Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.
with Harriet Beecher Stowe's dated signature tipped in on a separate slip
Boston and Cleveland: John P. Jewett & Company and Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1852. First edition, first printing. Hardcover. This is a finely bound two-volume first edition, first printing of perhaps “the most influential novel of propaganda in American literature.” Each book is the correct first printing, with the Hobart & Robbins slug on each title page verso and no mention of subsequent printings. On a separate slip tipped onto the Volume I second blank recto, is a clipped author signature in five lines: “Very truly Yours | H B Stowe | Hartford Feb 2. | 1869”.
The bindings are recent half tan Morocco featuring twin gilt printed and decorated calf spine labels – title and author label in red, volume number label in black. The spine and generous leather corners frame black and tan marbled paper-covered boards. The contents are bound with brown endpapers. Per the rear pastedown binder’s ticket, the bindings are executed by “Vernon Wiering”.
Condition of the bindings is better than very good plus, clean, bright, tight, and sharp-cornered with only trivial shelf wear apart from a few more noticeable though superficial scuffs to the spines. Condition of the first printing contents is good, complete though appreciably spotted throughout and a bit soiled. We find no previous ownership marks in Volume I. In Volume II, there are two previous owners' names inked on the recto of the blank preceding the title page and another name (sharing a surname with one of the two preceding) inked on the title page just below the author’s name. Additionally, on the Volume II contents page there are random, light pencil scribblings – plausibly erasable – as if in a child’s hand.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was already noted as a child for her “oddity and genius… At age eight she entered the Litchfield Female Academy, an excellent school founded to ‘vindicate the equality of female intellect’; … She was an eager writer… At age nine she volunteered to write weekly essays; at age thirteen she won the honor of having her composition read aloud at the annual school exhibit… In 1824 Stowe entered Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary, where she studied the most difficult subjects in the male college curriculum, including Latin and moral philosophy… Although she painted throughout her life and left some remarkably accomplished canvases, her true vocation was to paint with words… at age nineteen wrote to her brother George, who like all of her brothers entered the ministry, ‘It is as much my vocation to preach on paper as it is that of my brothers to preach viva voce.’”
Faith, loss and fateful legislation completed Stowe’s arc to authoring Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “In 1843, moved by the millennial spirit of the times and by the suicide of her brother George, Stowe experienced a deepening of her faith, a “second birth” more meaningful than her first conversion experience at age fourteen.” Then, in 1849, Stowe lost her eighteen-month-old son to a cholera epidemic. She wrote “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.” When the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law the following year implicated the North in just such family separations, Stowe began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The story was first serialized in the National Era between 5 June 1851 and 1 April 1852. However, “its shocking, melodramatic story of slaves and their owners made its greatest effect when published as a book in 1852.” As a two-volume book, the story sold more than 300,000 copies in the United States during the first year after it was published. The 5,000 first printing copies, of which this is a survivor, sold out almost immediately.
“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’… the social impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the United States was greater than that of any book before or since.” That impact extended abroad, including “in Europe where it influenced public opinion in the approaching American Civil War.” An apocryphal story of the time claimed that upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln said: “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”
References: PMM; ANB; BAL. Item #008475
Price: $6,750.00