Uncle Tom's Cabin is the Great American Novel

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has — Not preachy or overdetermined — Reads like the offspring of Dickens and Tolstoy — Yes, it has issues, beginning is uneven — The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book

What if Uncle Tom's Cabin is a better novel than Huckleberry Finn?

This might seem absurd, but surely it merits at least a little thought. Uncle Tom's Cabin was certainly the most widely-read novel of the nineteenth century. It was a huge bestseller in America, to a degree unprecedented before or since, selling 350,000 copies within a few years of publication—whereas The Scarlet Letter perhaps sold around 10,000 and Moby-Dick under 2,000. Thirty years later, Huckleberry Finn would be considered a moderate success with around 50,000 copies sold. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also a bestseller in the UK, reportedly selling a million copies within a few years of publication. In serial form, Dickens would have maybe 50,000 subscribers for his books. Uncle Tom’s Cabin dwarfed even Dickens in popularity. The book was also the best-selling novel of the 19th-century in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Latin America, and in France was second only to Les Miserables.

Okay, but popularity doesn't mean anything. Popular things are often bad.

Except, when it comes to 19th-century novels, that’s usually not true. Many of the most popular 19th-century writers are still read and revered today: Dickens, Hugo, Manzoni, and Tolstoy were the most commercially successful novelists of their respective countries. Only in America have we discounted out of hand our most popular 19th-century novelist.

Uncle Tom's Cabin had an impact on people far in excess of the impact produced by most novels. And that's an impact that you can feel even today! Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, you understand, on a deep level, that there is no goodness which is possible under slavery. That's a result of Harriet Beecher Stowe's art. She depicts a number of slave-owners why try to be good, but they fail, because this system itself is pernicious and dehumanizes people.

When you read the novel, you can feel how fair she’s trying to be to slave-owners. People say Uncle Tom’s Cabin is preachy, but it’s not: the novel has a point of view, yes, but for the most part it allows the system’s badness to be revealed by the actuality of how it operates, in this it's no different from how Dickens treated the Chancery Court in Bleak House.

Why shouldn't Uncle Tom's Cabin be assigned in school? There's not really a great case against it. Instead we get taught Huckleberry Finn, which is an anti-slavery book, yes, but it really downplays the evils of slavery and the extent to which most people actually knew it was wrong. Huckleberry Finn is a great novel, of course, but the book implies that people in antebellum Missouri didn’t really know slavery was wrong.¹ And of course there’s an element of truth to that; it’s hard to get people to understand something if their livelihood depends on them not understanding.

But…Uncle Tom’s Cabin is about an equally great truth, which is that…everyone actually did know slavery was wrong. They could avoid thinking about it, to some extent, but they knew. They knew the truth.

If we want to know about both the best and worst side of our country, we should read Uncle Tom's Cabin. We are a country that practiced slavery and also a country that abhorred it.

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was from a well-known New England clerical family, the Beechers, and she was active in abolitionist circles in Cincinnati. She married a professor of Biblical literature, and she eventually moved with him to Maine, where he taught at Bowdoin College. At some point in 1850 she started writing a tale about the evils of slavery, which was published in weekly installments by her friend Gamaliel Bailey, who edited the anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era. Her story was then published as a two-volume novel by John P. Jewett, who was a well-known publisher of sentimental literature—several years later, he’d also publish The Lamplighter, which I wrote about in my last post.² As mentioned above, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate bestseller, on a level heretofore unprecedented.

Stowe’s novel is about two slaves belonging to the Shelby family of Kentucky. This family has owned these two slaves since they were born, and it has treated them relatively well. These enslaved people, Tom and Eliza, are married (not to each other), maintain their own homes, and seem relatively happy. But…Mr. Shelby has fallen on hard times. One of his mortgages has come into the hands of a slave trader, who is demanding that Mr. Shelby make good on this debt, either in cash or by giving him some slaves. As the narration puts it, regarding slavery in Kentucky:

So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master,—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil,—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.

This is the central theme of the novel. It is not that slave-holders are essentially good or essentially bad. Some are good and some are bad, but this system magnifies the worst in people and makes it very hard to be good. It is the system itself that is evil.

