STOWE, Harriet Beecher. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work.

Refuting Critics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

STOWE, Harriet Beecher. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. London: Clarke, Beeton, and Co., … and Thomas Bosworth. [1853.]

8vo. Publisher’s blind-stamped dark green cloth, spine lettered and priced 3/6 in gilt, ornamental endpapers with advertisements printed in teal; pp. viii, 504, lithographic facsimile on pages 336 to 338; advertisement for Companion Volume to the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin tipped in to front free endpaper; slight wear to joints and spine ends, hinges cracked, a few ink spots to boards; slight offsetting to half-title, a few marks to title; internally a few spots here and there; nonetheless a good copy.

Second UK edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s guide to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling novel of the nineteenth-century, providing evidence of the horrific conditions of slavery in the United States to counter the complaints of pro-slavery critics.

The argument which Stowe combats here is that ‘as an account of slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin was wholly false, or at least wildly exaggerated. Thus The Key is organized around that defensive project, taking up her major characters one at a time, for example, to cite real life equivalents to them. At the same time, defending her novel led her to mount a more aggressive attack on slavery in the South than the novel itself had. In the novel she works hard to be sympathetic to white southerners as well as black slaves. Here, her prose seems much angrier, both morally and rhetorically more contemptuous. One explanation for this sharper tone could be the novel’s reception in the South, where no one seems to have appreciated her attempt to be fair. Stowe was probably unprepared for the South’s shrill rejection of the book” (The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture, online).

The Key features an analysis of each primary character as well as an overview of slavery, notes on protective statutes in South Carolina and Louisiana, discussions of Biblical laws of slavery, and chapters such as ‘Slavery is Despotism’, ‘The Separation of Families’, ‘The Influence of the American Church on Slavery’, and a conclusion in which she urges the ‘whole American Church, of all denominations’, to rise up against the institution of slavery.

This is the issue without appendix, likely the earlier of the two. This copy has a printed advertisement slip for Reverend Goodell’s The American Slave Code, in Theory and Practice, advertised as a ‘companion volume to the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.

SKU: 2103753