Please note that this blog post contains historic uses of language, which is outdated, offensive, and discriminatory. The language is retained in its original context and does not represent views of UCL Special Collections. We are commitment to contextualising and addressing dated and harmful languages in our collecting practice, collection documentation, teaching, and engagement activities. You can read about some of our work in this area as part of UCL’s Liberating the Collections programme here.   

 

Writing for the Tribune in 1945, George Orwell described Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “the supreme example of the ‘good bad’ book.” The “good bad book,” Orwell explained, “was the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” For Orwell, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is both “unintentionally ludicrous,” “full of preposterous melodramatic incidents,” and at the same time a “deeply moving” serious representation of real-world struggles; an account of the cruelty of slavery in mid-19th c. America.  

Orwell’s exploration of “good bad books,” such as Uncle Tom, was prompted by a project of his contemporary publisher to produce reprints of minor or partly forgotten novels – “a valuable service in these bookless days,” as he put it. Interestingly, the history of Stowe’s novel is a history of 19th century reprint culture. Its unprecedented publishing success is in no small part a result of burgeoning mass market publishing, lack of international copyright regulations, and complex cultures of media production of the period. This blog, part of our short Black History Month series, explores the publication history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its significance to histories of slavery, through UCL’s Special Collections holdings.  

The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 became a major catalyst for Stowe’s antislavery writing. This new legislation required all citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners. Its impacts were felt particularly acutely in places like Cincinnati, a border city of the free state of Ohio, where Stowe’s family lived, across from the slave state of Kentucky. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while a fictional account, was an attempt to document the dichotomies of slavery and freedom Stowe witnessed. Its contribution to the abolitionist cause was notable, but its subject was only one reason for the novel’s bestselling success. It is the unique publishing ecology of the time that enabled its rapid international circulation and resulting widespread engagement with Stowe’s anti-slavery stance. Political sentiment and growing capitalist impulse came together in this unique phenomenon of the 19th c. publishing culture.  

The novel was first issued in a book form in March 1852, released as a two-volume edition by an American publisher, J.P. Jewett. That first edition followed a highly successful serialised publication in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, which printed it in 41 weekly instalments between June 1851 and April 1852. It was hugely popular as a serial and Jewett expected a major commercial success. Claire Parfait noted, in her study of the novel, that Jewett chose to have the novel stereotyped. A relatively new printing technology at the time, which only appeared in the USA in the 1820s, stereotyping relied on manufacture of stereotype plates, instead of setting type to produce books. While expensive, it enabled much faster reprints – the ready-made plates could be reused multiple times and didn’t call for additional labour needed to re-set type for new impressions of the same publication. Because it required heavy investment, stereotyping was reserved for those publications which were expected to sell well. Jewett clearly knew his market – an instant bestseller, the novel sold 10,000 copies in the first two weeks. It was thanks to this choice of printing technology that Jewett was able to meet demand and issue a second printing of 5,000 copies of the novel as soon as the first printing sold out, only two days after its publication.  

It is interesting to note how rapidly Uncle Tom’s Cabin grew to be translated, published abroad, often pirated too. The first UK edition followed the American publication very quickly; Clarke & Company, a London-based publisher, issued it in May 1852, i.e. only two months after it was originally released. And a boom for UK editions followed, with the novel selling 1,5 million copies in the first year of publication. Katie McGettigan estimates that at least eighteen different publishers issued editions of the novel in its first year on the UK market. No other book had sold as well in as short a time in the UK, and in the USA only the Bible sold more copies. At UCL’s Special Collections, we hold examples of these early UK editions of the novel.  

 

 

One of our copies, part of UCL’s Rotton Collection, is the 1852 UK edition published by Thomas Bosworth as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Negro Life in the Slave States of America, published in August that year (one of the first to follow Clarke in publishing Uncle Tom on this side of the Atlantic) (UCL Reference: Rotton 24.c.26). We also hold an illustrated edition jointly published by Clarke and Routledge under the same title, also in 1852 (Ogden STO UNC/1), as well as another Routledge edition, published later that year but this time as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; a tale of life among the lowly (i.e. using the title of the first USA edition) (Ogden STO UNC/2). The latter also includes a preface by the Earl of Carlisle (introduced as a friend of Stowe’s, although the connection was exaggerated) and a preface by Stowe herself, both included here as unique selling points. All three were, characteristically, issued by publishers known for producing American reprints for the UK market.  

