Harriet (Elizabeth) Beecher Stowe Biography

Harriet Beecher Stowe (14 June 1811-1 July 1896), prolific novelist, is remembered today for Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of the distinguished Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote. The family included eight children, among them Catharine, Isabella, and Henry Ward Beecher. When Harriet was four, her mother died. Harriet's father remarried and had three more children by his second wife, Harriet Porter. During this period Harriet and Henry Ward were closely attached. Under her father's pervasive influence, she grew up in "a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen--full charged with intellectual electricity." Much of that "moral oxygen" and "intellectual electricity" would be injected into Uncle Tom's Cabin. The guiding principles of life in the Calvinist parsonage were self-abnegation and spiritual regeneration, principles that were to filter into Harriet's writings. After five years at Miss Sarah Pierce's school in Litchfield, she attended the Hartford Female Seminary opened by her oldest sister Catharine, and subsequently taught there. In 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati where Lyman Beecher became president of Lane Theological Seminary and Catharine founded the Western Female Institute. There Harriet taught and in 1834 won first prize for a sketch in the Western Monthly Magazine. Two years later, the shy, thin, plain Harriet Beecher married a widower, Calvin Ellis Stowe, Professor of Biblical Literature at Lane. Five children were born during the first seven years of their marriage. Strongly imbued with Christian purpose, Harriet took charge of the family finances as well as the drudgeries of housekeeping. She also dashed off a tale now and then so that she could hire household help, and in 1843 a collection of her stories, The Mayflower, was published by Harpers. A few years later, after the birth of two additional children, Calvin Stowe became a professor at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Harriet continued her writing, her early sentimental and conventional sketches reflecting her high-minded interest in social reform, the sanctity of the home, and woman's place in it. She had read of the atrocities of slavery, and when the Fugitive Slave Law spurred her to action she was finally metamorphosed into the instrument of the Lord who created an "epic of Negro bondage," a powerful narrative of damnation and salvation. Uncle Tom's Cabin was begun early in 1851 and sold for $300 to the National Era , where the first of forty installments appeared in June. At the suggestion of Mrs. John P. Jewett, wife of the Boston publisher, it was published in book form in 1852, the writer accepting a 10% royalty in lieu of half share of expenses and profits. Uncle Tom's Cabin was issued first in a two-volume set and later as a single volume priced at 37 1/2 cents. Within a year total sales topped 300,000.

Before the Civil War sales reached 3,000,000 and more than double that figure up to 1972. Eventually the book reached "the top flight of the list of American best sellers." With dramatizations, reprints, and foreign translations, its popularity soared. Uncle Tom's Cabin made its author famous overnight, inspired a spate of anti-Uncle Tom novels, and won the praise of such diverse critics as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Henry James. Ralph Waldo Emerson stressed its universality in "Success": "We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house." According to one reviewer, "The mightiest princes of intellect, as well as those who have scarcely harbored a stray thought ... friends of slavery equally with the haters of that institution ... all ... bend with sweating eagerness over her magic pages." Though its characters are sometimes symbols and some of its incidents stylized, this domestic novel was also a forceful,vital, original, and daring moral instrument. Its author exercised tact but did not shrink from realism, and her message--that slavery destroys both the master and the slave--rang boldly across the nation. Simon Legree, Eliza, Mr. St. Clare, little Eva, and Uncle Tom joined a parade of unforgettable literary characters, and Mrs. Stowe's timely propaganda stirred the national conscience. She replied to objectors in 1853 with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1856 she returned for the last time to the anti-slavery theme in Dred . Between 1862, when she reworked her New England childhood into The Pearl of Orr's Island, and 1884, Mrs. Stowe produced at least a book a year, providing for her family, educating her children, sustaining an alcoholic son. From her tireless pen flowed essays on the home, domestic novels, stories of death and redemption, as well as a defense of Lady Byron. After her husband's retirement in 1864, the family moved to Hartford, where Mrs. Stowe built a villa, Oakholm. Despite the independence her pen had won her, she continued to sermonize against the emancipated woman who indulged in tobacco. Harriet Beecher Stowe was accurately described by one biographer as a "Crusader in Crinoline." Her crinolines have become period pieces, her crusade historic. Yet she helped to document and advance that crusade. James Baldwin's attribution of racial prejudice to Uncle Tom's Cabin has been effectively rebutted, and recent evaluations of Mrs. Stowe as a writer tend to reveal in her work not less but more literary craftsmanship. Although Uncle Tom's Cabin is no longer widely read, it is still being critically examined, and it is unlikely that it will ever be forgotten.