Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin
John Kendrick Bangs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Grace Humphrey
eBook
(A. J. Cornell Publications, Feb. 20, 2012)
This Kindle edition, equivalent in length to a physical book of approximately 20 pages, consists of two parts. Part I, a biography of Stowe, was originally published in 1919 in “Women in American History.” Part II, a highly condensed retelling of Stowe’s best-known work, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was originally published in 1920 in “One Hundred Best Novels Condensed, Vol. 4.”Sample passages:(from Part I, the biography) Soon after the Stowes were settled in their Maine home a letter came from her sister-in-law in Boston: “Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something to make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” Reading this letter aloud to the family, when she came to that sentence Harriet Beecher Stowe rose, crushed the paper in her hand, and with a look on her face that her children never forgot, she exclaimed, “I will write something—if I live, I will!” She was forty years old, in delicate health, overladen with responsibilities; a devoted mother, with small children, one still a baby; with untrained servants requiring supervision; with her pupils to be taught daily; and boarders to eke out the limited salary—her hands were full to overflowing. It seemed unlikely that she would ever do anything but this ceaseless labor. But her heart burned within her for those in bondage. The law passed and the fugitives were hunted out and sent back into servitude and death. The people of the North looked on indifferently. Could she, a woman with no reputation, waken them by anything she might write?(from Part II, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” condensed) Enter now one Simon Legree, a master of far different type from Shelby and St. Clare. A brute and a drunkard. A beast whose glance was an insult to womanhood. A fiend who prided himself upon his inflexible brutality, and with brutish satisfaction showed, to all who would look, his knuckles calloused with the blows he had inflicted upon the helpless. To him by virtue of length of purse fell Tom, who now tasted the tragic dregs of the cup of slavery. The manifest contrast between his own crass brutality and the high-minded character of his chattel aroused the envious wrath of his new owner, who endeavored by every wicked expedient possible to break Tom’s spirit and his unalterable faith in divine guidance and protection. Furtively he watched him at work, hoping to find a flaw, but in vain; but one day he found the way. He ordered Tom to flog a woman-slave who was guiltless of the shortcoming attributed to her, and for the first time in his career Legree was denied. Tom refused. Legree’s answer was a blow upon Tom’s cheek.About the Authors:Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was an American novelist best known for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), which greatly strengthened the pre–Civil War antislavery cause. Grace Humphrey was an early 20th century writer whose other works include “Illinois, the Story of the Prairie State,” “The Story of the Marys,” and “Stories of the World’s Holidays.” John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922) was an American author, editor, and satirist whose other works include “Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others,” and “The Pursuit of the House-Boat,” and “Over the Plum Pudding.”