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
One of the reasons that Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't taught as a "great text" is that it WAS extremely popular in its time, which meant that it was widely adapted for the stage and that Tom ended up becoming a minstrel show character. By the time the "canon" was being formed, those who were forming it would have associated Uncle Tom with the lowest form of shucking and jiving--and the pedagogues who wanted to open up the canon later on would have agreed, even though they were coming from a completely different political perspective.
It's sort of funny how many contemporary writers need to feel that writing can change the world, is very dangerous, etc, but the one case of a novelist possibly actually doing this is like… totally ignored lol.
That said… I suspect that if I made all my friends read Uncle Tom's Cabin, the ones who didn't care for it & viewed it as sub-literary _also_ would not care for Dickens or Eliot or Hugo or Dumas. I think they'd be pretty consistent on this front. But ofc that doesn't really affect anything you're saying.
This is the correct take :) These writers basically got grandfathered in, even as prevailing aesthetic standards changed, while Stowe got ushered out bc America was embarrassed by slavery.
I kind of keep waiting for the "Middlemarch sucks" take to drop lol… I even have a short list of the people who seem most likely to write it. So far, though, silence…
Well, Middlemarch is pretty remarkably great. And so is Dickens. Dumas is just incredibly fun, even if (at least in English) he's not the greatest writer of prose.
I have not read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and for the reasons you imply -- it is largely disparaged these days as poorly written and oversentimental. And your post makes an excellent case for it, and makes be believe I really should read it!
I will disagree on one point, having nothing to do with Uncle Tom's Cabin -- I did not see Vronsky as in any sense honorable. He is attractive physically, yes, and I suppose he is good at sports (horse racing, anyway.) But his attractiveness is mostly surface -- he is shown as failing in almost anything he tries -- painting most obviously. And remember how wholly dishonorably he acts towards Kitty! He acts poorly to Anna as well, though I suppose you could argue that that's a downstream effect of the adultery. But look at his refusal to see her intellectual ability (as with her writing), and his frustration with her about having more children. In my opinion, he's a cad, through and through.
Maybe its reputation suffers from how "Uncle Tom" has become a pejorative, not that that's really fair to the novel. I'll also say that its academic defenders, from what I've seen, tend to extol "Uncle Tom's Cabin," particularly in comparison to "Huckleberry Finn," on the basis of the former's moral clarity, and I don't blame people for not wanting to read a novel sold in that way. I recall reading some excerpts of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in seventh grade, and it did seem like a formulaic sentimental novel like "Charlotte Temple" or "Black Beauty" where the character gets put in increasingly bad situations beyond their control; I've never read Dickens though, and maybe he's like that too. It would be interesting to ask why Frederick Douglass has a better reputation now than Harriet Beacher Stowe: I don't think pat theories about racism or embarrassment at slavery explain why "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is ignored today.
Thanks for writing. This piece is honestly as close to the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that I’ve been, so I appreciate your analysis and its placement in the global literary context.
What i’m curious about, and others have touched on this, is how the cultural meanings of the book have shifted over time, because this must explain readership. I’m not in academia; i’m a jazz dancer and musician by trade. “Uncle Tommin’” was a phrase I learned before I knew much about the book: an accusation against one of our greatest artists of all time, Louis Armstrong, by cutting-edge Black be-bop musicians, of playing a well wrought role of subservience that reinforces racial stereotypes held by white popular culture. (Of course there is a lot of scholarship on this and why someone like Dizzy Gillespie isn’t remembered the same way). Because American popular culture has been shaped, above all, by Black American culture since the ragtime era it kind of makes sense that this would influence readership over time, especially for lay readers outside of academia.
I would imagine that James Baldwin, in a more direct way, influenced whether or not people read the book. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” he excoriates Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a very bad novel,” the basis of a “formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth…” and “activated by what might be called a theological terror,” in which, presumably, Harriet Beecher Stowe is concerned less about Black humanity and more in white salvation through anti-slavery.
I think all of this provides even more reason to read UTC but it raises larger cultural questions that transcend whether or not it is a good novel: how has it shaped and symbolized American culture and history? How has its meaning (and therefore its popularity) changed over time?
Your excellent questions may find some answers in David Reynolds' book "Mightier Than the Sword," which explores the book's history and popular reception.
I loved this. And aside from appreciating the main point, this also struck me "it’s hard to get people to understand something if their livelihood depends on them not understanding."
It's one of the main themes of my current novel, and I think it's not only fair, but essential to ask what responsibility "civilians" bear in any number of situations. If you work for an insurance company that routinely denies valid claims. If you work for ICE. If you work an an Israeli IDF contractor, or an American prison for profit.
