Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was partly inspired by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada. It was the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible, and is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s.
About Uncle Tom’s Cabin in brief
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings. Stowe was partly inspired by the slave narrative The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada. The cabin where Henson lived while he was enslaved no longer exists, but a cabin on the Riley farm erroneously thought to be the Henson Cabin was purchased by the Montgomery County, Maryland, government in 2006. It is now a part of the National Park Service National Underground Railroad program, and plans are underway to build a museum and interpret center on the American Slavery and the Grimkivek sisters, a source of some of the novel’s content. This non-fiction book was intended to verify Stowe’s claims about slavery, but many later indicated that Stowe did not read many of the book’s claims to verify her claims about the book in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of stereotypes about black people, including the affectionate, dark-skinned ‘mammy’ and the ‘pickaninny’ stereotype of black children. It has been argued that the long-term durability of Lincoln’s greeting as an anecdote in literary studies and Stowe scholarship can perhaps be explained in part by the desire among many contemporary intellectuals to affirm the role of literature as an agent of social change.
Stowe wrote the novel as a response to the passage, in 1850, of the second Fugitive Slave Act of the U.S. The novel lent its name to Henson’s home, near Dresden, Ontario, Canada, which since the 1940s has been a museum, and since the 1950s has become a museum. It was the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible, and is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. In the first year after it was published, 300,000 copies were sold in the United States; one million copies in Great Britain. In 1855, three years after itwas published, it was called “the most popular novel of our day.’’ The impact attributed to the book is great, reinforced by a story that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, Lincoln declared, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” The quote isapocryphal; it did not appear in print until 1896, and it hasbeen argued that “uncle Tom” was not the main character in the novel. A number of interviews with people who escaped slavery during the time she was living in Ohio, a slave state, were used in the book.
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This page is based on the article Uncle Tom’s Cabin published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
