Born [Harriet Elizabeth Beecher], at Litchfield, Conn., 14 June 1812. At school kept by her sister at Hartford, as scholar and teacher, 1824–32. Removed, with her father, to Cincinnati, 1832. Married to Rev. Calvin Ellis Stowe, Jan. 1836. Contrib. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” as serial, to “National Era,” 1851–52. Removed to Andover, where her husband was Prof. of Sacred Lit., 1852. Visits to Europe, 1853, 56, 59. Removed to Hartford, 1864. Part-editor of “Hearth and Home,” 1868. Contrib. paper on “Lady Byron” to “Atlantic Monthly,” Sept. 1869. Husband died there, 22 Aug. 1886. Failing health in later years. Died, at Hartford, Conn., 1 July 1896. Works: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (from “National Era”), 1852; “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 1853; “A Peep into Uncle Tom’s Cabin; for Children,” 1853; “Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands” (2 vols.), 1854; “Geography for My Children,” 1855; “The Christian Slave; a drama” (dramatised from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), 1855; “Dred,” 1856 (another edn., called “Nina Gordon,” 1866); “Our Charley,” 1858; “The Minister’s Wooing,” 1859; “The Pearl of Orr’s Island,” 1862; “Reply on Behalf of the Women of America,” 1863; “The Ravages of a Carpet,” 1864; “House and Home Papers” (under pseud. “Christopher Crowfield”), 1864; “Religious Poems,” 1865; “Stories about our Dogs,” 1865; “Little Foxes,” 1865; “Queer Little People,” 1867; “Daisy’s First Winter,” 1867; “The Chimney Corner” (under pseud. “Christopher Crowfield”), 1868; “Men of Our Times,” 1868; “The American Woman’s Home” (with C. E. Beecher), 1869; “Old Town Folks,” 1869; “Lady Byron Vindicated,” 1869; “Little Pussy Willow,” 1870; “Pink and White Tyranny,” 1871; “Sam Lawson’s Fireside Stories,” 1871; “My Wife and I,” 1872; “Palmetto Leaves,” 1873; “Betty’s Bright Idea,” 1875; “We and our Neighbours,” 1875; “Footsteps of the Master,” 1876; “Bible Heroines,” 1878; “Poganuc People,” 1878; “A Dog’s Mission,” 1881. Life: [to the year 1888] by her son, C. E. Stowe, 1889.

Personal

  Mrs. Stowe has arrived in London. She is come with husband, brothers, sister-in-law, and nephew. She is a simple, kindly creature, with a face which becomes beautiful from expression.

  If we could have been biassed at all, it would have been rather against, than in favour of, a writer who had been over-persuaded by her friends to come to this country, for the purpose of making a sort of public appearance, at the moment that admiration of her work was at fever height. Nothing could palliate such an indiscretion on the part of this lady’s advisers, in the eyes of a fastidious Englishman, but the belief that she was a simple-minded enthusiastic crusader against American slavery, considering that the totally unexpected celebrity of her work had afforded her an opportunity of accelerating a European movement, in a holy cause, by her personal presence. Criticism, however, ought not to be influenced by petty disturbing forces like these, nor will ours.

  Mrs. Beecher Stowe is now in Scotland, and has been staying at Dunrobin, where she made herself popular by her pleasing, gentle, and unaffected manners.

  I went to a reception given to her at Willis’s Rooms, when she seemed to me a weird, uncanny creature, more French than English, and her husband a remarkably fine specimen of the Anglo-Saxon race, and no improvement upon it.

  It is difficult to realize, as one is shown memorials of this kind, that the fragile, gentle-voiced little lady, who stands by explaining them, is herself the heroine in chief of the sublime conflict they recall. For a more unpretending person every way, or one seeming to be more unconscious of gifts and works of genius, or of a great part acted in life, it is not possible to imagine. In her quiet home, attended by her daughters, surrounded by respect and affection, filled with the divine calm of the Christian faith, in perfect charity with all mankind, the most celebrated of American women is passing the tranquil evening of her days. She will often be found seated at the piano, her hand straying over its keys—that hand that has been clothed with such mighty power—singing softly to herself those hymns of Gospel hope which have been dear to her heart through all her earthly pilgrimage, alike in cloud and in sunshine. Of late she has almost wholly laid her pen aside; though just now she is engaged with her son’s assistance, in preparing for publication a brief memoir of her honored husband, who passed away a few months since.