I’m very fond of Poe’s poetry. I think it gets used a lot in schools because it’s rich in readily identifiable poetic devices (hard to miss the meter, rhyme schemes, alliteration, etc.), but I find it genuinely enjoyable in much the same way I find Kipling’s poetry (and his writing for children—he’s a truly excellent prose stylist).
I also remember making my first trip to the university library as a high school student doing a report on Poe and finding an entire book called Poe and Alcohol, which blew my 15yo mind.
Great writeup! Makes me want to read it again. I first read Uncle Tom's Cabin in 4th grade in Bulgaria, where it's part of the summer reading list. It's a really beloved book -- often named as a favorite by Bulgarians. I was very surprised when I moved to the US and found few people had read it. I think it's still very popular in the entire former Eastern Bloc.
Does Uncle Tom’s Cabin have much of a sense of humor to it, given the urgency & bleakness of its subject matter? The other classics you mention definitely do, which I think goes a long way to make a novel endure. Humor offers seasoning for the seriousness and lets the reader relax into the book’s narrative work, in my experience.
That's an intriguing question! When I read Middlemarch I was astonished at how downright funny it is at times, and to me that's a key part of its impact.
I wouldn't call it a funny book but there's a description early on of a man of vague and totally useless good will that has stuck with me through the years as pretty funny… went to go get it: "Mr. Wilson’s mind was one of those that may not unaptly be represented by a bale of cotton,—downy, soft, benevolently fuzzy and confused. He really pitied George with all his heart, and had a sort of dim and cloudy perception of the style of feeling that agitated him; but he deemed it his duty to go on talking good to him, with infinite pertinacity."
I'm persistently confused by the idea that Deep South slave owners in some way secretly knew in their hearts that slavery was wrong. Why did they dedicate such enormous amounts of time and effort to defending slavery, then? It seems much more likely to me that they sincerely believed all the stuff they said they believed, i.e. that slavery was good for the enslaved and justified by the classical traditions of ancient Rome.
“It's honestly a bit bizarre how little attention this book receives.... 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?”
You seem to answer your own question. Careerists feel threatened by amateurs and by partisans both. As does the industry and the establishment feel threatened by partisans – as it is. And a male dominated establishment is threatened by female success. And white supremacist police state culture and establishment is threatened by liberatory lit of many kinds.
Similarly the lit establishment has worked for a century and a half to bury the lib lit of Victor Hugo and the like while elevating the relatively depoliticized lit of his convenient countryman Gustave Flaubert – the (aimed-for) extreme elevation of the psychological, the abstract, and the depoliticized to the extreme diminishment of the sociological and political in lit (especially the socialist, anti-Empire, and particularly liberatory works of art that the ideology of the American supremacist, plutocratic, police state loves to suppress for myriad reasons of power and control. The “soft” power of Empire – the bigoted plutocracy).
This needs to be the era of literary populism, now – if lit is to help understand the times and to help keep the planet from blowing up and burning down or otherwise imploding. Check out Tamara Pearson's empathic, vibrant, and partisan The Eyes of the Earth (Tehom, November 2024). I hope to have a review of this vital novel out soon, somewhere or another. (Not sure why I should wait, though, since I could put it up on my substack immediately – pairing with your great post here.) Literary and partisan, brilliant, literary populism – Pearson's novel is easily among the best of the most recent examples of the future, past, and present of liberatory lit – that is, of lit.
In graduate school, I attended a lecture on the sales figures of 19th-century Russian novels (the lecturer was attempting to argue that bestsellers deserved more critical attention than the classics they outsold; my professors took a dim view of this). Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky all sold pretty well within Russia, but they too were also at times outsold by works we view as minor today. E.g. Evgenia Tur's Jane Eyre-esque sentimental novel "Antonina," (1851), far outsold Tolstoy's "Childhood" (1852), though not 10-to-1. But the biggest disparity was that foreign works, both in and out of translation, were far more popular than Tolstoy's books (in pure sales figures). The top-selling author in Russia in 1878, when Tolstoy had just published "Anna Karenina," was still Dumas, as it had been for the past decade.*
*Source: the aforementioned lecture. I can't find this corroborated anywhere and it's been several years. But the researcher who presented this was top-quality; any mistakes are my own memory.
I'll add that, when I was treaching HUCK FUNN to 9th graders, one of the points I always had to get through was "they didn't know it was wrong back then!" which some students always said (whether about slavery or the N word or whatever else). And I was like... but they did. There were abolitionists active at that time, slavery had already ended in England, and most importantly, the enslaved people themselves knew it was wrong. So that does sound like a strong point for Stowe's writing.
One of the reasons that Uncle Tom's Cabin isn't taught as a "great text" is that it WAS extremely popular in its time, which meant that it was widely adapted for the stage and that Tom ended up becoming a minstrel show character. By the time the "canon" was being formed, those who were forming it would have associated Uncle Tom with the lowest form of shucking and jiving--and the pedagogues who wanted to open up the canon later on would have agreed, even though they were coming from a completely different political perspective.
