Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel of slavery in Kentucky and Louisiana — the sale of Tom, the flight of Eliza across the ice, the death of Eva, the plantation of Simon Legree — was serialised in 1851–52 and published in two volumes in 1852. It sold three hundred thousand copies in the United States in its first year and was translated across Europe; no American novel before it had reached so many readers.

It was written to move its audience against the Fugitive Slave Act and did. It has also been argued over ever since, for its sentiment and for its stereotypes, which later readers, Black and white, have criticised sharply. Bibliomancer presents the text as written.