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Uncle Tom's Cabin (Thrift Edition) |  | Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Brand: Dover Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $4.00
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Seller: sbd-
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 1352
Media: Paperback
Edition: 5th
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.1 x 1
MPN: 9780486440286
ISBN: 0486440281
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780486440286
ASIN: 0486440281
Publication Date: August 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Selling more than 300,000 copies the first year it was published, Stowe s powerful abolitionist novel fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852. Supposedly, when Stowe met President Lincoln ten years later, Lincoln joked, So this is the little lady who made this big war. The plot centers on Eliza Harris and Tom Shelby, two people who triumph over slavery in very different ways. Today, critics, scholars, and students alike are revisiting this monumental work with fresh eyes and open minds, focusing on Stowe s portrayal of women and the novel s theological underpinnings. Recommended in Laura Berquist U.S. History Geography and American Literature, Kolbe Academy Junior High Literature Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe Pages: 384, paperbackPublisher: DoverISBN: 0-486-44028-1
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
 Required reading May 7, 2009
GibsonJ45 (Virginia)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
I assign this edition to students in my college US history survey classes, and while there's really nothing I can add to the numerous literary reviews of this beloved (yet increasingly unread) classic, I will say that no other book, save All Quiet on the Western Front, elicits such an emotional, intellectual, and visceral response among my students as this book does.
Everyone should read this masterpiece at some point in their lives, and I suspect you'll be indelibly marked by it.
An important read for understanding American history. December 20, 2008
Marilyn Squier (Fiskdale, MA USA)
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
I have a love / hate relationship with the novel. Some days, I think that Stowe is unforgivably racist and cares only about preserving the souls of white people who are forfeiting their place in heaven by owning slaves. On other days, I am really impressed by the way that Stowe is working within many of the discourses of her time and creating a radical message about why slavery is unchristian, unpatriotic and unwomanly.
Of course, everyone knows that Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling book of its time, outselling even the Bible. It sold over 1,000,000 copies, and, for every copy sold, about 10 people read the book. For every person who read the book, about 50 saw a dramatic adaptation (possibly one of the versions by Aiken or Conway, which took away much of Stowe's message and retained mostly the melodrama and racial stereotypes). Nineteenth century America was steeped in Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was the first book to have spin-off products that are common for films today - actions figures, tea sets, dolls, board games, card games, sheet music. Uncle Tom's Cabin permeated American culture. It is speciously reported that, upon meeting Stowe during the Civil War, President Lincoln said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that caused this great war."
There are so many things to fault Stowe for. In our politically correct culture, all of the faults of Stowe's novel are incredibly salient: she co-opts many racial stereotypes from the minstrel stage. Influenced by romantic racialism, she sees all blacks as simple, docile, childlike, and innately Christian. She sees people who are bi-racial, on the other hand, as intelligent and discontent with their position in slavery because of the "Anglo-Saxon blood" that is flowing through their veins.
But I think that what is important to focus on in Uncle Tom's Cabin is the way that Stowe created an inherently domestic attack on slavery by associating slavery with the public sphere of economy and capitalism and slaves with the domestic sphere of womanhood and Christianity.
Stowe was writing during the time of the cult of true womanhood. In the nineteenth century, women were supposed to be (sexually) pure, (religiously) pious, domestic (staying in the house / kitchen), and submissive (to men). Stowe believed in these prescriptive categories for women (as you can see through the characters of Mrs. Shelby and Mrs. Bird). To her, the best people in the world are mothers and Christians, and Christ himself is a mother-figure; he is pure, pious, domestic, and submissive. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eva and Uncle Tom are both Christ figures and mother figures because mother and Christ are interchangeable. They are the best type of people in the world. The Quaker Settlement, where Rachel Halliday gentle nudges her family to work in harmony in a Christian matriarchy is Stowe's vision of a millennial utopia.
Slavery is evil for Stowe because it is the opposite of Christianity. Christianity is domestic and spiritual, and slavery is a part of the public sphere; it is mundane. Appealing to white Northern women, Stowe shows how slavery creates problems for women: it separates mothers from their children and wives from their husbands. It is bad for the slaveholders because it corrupts them morally. Stowe also attacks the North for their culpability in Slavery. Through the character of Miss Ophelia, she shows that Northerners, while the want slaves to be free, do not want to come near black people with a ten foot pole. They have a visceral reaction to blackness. Through the Fugitive Slave Law, Northerners are helping Southerners to return blacks to slavery.
Lobbying for the inclusion of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the literary canon, Jane Tompkins says of the novel in Sensational Design, that it "retells the culture's central religious myth - the story of the crucifixion - in terms of the nation's greatest political conflict - slavery - and of its most cherished social beliefs - the sanctity of motherhood and the family."
I have read several editions of this novel, and I would highly recommend the Norton Critical edition, edited by Elizabeth Ammons (Tufts University) or the new Annotated edition, edited and annotated by Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. (Harvard University). Like all Norton editions, Ammons's version includes important contextual information as well as some of the seminal scholarly essays about the novel. In the annotated version, Gates gives two lengthy introductions and useful annotations. One thing that he mentions throughout the annotations is the way that Stowe depicts Tom's relationship with Chloe. According to Gates he seem not to be very affected by their separation; when he reminisces about the past, he thinks about the white children that he misses, George Shelby and Eva St. Clare.
A Real Classic! November 17, 2007
J. Gaudio (New Braunfels, TX USA)
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
Most of the classics you read are long and boring and definitely not easy reading. Uncle Tom's Cabin is not one of those books! It is a book you can read before you go to sleep at night, without your brain hurting from trying to decipher what is going on (Wuthering Heights anyone?). Bottom line, I really enjoyed the book, and I know others will too.
