SOURCE: Fisch, Audrey A. “Abolition as a ‘step to reform in our kingdom’: Chartism, ‘white slaves,’ and a new ‘Uncle Tom’ in England.” In American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture, pp. 33-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Fisch discusses themes in the anonymous 1852 novel Uncle Tom in England, asserting the work was published to illustrate England's moral superiority to the United States and to capitalize on the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

England, perhaps more than any other nation, owes a duty to America; and certainly no other people can perform such a duty so effectively as the English. We owe it, then, as a duty to God and to man, and to Americans especially, to speak out against the dreadful oppression of which the black slave is the victim … But how shall this voice be...