Stowe’s final missed installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era (Blog Post)
Title: Stowe’s final missed installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era
Author: Barbara Hochman
Abstract: Stowe missed the deadline for the installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that was to appear on December 18, 1851. The reason for the missed deadline is unknown.Stowe had failed to meet her deadline twice before; the missed deadline for the December 18 issue was her last such inadvertency. But perhaps missing the deadline for this particular installment was a tactical decision on Stowe’s part, designed for a particular effect upon her readers. Analysis of the episodes that were published immediately before and after the number of the Era that appeared without an installment of the tale suggests that Stowe purposely missed her deadline in order to intensify the effect of the Christmas installment.
Date: 12/18/2011
Primary URL: http://nationalera.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/december-18-1851/
Primary URL Description: Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era Presented By: The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center-Hartford, CT
Blog Title: Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era
Website: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood and Fiction 1851-1911 (Book) [show prizes]
Title: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood and Fiction 1851-1911
Author: Barbara Hochman
Abstract: "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution explores a transformation in the cultural meaning of Stowe’s influential book by addressing changes in reading practices and a shift in widely shared cultural assumptions. These changes reshaped interpretive conventions and generated new meanings for Stowe’s text in the wake of the Civil War. During the 1850s, men, women, and children avidly devoured Stowe’s novel. White adults wept and could not put the book down, neglecting work and other obligations to complete it. African Americans both celebrated and denounced the book. By the 1890s, readers understood Uncle Tom’s Cabin in new ways. Prefaces and retrospectives celebrated Stowe’s novel as a historical event that led directly to emancipation and national unity. Commentaries played down the evangelical and polemical messages of the book. Illustrations and children’s editions projected images of entertaining and devoted servants into an open-ended future. In the course of the 1890s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became both a more viciously racialized book than it had been and a less compelling one. White readers no longer consumed the book at one sitting; Uncle Tom’s Cabin was now more widely known than read. However, in the growing silence surrounding slavery at the turn of the century, Stowe’s book became an increasingly important source of ideas, facts, and images that the children of ex-slaves and other free-black readers could use to make sense of their position in U.S. culture.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/uncle-toms-cabin-and-reading-revolution
Primary URL Description: University of Massachusetts Press website
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-55849-8

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