Uncle Tom's Cabin

Okay, okay. So I started this book many years ago when I co-taught "History in Literature and Film" with Brian Bodner. I never actually finished the book back then; I only got about 1/3 of the way through it. I figured it was about time I finished it.

I liked the plot and characters. Stowe, for a Nineteenth century New England Baptist, has a great sense of dialogue. Her slave characters had interesting and slightly varied dialects (difficult to write well), and the evil characters (e.g., the diabolical Simon Legree) were frightening in their viciousness. All the characters had original, unique voices, and Stowe fleshed them out thoroughly with extensive backgrounds. Overall, the story was realistic, an aspect confirmed by the superfluous and didactic final chapter in which she relates many of the real-life anecdotes upon which numerous novel events were based.

The book had some memorable scenes: Eliza crossing the Ohio River, infant in her arms, by jumping across floes of ice (an event supposedly based upon reality), the death of little Eva, the wonderfully careless but compassionate Augustus St. Clare, and of course the emotional death of Uncle Tom himself. The book was surprisingly humorous, despite- or perhaps because of--its serpentine prose and intrusive narrator. Maudlin at times, preachy and overwritten on occasion, and with a series of final coincidences that stretch believability, the book nevertheless was enjoyable to read. The ending (i.e., the final two chapters) dragged horribly, but I can forgive her inability to resist driving home her point and providing a happy ending for as many of her characters as she could, considering what she undertook in writing the novel. Abraham Lincoln certainly had a high opinion of the novel, as evidenced by his comment upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe at a White House reception: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made the great war!"