Professor Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom's Cabin Professor Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible.[ It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the United States; one million copies were sold in Great Britain.] Eight power presses, running incessantly, could barely keep up with the demand. In 1855, three years after it was published, it was called "the most popular novel of our day."The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, he declared, "So this is the little lady who started this great war."The quote is apocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it has been argued that "the long-term durability of Lincoln's greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals ... to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change."The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people. These include the affectionate, dark-skinned "mammy"; the "pickaninny" stereotype of black children; and the "Uncle Tom", or dutiful, long-suffering servant faithful to his white master or mistress. In recent years, the negative associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a "vital antislavery tool."