SOURCE: "Mothers, Husbands, and an Uncle: Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, " in Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 74-89.

In the following excerpt, Railton focuses on Stowe's relationship to her audience, contending that Uncle Tom's Cabin is both a radical novel of social protest and a conventional recording of genteel Victorian preconceptions.

There are still two good reasons to read Uncle Tom's Cabin: for its radicalism, and for its conventionality. As a novel of social protest, it generates so much passion within its own pages that, although the particular evil it indicts has given way to other forms of injustice, its power remains largely intact. In this respect it is like The Grapes of Wrath, which is deeply indebted to Stowe's archetypal work. As one of the three best-selling novels of mid-nineteenth-century America, it is also a perfect mirror of genteel Victorian...