Shelby chooses to sell Tom and to sell Eliza’s son.

But the two slaves react differently: Eliza grabs her son and runs, hoping to reach Kentucky, a free state; in contrast, Tom is a Christian, and he knows that if he runs, then another slave will need to be sold in his place, so he chooses to go willingly with the slave trader.

The rest of the novel alternates between these two stories. On the riverboat taking him south, Tom rescues a little white girl, Eva, from drowning, and is purchased by her indulgent father, Augustine St. Claire. Meanwhile Eliza and her husband, George, make it to Kentucky and, with the help of Quakers and other abolitionists, have to run from a slave-catching patrol.

The book is so fascinating, so fertile. It has such a wide variety of characters. Every type of person is portrayed at least twice. For instance, there’s one slave-trader who is merely business-like in his cruelty, and there’s another, Tom Loker, who seems to take pleasure in being harsh. There’s Mrs. Shelby, who attempts to treat her slaves well, and Mrs. St. Claire, who doesn’t discipline them too much (because her husband won’t allow them), but has no regard for their health and safety, forcing her maid to stay up all night with her. There’s an enslaved woman who becomes an alcoholic (and is eventually whipped to death for it) after her child is taken from her, and there’s Eliza, who picks up her child and hops across the ice, choosing danger over separation. There’s Mr. St. Claire, who loathes slavery, but feels powerless to stop it, and there’s his Northern cousin Ophelia, who hates slavery but feels a revulsion towards Black people—a fact for which St. Claire is eager to call her out:

“You would think no harm in a child’s caressing a large dog, even if he was black; but a creature that can think, and reason, and feel, and is immortal, you shudder at; confess it, cousin. I know the feeling among some of you northerners well enough. Not that there is a particle of virtue in our not having it; but custom with us does what Christianity ought to do,—obliterates the feeling of personal prejudice. I have often noticed, in my travels north, how much stronger this was with you than with us. You loathe them as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs…”

The book is full of speeches, but no more so than Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice. It also contains a few passages where the narrator breaks through in outraged passion, but War and Peace equally abounds in such intrusions. The book is a passionate book, brimming over with life. It’s genuinely quite impressive that this rather genteel woman, who had never written a novel before, was able to capture so many different kinds of people and to fix them so firmly in the reader’s mind. Her talent for creating memorable characters easily rivals that of Dickens.

But she has a moral authority that Dickens only occasionally achieved. Whenever Dickens was genuinely motivated by higher feelings, as with the school in Hard Times or the debtor’s prison in Little Dorrit or the Chancery Court in Bleak House, you can feel his outrage coming through, but ultimately what Dickens wanted was for the world to just be a little better, a little kinder to the unfortunate.

Stowe is animated by quite a different vision. She believes slavery is wrong. She’s not certain whether it’s uniquely wrong—at some point St. Claire compares it to the treatment of workers in industrial England, and the novel allows how maybe slavery is equally bad. There’s murkiness on this point. But Stowe knows that slavery is wrong. There is no goodness possible under slavery.

And she demonstrates this by showing what happens to goodness. She shows how the Shelby family cannot keep their promises to their slaves. She shows how St. Claire is so mired in his comforts that, despite all his higher feelings, he’s both unable to make something of his own life and unable to treat his enslaved workers well. She shows how many enslaved children, like Topsy, are ripped from their parents and raised without morals, so they grow up disturbed, dishonest, and unruly. And she shows how this system almost unerringly, through the magic of commerce, takes slaves from less-productive, gentler masters and directs them steadily into brutal, plantation slavery, where they are under the thumb of hired overseers, like Simon LeGree, who are incentivized to work them into the grave. And she shows how even the slaves with the finest feelings, like Tom and George, are ultimately destroyed precisely because of those feelings, because they live under a system that will not allow an enslaved person to have any pride.

It is a fantastic performance. And one that’s not too different from other novels that’ve reached canonical status. For instance, Middlemarch attempts to show that marriage cannot succeed unless it’s between two people with aligned value systems. In this, it creates three couples: Dorothea and Causubon, Tertius and Rosamund Lydgate, and Mary Garth and Fred Percy, who are all attracted to each other, but who (at least initially) lack the basis for an enduring relationship. Similarly, Anna Karenina aims to show that marriage is a sacred bond that cannot be dissolved, and to this end creates an attractive, vibrant and honorable couple, Anna and Vronsky, so that we can see that even under the best circumstances, adultery can only end in sorrow.

