Folkestone Literary Festival Read
When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe at the start
of the American Civil War, he is often reported as having said, "So this is the
little lady who made this big war." Whether or not this is true there is no
doubt that her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was crucially important in revealing to
the world the evils of slavery in the southern states of America and in fuelling
the abolitionist cause.
The book has been chosen for this years Folkestone Literary Festival Read in
part because, though this year is not an anniversary of the abolition of slavery
in any country, it is two hundred years since the abolition of the Atlantic
Slave trade, which provided the labour for plantations in the United States. The
impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on it’s publication in 1852 was immediate and
lasting. In its first year 300,000 copies were sold in the United States and
nearly one million in England. It became the best selling novel of the
nineteenth century and has never been out of print.
Based mainly on interviews with runaways, the book follows the life of a slave
Uncle Tom who is sold on after the death of a kindly owner to a plantation owner
whose treatment of him is appalling. There is a parallel story of another slave
Eliza, who escapes to freedom. The book is written in a sentimental and
sensational style that was common in one genre of women’s writing in the
nineteenth century and, as a result, was not taken seriously by literary Critics
despite its great success. However in 1985 Jane Tomkins wrote of the power of
sentimentality and suggested that women’s emotions had the ability to bring
about great changes as indeed Uncle Tom's Cabin had done.
During the 1960s and 1970s the novel also came under attack by the Black Power
and Black Arts movement for its crude stereotyping. However, in recent a
reassessment of the novel, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has reversed these criticisms
stating that the book is a "central document in American race relations and a
significant moral and political exploration of the character of those
relations."
Dr. Keith Carabine, a lecturer, recently retired from the University of Kent at
Canterbury, will be giving a talk on the book during the Literary Festival in
November. He has written of it in his Introduction to the Worsdsworth Edition as
“arguably the most popular and certainly the most influential novel ever written
by an American” We are hoping that as many people as possible will read Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and come along to the talk during the festival. The Wordsworth
edition is available from both Waterstone's branches in Folkestone for £1.99.
Nick Spurrier
Article from Go Folkestone Newsletter September 2007
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