  A little woman entered, seventy-five years old, decidedly undersize, and weighing less than a hundred pounds. She was very simply attired in a dress of black and white check, with linen collar and small brooch, her hair which had once been brown, hung fluffily upon a broad brow and was bound by a black ribbon in front and gathered in a low knot behind. Her nose is long and straight, eyes dimmed by years, mouth large and with long, Beecher lip, full of the pathos of humanity’s mystical estate. This is what time has left of the immortal Harriet Beecher Stowe. She greeted us with cordial hand and voice and smile.

  When Mrs. Beecher Stowe visited London soon after the great success of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” I was taken to an afternoon reception given in her honor. I am ashamed to say I forget the name of her host, but I have an impression that he was a dissenting minister of some celebrity. It was certainly in the early “fifties,” I think in 1852 or 1853; and perhaps few authors ever received more genuine homage, during a brief stay in England, than did the little woman on the sofa to whom we were in turn introduced. I did not actually hear the words from her lips, but they were buzzed about the room as having just been uttered by her, that she “felt like a child who had set fire to a packet of gunpowder.” Notwithstanding the strong Yankee twang of her dialect, there was a very charming simplicity of manner about Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She did not ignore the fact that she had done an important piece of work in the world, but showed neither mock humility nor self-laudation on the subject. I suppose she was under forty years of age at the time of which I am speaking, but her skin looked dry and withered as if by a settled tan. Her countenance was distinctly intelligent, yet I can fancy certain commonplace people ranking her as one of themselves, and rather wondering how she could have written such a book. I mean those people who seem to fancy that authors are always attired in their “foolscap uniform,” much as little children imagine that kings and queens always wear crowns. But more expressive, to my mind, than her countenance, were Mrs. Stowe’s hands, which, for the most part, lay very quietly in her lap. I noticed there was no wedding-ring. Small, brown, and thin, the gnarling of the joints revealed the energy of character that usually accompanies such hands. Though by no means so “spirit small” as Mrs. Browning’s hands, they had something of the same character.

  The last time that I saw Mrs. Stowe was on the occasion of her seventieth birthday; when, at the country-seat of Governor and Mrs. Claflin, in Newtonville, Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin, her publishers, tendered her a reception—I think she called it a birthday party…. Mrs. Stowe’s appearance that day—one of her last, I think, in public—was a memorable one. Her dignity, her repose, a certain dreaminess and aloofness of manner characteristic of her, blended gently with her look of peace and unmistakable happiness. Crowded with honors as her life had been, I have fancied that this, among her latest, in her quiet years, and so full of the tenderness of personal friendship, had especial meanings to her, and gave her deep pleasure.

  Mrs. Stowe’s face, like those of all her mother’s children, showed the delicate refinement of the Foote mask, overlaid by the stronger and more sanguine Beecher integument. Her curling, crispy hair, more or less freeing itself from the velvet bands with which she was accustomed to confine it, gave an informal grace to her head. Her eyes, whether twinkling with merriment or subdued to thoughtfulness, were always kind and pleasant. Her slender frame, with something of the “scholar’s stoop” of the shoulders (although so faithful a mother and housekeeper might claim other reasons besides study, for that), was neatly but not stylishly dressed. Her manner was very self-possessed, gentle, considerate; without the graces of one habituated to society, she was most evidently a gentlewoman, born and bred.

  It appeared to those who listened most frequently to her conversation that a large part of the charm of her tales was often lost in the writing down; yet with all her unusual powers she was an excellent listener herself. Her natural modesty was such that she took keen pleasure in gathering fresh thought and inspiration from the conversation of others. Nor did the universal homage she received from high and low leave any unworthy impression upon her self-esteem. She was grateful and pleased and humble, and the only visible effect produced upon her was the heightened pleasure she received from the opportunities of knowing men and women who excited her love and admiration. Her name was a kind of sacred talisman, especially in New and Old England. It was a banner which had led men to battle against slavery. Therefore it was often a cause of surprise and social embarrassment when the bearer of this name proved to be sometimes too modest, and sometimes too absent-minded to remember that anything was expected of her on great occasions, or anything arranged for her special entertainment.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

  You must feel and know what deep impression “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has made upon every heart that can feel for the dignity of human existence; so I, with my miserable English, would not even try to say a word about the great excellency of that most beautiful book, but I must thank you for the great joy I have felt over that book…. I have the feeling about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that great changes will take place by and by from the impression people receive out of it, and that the writer of that book can “fall asleep” to-day or to-morrow with the bright sweet conscience of having been a strong, powerful means, in the Creator’s hand, of operating essential good in one of the most important questions for the welfare of our black brethren.