These books have the potential to seem preachy and overdetermined, but they don’t, because the author is willing to test their own moral certainty under the most difficult circumstances. It’s easy to show that if you leave your husband for a cad, then your life will fall apart. But Tolstoy doesn’t do this. He shows even if you leave your husband for an honorable man, it still won’t work! Now, is that actually true, in reality? Not categorically true, no. But there’s certainly an element of truth to it, and that element is what Tolstoy has captured.

Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe knows that slavery is wrong, and that’s why she’s willing to be generous, to entertain many arguments in its favor, and to show that even under the best circumstances, it is harmful to the morals of both slave and master. That is the key to this book. Stowe argues not just that slaves have hard lives, but that this system makes it very hard for both slaves and masters to be good, and, as a result, slavery calls into question their place in the after-life.

In fact, the role of God in this system is a matter of considerable discussion. At one point, Marie St. Claire describes the sermon at Church:

“The text was, ‘He hath made everything beautiful in its season;’ and he showed how all the orders and distinctions in society came from God; and that it was so appropriate, you know, and beautiful, that some should be high and some low, and that some were born to rule and some to serve, and all that, you know; and he applied it so well to all this ridiculous fuss that is made about slavery, and he proved distinctly that the Bible was on our side, and supported all our institutions so convincingly. I only wish you’d heard him.”

Tom, for his part, is animated primarily by his faith in God. For me the book’s most affecting passage occurs when he’s on a slave ship south, attempting to read the Bible, and Stowe compares Tom in his grief to Cicero, attempting to find consolation after the death of his daughter:

Cicero, when he buried his darling and only daughter, had a heart as full of honest grief as poor Tom’s,—perhaps no fuller, for both were only men;—but Cicero could pause over no such sublime words of hope, and look to no such future reunion; and if he had seen them, ten to one he would not have believed,—he must fill his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of manuscript, and correctness of translation. But, to poor Tom, there it lay, just what he needed, so evidently true and divine that the possibility of a question never entered his simple head. It must be true; for, if not true, how could he live?

That’s really the heart of the book. To Stowe (and surely to any reader of this book), it is obvious that enslaved people like Tom are exactly the sorts of people that Christ came to this world in order to save. He is one of the meek who will inherit the Earth. This religion, the religion of his masters, speaks much more deeply and directly to him than it possibly can to them.

It’s such an awe-inspiring, powerful book, full of both artistry and moral fervor. There is no other novel like it in the English language: it is like the child of Dickens and Tolstoy, but it was written before Tolstoy’s great novels came out!

In fact, this book was an influence on Tolstoy (he said it was better than Shakespeare). Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an influence on every single person who published a book after 1852. For at least the next forty years, there was simply no ignoring this book.

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Does the book have problems? It does…but they’re more minor than you might think. A lot of the criticism of the book was distinctly unfair. For instance, a Southern critic, George F. Holmes, wrote that the book’s fault:

…lies in the cruel disparity, both intellectual and physical, which our authoress makes between the white and black races, to the prejudice of the former. The negro under her brush invariably becomes handsome in person or character, or in both, and not one figures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, no matter how benighted or besotted his condition, who does not ultimately get to heaven. But while Mrs. Stowe can thus “see Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt,” she is unable to look upon a white face without tracing in it something sinister and repulsive.

This is flatly untrue. There are Black people in the book who are portrayed in a distinctly negative light, like the amoral Topsy or the vain, shallow footman Dolph. In fact, it serves Stowe’s rhetorical purposes for her to assert that many Black people are morally degraded by slavery, because if they were all Christ figures like Tom then the natural rejoinder would be that slavery is obviously good, because it creates such good people.