Too bad it's on the Forbidden Reading list.... December 2, 2009
C. Sahu (Southern California)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a vivid, extremely moving, dramatic adventure story based on accounts the author heard from escaped slaves and the missionaries who helped them. Unfortunately, it was written by a white woman and has a lot of references to Christianity in it, so you sure as heck will NOT be given it to read in a college classroom, at least, not in my state (California). On the contrary, the book has been branded as racist, as the other reviewers note. So avoid being excommunicated from the intelligentsia! Don't even pick it up!
....But if you haven't been scared away yet, let me tell you a little to whet your curiosity: the story begins when a Kentucky plantation owner, who has speculated unwisely, finds he must sell two of his slaves to pay off debts he owes to an unscrupulous (obviously) slave trader. One of the slaves is Uncle Tom, the plantation's highly competent and honest overseer, and the other is a handsome, clever little boy who will make a good house servant. The plantation owner's wife, a good woman who has taught the slaves to read, can't believe this is happening - didn't her husband promise never to sell any of them? - and when the little boy and his mother escape, the wife and everyone on the plantation cooperate to slow the trader's chance of catching his prey. But the slave trader is on horseback and the woman and her boy are on foot. Ahead of them also is the wide river, half-choked with ice. How will they cross?
Meanwhile, Uncle Tom has decided not to flee: if his being sold will prevent the sale of the other slaves on the plantation, then it's his Christian duty to go along quietly, he feels. The plantation owner's wife makes a solemn promise to find Uncle Tom again and buy him back, and her young son, galloping in at the last minute, even more vehemently promises the same. Will they ever make good on their promises?
Luckily, on his trip down river to the place where the slave auction is to be held, Uncle Tom meets up with another plantation owner and his little girl, who takes a liking to Tom and asks her daddy to buy Tom. And so Tom ends up, for a while, with this family. This plantation owner is a highly sensitive, honest man, who nonetheless owns slaves. How is this possible? We learn about it, and his rationalizations, as time goes on. He is bringing home with him his sensible Methodist northern cousin, who of course abhors slavery but who, nonetheless, is in some ways more prejudiced against blacks than the southern slave-owners are. She has taken on the task of getting the plantation's household in order, because the man's wife, a spoiled, selfish beauty, has no time for anyone other than herself. How will the Puritanical northern lady cope with a household of "shiftless" southerners? And whose - northern or southern - way of doing things is really better? This is one of the more amusing parts of the story.
I don't want to go too farther and give any spoilers. Suffice it to say there is lots of excitement, including shoot-outs and (supposedly) haunted mansions. The characters are NOT two-dimensional but are quite satisfyingly lifelike, and there are many more than I've mentioned here, including the infamous Simon Legree, the brave but tragic Cassy, teetering toward insanity, and perhaps the most attractive to anyone who loves children, little Topsy. The plot may seem extreme and melodramatic, but the most of the incidents, such as the crossing of the river hinted at above, are taken from true life. Stowe gives us an exhaustive, contemporary survey of the institution of slavery, describing the laws of various states at the time, how the auctions were conducted, and what life in the Antebellum South and North was like. I found her depiction of the Quaker settlement especially interesting.
Stowe lists all the arguments not only of those who favored slavery but also of those who thought it must be tolerated for the sake of the Union, and she rebuts these arguments without insults but with moral truths based on Christian law. She does not spare the Christian pro-slavery faction: on the contrary, they are her primary target. This is religion in one of its finest uses.
Uncle Tom is not a dupe or a character written to encourage black people to submission: his reasons for submitting, when he does submit, are morally admirable. Towards the end, he means to escape from Legree's plantation but, after having a vision of Jesus on the cross, is so transformed that he chooses not to abandon the other slaves, but to stay and offer what aid he can to them. He is, as many have said, a martyr or "Christ figure." This implies that we are to see him symbolically and I'm sure there are many who don't think such people really exist. This is not true, as history shows. I myself know two people who might very well die for their ideals the way Uncle Tom did: one is a Christian and the other follows the principles of ahimsa as taught by Gandhiji. And, unless we a cynics, don't we all in our hearts wish that, in similar circumstances, we would die bravely for our fellow man?
Stowe is not a racist. She makes many of the observations that appear later on in 20th century black literature: that it's foolish to call grown black men "boys" and that black and white southerners lived together and were codependent in a way that northerners can't really understand. It's true, she makes many quaint references to the differences between the races - she contends that Africans are morally superior and better Christians while whites are more active and assertive - but that was a common way of looking at things in those days, and who among us doesn't still compare, for instance, the French character with that of the English, or red-heads with blonds? Although the mulatto slaves were described as better-looking, this was given as the reason they were sold at a higher price. Stowe in no way suggests that the fully African characters are stupider. Uncle Tom is, once again, the plantation's overseer, and Topsy, the little, abused, fully-African girl, learns to read very quickly, and can memorize with near-perfect recall.
And may I say, it really is unreasonable to apply modern standards of political correctness to all of past history. Who among us has lived through anything comparable to what these people lived through? They were familiar with hardship, and death, and grief, to an extent few of our pill-popping, screen-mesmerized generation are. Who are we to so lightly dismiss what they held to be a work worthy of great love and respect?
(Actually, this is a review of the Books on Tape version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, read by Rebecca Nicholas - a really excellent reading.)
Required Reading for Viginia Governors April 8, 2010
C. Deen
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I sent a copy of this to the governor of Virginia after he proclaimed April to be Confederate History month. Kind of ironic when that's the month that Lee surrendered and Lincoln was assassinated.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
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