  My dear Sir,—I have to offer you my thanks for sending me a very remarkable book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which followed on the receipt of your letter of the 25th of April last. The book horrifies and haunts me; and I cannot help writing to you somewhat at large upon it…. Many readers and reviewers will, I have no doubt, at once explain the book to themselves, and make their minds, comparatively speaking, easy upon it, by saying that it contains gross exaggerations, and that it gives no fair account of slavery in America. I am, unfortunately, but too well acquainted with the records of slavery in most parts of the New World, and under nations differing very much from one another, for me to be able to comfort myself in this way. In truth, unless by some special Providence, planters were imbued with angelic nature, of which there is at present no evidence before us, I cannot see how the state of things can be much otherwise than as it is described to be in this fearful book, which seems to have set all America again thinking about slavery…. I have now said all that I have to say, and more than I ought to ask you to read, about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” If I had the honor of any acquaintance with the authoress, I would send through you my best regards and most earnest expressions of encouragement to her. She is evidently a noble woman and an excellent writer. And her book is one of those which insist upon being read when once begun.

  Mrs. Stowe is all instinct: it is the very reason that she appears to some not to have talent. Has she not talent? What is talent? Nothing, doubtless, compared to genius; but has she genius? I cannot say that she has talent, as one understands it in the world of letters; but she has genius, as humanity feels the need of genius,—the genius of goodness, not of the man of letters, but of the saint. Yes, a saint! Thrice holy the soul which thus loves, blesses, and consoles the martyrs. Pure, penetrating, and profound the spirit which thus fathoms the recesses of the human soul. Noble, generous, and great the heart which embraces in her pity, in her love, an entire race, trodden down in blood and mire under the whip of ruffians and the maledictions of the impious.

  The enthusiastic reception of Mrs. Stowe’s novel is the result of various causes. One is the merit of the book itself. It is, unquestionably, a work of genius. It has defects of conception and style, exhibits a want of artistic skill, is often tame and inadequate in description, and is tinctured with methodistic cant; but, with all its blemishes,—thought, imagination, feeling, high moral and religious sentiment, and dramatic power shine in every page. It has the capital excellence of exciting the interest of the reader; this never stops or falters from the beginning to the end. The characters are drawn with spirit and truth.

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a remarkable book, unquestionably; and, upon the whole, we are not surprised at its prodigious success, even as a mere literary performance; but whether, after all, it will have any direct effect upon the dreadful INSTITUTION at which it is aimed, may be regarded as problematical. Of one thing we are persuaded—that its author, as she has displayed in this work undoubted genius, in some respects of a higher order than any American predecessor or contemporary, is also a woman of unaffected and profound piety, and an ardent friend of the unhappy black. Every word in her pages issues glistening and warm from the mint of woman’s love and sympathy, refined and purified by Christianity. We never saw in any other work, so many and such sudden irresistible appeals to the reader’s heart—appeals which, moreover, only a wife and a mother could make. One’s heart throbs, and one’s eyes are suffused with tears without a moment’s notice, and without anything like effort or preparation on the writer’s part. We are, on the contrary, soothed in our spontaneous emotion by a conviction of the writer’s utter artlessness; and when once a gifted woman has satisfied her most captious reader that such is the case, she thenceforth leads him on, with an air of loving and tender triumph, a willing captive to the last. There are, indeed, scenes and touches in this book which no living writer, that we know of, can surpass, and perhaps none even equal.

  Tell her I can send her nothing half so good, if I were to lay out pounds instead of pence. I have never read anything which has made such a profound impression on me. I should like to know, when you write again, what you think of this wonderful, human-hearted, and deeply Christian book. It is not a religious novel, but a religious book in the sense in which our life should be religious.

  The humor, the pathos, the keen observation, the power of characterization, displayed in the novel, were all penetrated by an imagination quickened into activity by a deep and humane religious sentiment.

  The fact was a terrible blow had just fallen on English literature. This was a funeral feast over scores of promising works, born to die at once, some indeed never to be heard of, so I have been told, but to pass straight from the press to the vat. It was the year of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” All the ’ologies, all the arts and sciences, histories, travels, fictions, facts, light literature, heavy literature, everything that man can read, perished in that fatal blight. Mrs. Beecher Stowe had found the Garden of Eden before her, but she left a wilderness behind.