Similarly, many white people are portrayed in a positive light. Augustine St. Claire is one of the most likable figures in the book, because he talks about slavery in an intellectually honest way. As he puts it:

“The whole frame-work of society, both in Europe and America, is made up of various things which will not stand the scrutiny of any very ideal standard of morality. It’s pretty generally understood that men don’t aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world. Now, when any one speaks up, like a man, and says slavery is necessary to us, we can’t get along without it, we should be beggared if we give it up, and, of course, we mean to hold on to it,—this is strong, clear, well-defined language; it has the respectability of truth to it; and if we may judge by their practice, the majority of the world will bear us out in it. But when he begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture, I incline to think he isn’t much better than he should be.”

One of the hardest things about the book is the way that Augustine St. Claire ultimately fails Tom and puts him in a situation where Tom can be sold into plantation slavery and come into contact with Simon LeGree. It’s hard to escape the feeling that because St. Claire inherited ownership of several hundred slaves, he was given a moral test that he was too weak to pass (a test most of us probably wouldn’t pass), and that he would’ve been a much better and happier man if all his slaves had been taken from him at some point.

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So I don’t think there’s a believable critique that Stowe is somehow unfair to her characters, either Black or white. But even appreciative critics have often come to the conclusion that there is something lacking in the artistry of the book. George Sand, a French novelist, gave a review of the book, where she wrote:

If the best eulogy which one can make of the author is to love her, the truest that one can make of the book is to love its very faults. It has faults,—we need not pass them in silence, we need not evade the discussion of them,—but you need not be disturbed about them, you who are rallied on the tears you have shed over the fortunes of the poor victims in a narrative so simple and true.

You have to read between the lines with Sand’s review, because it’s so gushing, but the core of the complaint against the book is as follows:

For this book is essentially domestic and of the family,—this book, with its long discussions, its minute details, its portraits carefully studied. Mothers of families, young girls, little children, servants even, can read and understand them, and men themselves, even the most superior, cannot disdain them. We do not say that the success of the book is because its great merits redeem its faults; we say its success is because of these very alleged faults.

Basically, especially in the first ten chapters, there’s some boring stuff. There’s these long discussions of domestic life, and they are a bit tedious.

Stowe’s interest is really with slavery, but she knows novels need some domestic scene setting, and her book doesn't really excel in that kind of stuff. Tolstoy and George Eliot were better at the domestic life, better at creating that aura of life around their subject. But…they were also professional writers. It’s really a matter of craft.

Stowe learned, as she was writing the book, how to weave in her themes with the domestic life. Later in the book, when we learn about the house-keeping, we see how many of these slaves steal from the household. When we learn how children are raised, we see how it’s very difficult to impart moral education to enslaved kids who’ve been taken from their parents. When we learn about the economics of the plantation, we see how it’s inextricable from brutality and violence. Over time, Stowe learns how to show us that life in the South, in these households, is inextricable from the brutality and horror of slavery. As a result, the last three fourths move much quicker than the first fourth.

I really don’t think the unevenness of these early chapters is enough to justify the contemporary critical disdain for the book. The fact is, it’s not like people actually make a case that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is poorly-made. They simply assert it. They say that the book is preachy and maudlin.

But in this, they’re holding Uncle Tom’s Cabin to a much higher standard than that they use for Dickens or Dostoevsky. Are their books not preachy and maudlin? There’s literally nothing you could say about Stowe that you couldn’t also say about Dickens. Yet the latter is taught and studied widely, while the former is almost forgotten.

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It's honestly a bit bizarre how little attention this book receives. There's no equivalent for other countries. If we discount Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself, the best-selling novelist in Victorian Britain was Dickens, who is still seen as a major, era-defining writer even today.

It's similar in France. Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas were amongst the best-selling authors of the 19th-century, and they’re still regarded as era-defining writers. Jules Verne sold well, and perhaps outsold these figures, but the discrepancy between their and his critical reputation isn’t nearly the same as the discrepancy between, say, Stowe and Twain, to say nothing of the discrepancy between Stowe and Melville.

Similarly, can you imagine if at the same time Tolstoy was writing, there was another Russian novelist who was outselling him by a factor of ten who nobody talks about? You can't imagine it, because that person doesn't exist! Only in America do we have such a person!