It's sort of funny how many contemporary writers need to feel that writing can change the world, is very dangerous, etc, but the one case of a novelist possibly actually doing this is like… totally ignored lol.
That said… I suspect that if I made all my friends read Uncle Tom's Cabin, the ones who didn't care for it & viewed it as sub-literary _also_ would not care for Dickens or Eliot or Hugo or Dumas. I think they'd be pretty consistent on this front. But ofc that doesn't really affect anything you're saying.
This is the correct take :) These writers basically got grandfathered in, even as prevailing aesthetic standards changed, while Stowe got ushered out bc America was embarrassed by slavery.
I kind of keep waiting for the "Middlemarch sucks" take to drop lol… I even have a short list of the people who seem most likely to write it. So far, though, silence…
Well, Middlemarch is pretty remarkably great. And so is Dickens. Dumas is just incredibly fun, even if (at least in English) he's not the greatest writer of prose.
I have not read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and for the reasons you imply -- it is largely disparaged these days as poorly written and oversentimental. And your post makes an excellent case for it, and makes be believe I really should read it!
I will disagree on one point, having nothing to do with Uncle Tom's Cabin -- I did not see Vronsky as in any sense honorable. He is attractive physically, yes, and I suppose he is good at sports (horse racing, anyway.) But his attractiveness is mostly surface -- he is shown as failing in almost anything he tries -- painting most obviously. And remember how wholly dishonorably he acts towards Kitty! He acts poorly to Anna as well, though I suppose you could argue that that's a downstream effect of the adultery. But look at his refusal to see her intellectual ability (as with her writing), and his frustration with her about having more children. In my opinion, he's a cad, through and through.
Maybe its reputation suffers from how "Uncle Tom" has become a pejorative, not that that's really fair to the novel. I'll also say that its academic defenders, from what I've seen, tend to extol "Uncle Tom's Cabin," particularly in comparison to "Huckleberry Finn," on the basis of the former's moral clarity, and I don't blame people for not wanting to read a novel sold in that way. I recall reading some excerpts of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in seventh grade, and it did seem like a formulaic sentimental novel like "Charlotte Temple" or "Black Beauty" where the character gets put in increasingly bad situations beyond their control; I've never read Dickens though, and maybe he's like that too. It would be interesting to ask why Frederick Douglass has a better reputation now than Harriet Beacher Stowe: I don't think pat theories about racism or embarrassment at slavery explain why "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is ignored today.
Thanks for writing. This piece is honestly as close to the text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that I’ve been, so I appreciate your analysis and its placement in the global literary context.
What i’m curious about, and others have touched on this, is how the cultural meanings of the book have shifted over time, because this must explain readership. I’m not in academia; i’m a jazz dancer and musician by trade. “Uncle Tommin’” was a phrase I learned before I knew much about the book: an accusation against one of our greatest artists of all time, Louis Armstrong, by cutting-edge Black be-bop musicians, of playing a well wrought role of subservience that reinforces racial stereotypes held by white popular culture. (Of course there is a lot of scholarship on this and why someone like Dizzy Gillespie isn’t remembered the same way). Because American popular culture has been shaped, above all, by Black American culture since the ragtime era it kind of makes sense that this would influence readership over time, especially for lay readers outside of academia.
I would imagine that James Baldwin, in a more direct way, influenced whether or not people read the book. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” he excoriates Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a very bad novel,” the basis of a “formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth…” and “activated by what might be called a theological terror,” in which, presumably, Harriet Beecher Stowe is concerned less about Black humanity and more in white salvation through anti-slavery.
I think all of this provides even more reason to read UTC but it raises larger cultural questions that transcend whether or not it is a good novel: how has it shaped and symbolized American culture and history? How has its meaning (and therefore its popularity) changed over time?
Your excellent questions may find some answers in David Reynolds' book "Mightier Than the Sword," which explores the book's history and popular reception.
Thanks for the rec! I'll put it on my list.
I loved this. And aside from appreciating the main point, this also struck me "it’s hard to get people to understand something if their livelihood depends on them not understanding."
It's one of the main themes of my current novel, and I think it's not only fair, but essential to ask what responsibility "civilians" bear in any number of situations. If you work for an insurance company that routinely denies valid claims. If you work for ICE. If you work an an Israeli IDF contractor, or an American prison for profit.
When John Updike reviewed our edition in The New Yorker in 2006 he confessed he'd never read it. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/06/down-the-river-4
I’m very fond of Poe’s poetry. I think it gets used a lot in schools because it’s rich in readily identifiable poetic devices (hard to miss the meter, rhyme schemes, alliteration, etc.), but I find it genuinely enjoyable in much the same way I find Kipling’s poetry (and his writing for children—he’s a truly excellent prose stylist).