  She was in the forefront of the broadest Puritanic movement—the anti-slavery reform. She developed amid the finest culture, and ripened in mind when the times were ripest for action. These were her opportunities. Her gifts from nature were of the Walter Scott pattern. Her mind was masculine in its perception of humor, in its broad, healthy common sense. She absorbed, like Scott, everything that goes to the fullest expression of human action—incident, gesture, dialect, feature, tone, inflection—both the peculiar and the general. She could generalize and individualize—her individuals being both types and distinct personages—warm, full-blooded, alive all over, and characteristic. She had such a large intellectual endowment that she could give a fair fund of mind to each of her creations; such a wealth of humor and bonhomie that she could warm the coldest blood; such a wide possibility of the sinner and saint in her nature that she could endow a double-headed procession to march with Eva heavenward, or with Legree in the other direction. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” she was lavish. This book contains her whole range of characters, and everything combined to make it her great work.

  The author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had the wisdom—not possessed by the pessimistic or self-blinded delineators of later woes in Russia—to brighten her pages by touches of humor and kindly humanity, and to obey the canons of the novelist’s art as well as those of the moralist’s conscience. Thereby her force was quadrupled, for literature both popularizes and perpetuates morality, while morality without art is fatal to literature. The book remains a vivid panorama of people and scene in a bygone time, now remanded by final war to a past that must ever be historic and can never be repeated.

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in book form in March, 1852. The despondency and uncertainty of the author as to whether any one would read her book, was soon dispelled. Ten thousand copies were sold in a few days, and over three hundred thousand within a year. Eight powerful presses running day and night for months were barely able to keep pace with the demand for it. It was read everywhere, by all classes of people. Talk of it filled the atmosphere. Heated discussions occasioned by it resounded in cottage, farm-house, business offices, and palatial residences all over the land…. Echoes of its clarion tones came back to its author in her quiet home in Brunswick, returning as they had struck the world, with clashing dissonance or loud alarum, or low, sweet tones of feeling. Letters, letters of all sizes, colors, directions, and kinds of chirography, astonished the postmaster at Brunswick by their countless numbers, and the author began to feel the nation’s pulse. Friends applauded, remonstrated, or vociferously deprecated her course. Literary associates praised the technique of the story, but thought the subject ill-chosen. Abolitionists wrote with irrepressible enthusiasm, and praised God that she had been raised up to do this thing. Politicians angrily expressed their amazement that her husband should permit her to commit this incendiarism, which might burst into a conflagration that would dissolve the national Union. Slaveholders heaped reproaches and contumely upon her, and badly spelled productions, evincing cowardly ruffianism, were taken with tongs by her husband and dropped almost unread into the fire.

  Even the careless reader today will see that the story straggles not a little and lacks firm structure; it bears evidence that it was written from week to week, without a settled plan, and that it grew on the author’s hands almost in spite of herself. As Mrs. Stowe told the publisher, “the story made itself, and that she could not stop till it was done.” The tale was nearly half told before the need for “comedy relief,” as the playmakers phrase it, led to the introduction of Topsy, perhaps the most popular figure in the book; and it was drawing to its close before we were made acquainted with Cassy, perhaps the most picturesque character in the story and certainly not the least true. The intensity of the author’s feeling was so keen, her knowledge of her subject was so wide, her unconscious and intuitive impulse was so vigorous, that she shaped her story so as best to accomplish its purpose, building better than she knew and doing more than she dared to hope.

  Mrs. Stowe’s experiences were exceptional, her achievements conspicuous. The ethical was dominant in her career—the world of spirits, ideas, ideals, and aspirations was the world of her chief interest. In the making of her mightiest book she regarded herself as a medium—in the noble sense of that much misused word. “Are you not thankful, Mrs. Stowe,” said a neighbor of late, “that you wrote ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin?’” With a flash of the old fire she replied, “I did not write that book: God put a pen into my hand; he wrote it.”

  It was plain that no immediate literary success, tried by the ordinary standards, was ever greater than this. If now the question be asked, how far “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has vindicated its claim to be one of the great and permanent works of literature, it can only be replied that it is too soon to judge, but that the probabilities now seem rather against such a destiny. It had, like Cooper’s novels, the immense advantage of introducing to the reading world a race of human beings practically new to literature, and it had, beyond the writings of Cooper, the advantage of a distinctly evangelical flavor, such as had of itself secured a great success for the novels of the Warner sisters, now almost forgotten. Finally, it roused the world’s resentment against a mighty wrong. All these things together could not sufficiently explain the success of the book, but they helped to explain it…. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” implied a marked literary ability in its author. Characterization, grouping, incident, all were good; but, in view of the favourable conditions offered by the subject and the occasion, it is not necessary to account for its success by calling it a work of pure genius, nor is it likely that this will be the judgment of future criticism. The simple fact that the same publishers issued soon after a story of the most mediocre quality, called “The Lamplighter,” which, without any special interest of theme, yet made a tour through Europe and was abundantly translated, seems to imply that there may have been something favorable in the conditions of the times.