And if Uncle Tom’s Cabin seemed immediately and objectively worse than other 19th-century novels, it would make sense to ignore it. But it’s really not. It’s actually very good. Most people who are accustomed to reading 19th-century novels would probably enjoy reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Go and look at the beginning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s about two guys who are selling a slave. Genuinely ask yourself if what you’re reading is less compelling than, say, the opening of Middlemarch. Most people who try to read Middlemarch or Moby-Dick probably don’t finish; it’s the same with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The difference is that with Uncle Tom’s Cabin far fewer people even attempt it.

I don’t know why we live in a world where lots of people try to read Moby-Dick but very few people try to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I could speculate, but even when I speculate, it only makes the situation seem stranger. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe was not a literary careerist. She published the book in installments in an abolitionist paper. Unlike Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne she didn’t really situate herself as a literary figure. But…so what? Doesn’t that actually make this situation even more absurd? Shouldn’t we take a lesson from the fact that the most successful novel in American history was written by someone who…didn’t particularly want to be a novelist? Who thought there was some higher purpose beyond making a name for herself as a literary figure?³

Maybe there’s some lesson there for us as writers!

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All of the ostensible arguments arguments against Uncle Tom’s Cabin don’t really hold up. They’re arguments that could apply just as easily to many books that we do teach.

But of course that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Many books sound great, but when you actually read them they don’t hold up. You can’t put your finger on why they’re bad, but…they just aren’t exciting, aren’t worthwhile. However, Uncle Tom’s Cabin isn’t like that. If you didn’t know, a priori, that this book was held in such a poor odor, you’d have no reason for thinking it was worse than Huckleberry Finn or Middlemarch. It’s a well-written, lively, thoughtful, and still has the power, after almost two hundred years, to arouse intense feelings on the part of the reader.

Moreover, it’s a much bigger part of American history than almost any other book. All of the other books we teach had a negligible impact during their initial publication. Their influence was really created in their afterlife, through the fact that they were so often taught and studied.

Whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a real phenomenon, on a level that will perhaps never again be matched. This is the rare book whose influence genuinely cannot be over-stated.

If you read a novel during the latter half of the 19th-century, odds are good that this novel was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was the book of the century! There are no other books that even compare! Its impact was so out-sized that there’s no template for even thinking about it. The book was too big for literature. It was the Napoleon of books.

You might say, okay, your argument really hinges on Stowe’s popularity. Is Harry Potter literature? Is Colleen Hoover literature?

The answer is…I don’t know. I’m not writing about those things. With Stowe, the situation is very different from these books. We have a number of 19th-century novelists that we recognize as great writers (Dickens, Hugo, Dostoevsky), and these novelists have aims and style and mass appeal that is very much in line with Stowe’s novel. But for some strange and arbitrary reason, Stowe is not considered their equal. If she had not been immensely popular and influential, then it would make sense to ignore her, because…most things get ignored. But the level of her popularity is such that her current level of critical obscurity is actually rather bizarre.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not lesser or worse than other great 19th-century novels, if anything it’s better-structured than Huckleberry Finn, more heartfelt than Dickens, and more humane than Dostoevsky. And, yes, not incidentally, it’s the best-selling and most-influential novel published in the 19th-century, and its first London edition was quite literally subtitled “The Great American Novel.”⁴

P.S. I am under deadline for revisions to my Princeton University Press book, What’s So Great About The Great Books, so I’m going to only do one post this week. I’ll be back on Tuesday, March 18th.

1. I reread Huckleberry Finn several months ago and really liked it! I have an article coming out about it in Arc in April.

2. My post on The Lamplighter is here.

3. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe did write a number of other novels, many of which were not on slavery themes, but she continues to seem rather distant from literary society in America. She was a neighbor of Twain in Hartford, and in one of his book’s he includes a rather cruel sketch of her latter life, when she suffered from dementia. Hawthorne, who complained to his publisher about The Lamplighter and praised Ruth Hall, never wrote about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Neither did Melville. Henry James said it was, “much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which [the audience] didn't sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried . . . in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistible cause.”

These seem to be the two common responses to the book. Either critics ignored it, or they described it in terms which indicated that its appeal was somehow extra-literary or transcended literature.

4. A link to this edition here. The popularizer of the term “The Great American Novel”, John DeForrest, also said in his 1868 essay that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “the nearest approach to the desired phenomenon.”