advice and encouragement.

While not all mneteenth-centuiy women writers took up ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 From Inception to Serialization
• 2 Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Contract
• 3 "The Story of the Age": Advertising and Promotion
• 4 Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Book, 1852-1853
• 5 Distribution and Sales, 1852-1863
• 6 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1863-1893
• 7 Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1893-1930
• 8 Eclipse and Renaissance: Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1930-2002
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• Index