A common characteristic of these international editions, in the UK and elsewhere, were claims to ‘authenticity.’  The Thomas Bosworth edition, for example, was marketed as ‘the author’s edition.’ It included an ‘Advertisement to this edition’ which notes that Stowe had “a direct interest” in its sale. The Routledge and Clarke edition was published with a notice on author’s editions which read:  

we must do ourselves the justice to announce that Mrs Stowe has a direct pecuniary interest in this extraordinary success. Our editions are the real ‘Author’s Editions;’ we are in direct negotiations with Mrs. Stowe; and we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to award to that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in America.  

On the market almost instantaneously flooded by a myriad of the novel’s editions, some authorised, many what we would consider today ‘pirated copies’, a credible association with the author became an important means of ensuring better sales of the book.  Neither of these two publishers were, in fact, Stowe’s official UK publishers; seeking out other means to make their editions attractive to the reading public was an important marketing strategy. 

 

 

Publishing for children formed an important and rapidly expanding part of the publishing market in both UK and USA of the period. Stowe also saw children as the first and main audience of Uncle Tom and there is evidence of the text being read to children in many 19th c. homes. The proliferation of illustrated editions of the novel definitely helped promote it as a publication for young audiences.  In fact, our illustrated Routledge and Clarke edition includes a handwritten inscription: “Presented to Clement Hall, Sept 18th 1852 by his Mamma,” implying, perhaps a similar intended usage of the copy we hold.   

 

 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was as controversial as it was popular. The novel was criticised both for reinforcing negative stereotypes of enslaved peoples and widely denounced by advocates of slavery, spurring a unique publication ecology of counter publications too. The so-called “anti-Tom” works typically promoted pro-slavery arguments in an attempt to discredit Stowe’s depiction of the cruelty of slavery. It was in response to the growing criticism that Stowe published in 1853 a Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The work detailed the sources and corroborated facts incorporated into her otherwise fictional account of slave struggles of the period. That work proved an instant publishing success too, and was similarly reprinted widely. It also led to a growing market for related publications. UCL’s copy of the UK 1853 edition of the Key includes, for example, a pasted-in advertisement for The American Slave Code, in Theory and Practice, published by Clarke, Beeton, and Co. as a companion to the volume (Rotton 24.c.25).  

 

 

 

The boom in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin reprints was not unique to that title. The novel appeared in the UK in a complex transatlantic publishing landscape which relied on reprints rather than imports for distribution and circulation of works. Starting in the 1830s, reprints of existing titles, often in affordable editions, became popular, aimed especially at the growing middle- and working-class reading publics. Many UK publishers turned to texts published in the USA for that purpose, partly in search of new titles that had potential to sell well, and partly due to costs. The UK and USA copyright laws of the period meant that any US text published first in North America was considered public domain in the UK and so could be reprinted without incurring any additional costs. Republishing in the UK texts which proved popular abroad was a simple business decision; the publication history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a perfect example of the mid-19th publishing market logic.  

While UK reprints market of Uncle Tom was able to flourish unrestricted, the local USA regulations limited it somewhat until 1893, when copyright in the work expired, prompting a flurry of new American editions of the work in the mid-1890s. That is, it was the copyright regulation, coupled with a rapidly expanding market for fiction and affordable books, rather than a strong anti-slavery stance in the UK that made it possible for this antislavery fiction to circulate in the UK widely and without restriction.  

 

This blog post is the first instalment in the UCL Special Collection Black History Month series exploring black histories through histories of print and publishing.  

Other posts in the series:

Independent Black Publishing and UCL’s collecting practices, by Liz Lawes

The ‘reprint revolution’ and cultures of 20th c. Black publishing, by Kaja Marczewska