Uncle Tom's Cabin
This unforgettable novel tells the story of Tom, a devoutly Christian slave who chooses not to escape bondage for fear of embarrassing his master. However, he is soon sold to a slave trader and sent down the Mississippi, where he must endure brutal treatment. This is a powerful tale of the extreme cruelties of slavery, as well as the price of loyalty and morality. When first published, it helped to solidify the anti-slavery sentiments of the North, and it remains today as the book that helped move a nation to civil war. "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Mrs. Stowe has been seriously questioned, but few will deny that this work fed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers. If it did not "make" the Civil War, it flamed the embers. That Uncle Tom's Cabin is far more than an outdated work of propaganda confounds literary criticism. The novel's overwhelming power and persuasion have outlived even the most severe of critics. As Professor John William Ward of Amherst College points out in his incisive Afterword, the dilemma posed by Mrs. Stowe is no less relevant today than it was in 1852: What is it to be "a moral human being"? Can such a person live in society -- any society?
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6recommend
69mentions
64people
2008–2026years
9% recommend83% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Mein Kampf is just the most stark example of a book that is forbidden, but very significant to read if you want to understand WWII history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is another example of a book you wont see but is another piece of literature you should read if you want to understand the ideology of a given time period. You don't have to agree with a book to read it.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
- >For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance that results in brutal suffering and death on an unjust earth that will finally send Uncle Tom out of America to a less violent place known as Heaven. In Baldwin’s words, Stowe “was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong… This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel, and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still with the same constriction.”
So, is the problem that the slaves don't fight back? Or that the author is injecting their pesky morality into "apolitical" literature? The latter is usually a veiled condemnation of something the reader doesn't like. The former is just arguing for a different moral framing[0].
I don't see morals in literature being a bad thing. The example used here, Uncle Tom's Cabin, did what a lot of books only dream they could do - grabbing their readers by the throat and dragging them to the conclusion.
I've never worked with a sensitivity reader and I have no intention of working in traditional publishing[1]. I'm sure there are plenty of situations there where books have been neutered by people who misread them. However, that problem is not that readers want morally sanitized books or even that the acceptable morals have shifted. The problem is that the idiots running the business believe that to be the case.
[0] Specifically, one of oppressed peoples fighting back and liberating themselves
[1] Amazon sucked the life out of that business. In fact, I'm appalled that the Esquire writer wastes so many words on how technology is killing novels and doesn't even mention the kinds of shit Kindle and Audible do.
- >And Uncle Tom's Cabin has virtually no appeal anymore.
It might have no appeal for the trend following people in the current US climate (for political reasons), but it remains a popular book around the globe. You can find it on most bookstores in this (much remote) place just fine. And in amazon.com it's in the top 200 of the African-American literature category by sales.
- Slaves did many skilled labor jobs back in the day. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book you really should read, but beware the purpose was to make you pick up your gun and march, so if you have those tendencies...) on of the important slaves held a good factory job.
Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did hold other positions. I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.
- The book I recommended in original comment (A World on Fire) will give you a good inside-look at the British political thought & decision making during that time, including Parliamentary debates & communiques between Palmerston and his ministers. Their motivations are complex, like any other politician, but if they were purely economic & geopolitical opportunists I would have expected them to leap at dividing America and keeping the cotton flowing. They didn't.
> I've generally had a pretty cynical view towards British abolitionism
I am not an expert on abolitionist movements or their political effects, but there was a strong moral outrage to slavery in the 19th century and it developed very rapidly, starting in Britain. I recommend reading about the British public's reaction to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
> their empire, whose 19th century wealth was bootstrapped on the profits of of slave-trading and the manufacture of raw materials extracted via slave labor, was uniquely-well-positioned to come out on top in a world order deprived of slave labor
You're not wrong, and you can toss colonialism in there, too. The Japanese were made the same argument in the early 20th century as they were trying to expand and acquire colonies and kept getting their knuckles whacked by the Europeans, who were (mostly) trying to pump the brakes on colonialism by that point.
- Uncle Tom´s cabin
