278: “Uncle Tom in England” published in 1852



The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was a sensation from the moment it was published in New York in 1852. The absence of copyright laws enabled publishers elsewhere to print editions, summaries, selections and extracts, which spread the story of the elderly slave Tom and his family all over the world. Copies appeared in over thirty different languages.

Stage versions, some owing little to Stowe’s narrative, became commonplace and in October 1852 three London theatres presented productions. Thousands of copies of the book were sold monthly, and the name ‘Uncle Tom’ was widespread, appearing for example as the name of beer houses in Huddersfield, Sheffield, London, Preston and Bradford. By the end of 1853 600,000 copies of Stowe’s book had been sold in Britain. Music – a march, a lament, a waltz and a quadrille – used the title by 1855. The stage performances gave opportunities to black people in Britain, with walk-on parts and crowd scenes, as well as Uncle Tom himself. These roles continued beyond the end of Victoria’s reign.

In her 135 page American Slaves in Victorian England (Cambridge University Press, 2000) Professor Audrey Fisch mentions a London publication of 1852 which had escaped my attention – Uncle Tom in England. Published by Houlston and Stoneman, long established in London’s Paternoster Row (the centre of England’s book trade), and with a German language edition published in Leipzig in 1853, the book does not seem to be central to that publisher’s output which had titles including Immortality, The Evangelical Pulpit (a collection of 28 sermons), The Soul’s Welfare, Flowers of the Holy Land, and back in the mid-1840s, A Treatise on the Practical Drainage of Land and The Orphan’s Inheritance. A quick study of Houlston and Stoneman’s publications on the website JISC also reveals that perhaps just Frederick Dyer’s The Slave Girl of 1848 hints at the possibility of Uncle Tom in England. Fisch notes that whereas in the American-authored original Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘lighter-skinned blacks are the superiors (intellectually, morally, and socially) of darker-skinned black characters’, in Uncle Tom in England ‘the “whiter” mulattos … are identified as intellectually and socially inferior to … the “full” black children’ (page 110 note 8).

No author has been identified but the papers of Houlston and Stoneman 1827-1861 are at the British Library (Add MS 45413).