I also remember making my first trip to the university library as a high school student doing a report on Poe and finding an entire book called Poe and Alcohol, which blew my 15yo mind.
Great writeup! Makes me want to read it again. I first read Uncle Tom's Cabin in 4th grade in Bulgaria, where it's part of the summer reading list. It's a really beloved book -- often named as a favorite by Bulgarians. I was very surprised when I moved to the US and found few people had read it. I think it's still very popular in the entire former Eastern Bloc.
Does Uncle Tom’s Cabin have much of a sense of humor to it, given the urgency & bleakness of its subject matter? The other classics you mention definitely do, which I think goes a long way to make a novel endure. Humor offers seasoning for the seriousness and lets the reader relax into the book’s narrative work, in my experience.
That's an intriguing question! When I read Middlemarch I was astonished at how downright funny it is at times, and to me that's a key part of its impact.
I wouldn't call it a funny book but there's a description early on of a man of vague and totally useless good will that has stuck with me through the years as pretty funny… went to go get it: "Mr. Wilson’s mind was one of those that may not unaptly be represented by a bale of cotton,—downy, soft, benevolently fuzzy and confused. He really pitied George with all his heart, and had a sort of dim and cloudy perception of the style of feeling that agitated him; but he deemed it his duty to go on talking good to him, with infinite pertinacity."
I'm persistently confused by the idea that Deep South slave owners in some way secretly knew in their hearts that slavery was wrong. Why did they dedicate such enormous amounts of time and effort to defending slavery, then? It seems much more likely to me that they sincerely believed all the stuff they said they believed, i.e. that slavery was good for the enslaved and justified by the classical traditions of ancient Rome.
I wish you'd been my English prof in college. I adore your writing. It's so smart but always accessible.
Nice work.
“It's honestly a bit bizarre how little attention this book receives.... 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?”
You seem to answer your own question. Careerists feel threatened by amateurs and by partisans both. As does the industry and the establishment feel threatened by partisans – as it is. And a male dominated establishment is threatened by female success. And white supremacist police state culture and establishment is threatened by liberatory lit of many kinds.
Similarly the lit establishment has worked for a century and a half to bury the lib lit of Victor Hugo and the like while elevating the relatively depoliticized lit of his convenient countryman Gustave Flaubert – the (aimed-for) extreme elevation of the psychological, the abstract, and the depoliticized to the extreme diminishment of the sociological and political in lit (especially the socialist, anti-Empire, and particularly liberatory works of art that the ideology of the American supremacist, plutocratic, police state loves to suppress for myriad reasons of power and control. The “soft” power of Empire – the bigoted plutocracy).
This needs to be the era of literary populism, now – if lit is to help understand the times and to help keep the planet from blowing up and burning down or otherwise imploding. Check out Tamara Pearson's empathic, vibrant, and partisan The Eyes of the Earth (Tehom, November 2024). I hope to have a review of this vital novel out soon, somewhere or another. (Not sure why I should wait, though, since I could put it up on my substack immediately – pairing with your great post here.) Literary and partisan, brilliant, literary populism – Pearson's novel is easily among the best of the most recent examples of the future, past, and present of liberatory lit – that is, of lit.
In graduate school, I attended a lecture on the sales figures of 19th-century Russian novels (the lecturer was attempting to argue that bestsellers deserved more critical attention than the classics they outsold; my professors took a dim view of this). Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky all sold pretty well within Russia, but they too were also at times outsold by works we view as minor today. E.g. Evgenia Tur's Jane Eyre-esque sentimental novel "Antonina," (1851), far outsold Tolstoy's "Childhood" (1852), though not 10-to-1. But the biggest disparity was that foreign works, both in and out of translation, were far more popular than Tolstoy's books (in pure sales figures). The top-selling author in Russia in 1878, when Tolstoy had just published "Anna Karenina," was still Dumas, as it had been for the past decade.*
*Source: the aforementioned lecture. I can't find this corroborated anywhere and it's been several years. But the researcher who presented this was top-quality; any mistakes are my own memory.
Great essay, I'm putting this on my reading list.
i didn't know this book wasn't widely read!! it was on my homeschool curriculum
This is why you guys are in charge now I guess ;)
Ok, you've convinced me. I"ll read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.
I'll add that, when I was treaching HUCK FUNN to 9th graders, one of the points I always had to get through was "they didn't know it was wrong back then!" which some students always said (whether about slavery or the N word or whatever else). And I was like... but they did. There were abolitionists active at that time, slavery had already ended in England, and most importantly, the enslaved people themselves knew it was wrong. So that does sound like a strong point for Stowe's writing.