  Until after the war we had no real novels in this country, except “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” That is one of the great novels of the world, and of all time. Even the fact that slavery was done away with does not matter; the interest in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” never will pass, because the book is really as well as ideally true to human nature, and nobly true. It is the only great novel of ours before the war that I can think of.

  Say what we will, we can only let it stand in our serene Walhalla side by side with mighty master-pieces, a stranger withal, a Topsy among the gods, an Uncle Tom that had to be let in. There it stands. No one shall move it thence—an inspired crime, a blundering apocalypse. However inferior in many respects to her other work Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” may be, it is impossible to consider anything that she ever did—perhaps her ever doing anything,—except through this great tidal experience which swept her personality out into the full current of its power. Uncle Tom meant in Mrs. Stowe’s art what the Civil War meant in the life of every soldier who fought in it. No thought that he could ever think, nothing that he could refrain from doing, would be the same as it otherwise would have been, without those three immortal years with shot and shell and passion, day and night, and with Death for a comrade. All that is masterful in the painting of pictures, in the crises of life, the composing of symphonies, the writing of books, would seem to be the infinite coming back of some Moment we never forget. It is decreed that this moment shall be God to us. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was Mrs. Stowe’s Moment…. The success of Uncle Tom was based upon the moments in which she was a genius and an artist both.

  I believe that Uncle Tom and Eva are as imperishable as Hector and Andromache. As long as human error and atonement are intelligible subjects of tragedy, as long as men need to be reminded that the innocent must suffer for the guilty, as long as tyrants torture and helpless creatures cringe, so long this dramatic romance will retain its power.

  Forgetting alike her false step in the Byron matter, her volumes of travels, her religious verses, her sketches, her juvenile fiction, and even most of her better novels, the great world appears to have decided to remember Mrs. Stowe as the woman that wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In this case, as in so many others, the decision of the world seems to be the safest one for criticism to adopt. Mrs. Stowe lives as the writer of one great book. She had the faculty of giving a fair amount of life to some characters; of sketching others very effectively, even if she frequently lapsed into caricature, of telling an interesting story. Her descriptive powers were good, her command of pathos and humour was very considerable, her intellectual ability was respectable, and with regard to slavery and theology more than respectable, her womanliness lent charm and dignity to many of her pages, her style improved with practice and was at least fairly adequate to her purposes; yet we have but to set Mrs. Stowe beside Jane Austen, George Eliot, and George Sand to be convinced that she was not an eminent author. Her art was not sufficiently sure, her intellect not sufficiently strong and deep, her power not sufficiently affluent. These deficiencies of the writer are plainly visible in her single masterpiece, but “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is alive with emotion, and the book that is alive with emotion after the lapse of fifty years is a great book. The critic of to-day cannot do better than to imitate George Sand when she reviewed the story on its first appearance—waive its faults and affirm its almost unrivalled emotional sincerity and strength.

  Even more remarkable than the external fortunes of the book is the author’s lack of intellectual and moral preparation for it and pre-engagement with it. Her first knowledge of slavery on its own ground was in 1833, when she visited a Kentucky plantation, which became Colonel Shelby’s in the book. She saw something of pro-slavery riots in Cincinnati, and something of runaway slaves, only the Ohio’s width intervening between Cincinnati and slave territory. Once she had a slave girl as a servant in her house, and when the man-hounds were on the girl’s track Mrs. Stowe’s husband and brother spirited her away towards Canada, so furnishing Mrs. Stowe with one of her strong incidents. Had her own scent upon the trail of slavery been keen, her opportunities for intimate knowledge of it would have been adequate to her demands. But living for eighteen years next door to slavery, and, as it were, in the first station of the “underground railroad,” she does not appear to have had any deep interest in the matter during those years. She probably sympathised with her father when, at the dictation of the slave holding interests, he silenced the discussion of slavery in his school and forced the withdrawal of the anti-slavery students. She disliked the abolitionists and was still a “colonisationist” when she wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Apparently she waited, as did many others, for the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) to wake her sleeping heart, and it was first through another’s eyes that she saw the horror of the situation. Her brother Edward’s wife in Boston had a close view of the slave captures and renditions, and she wrote to Mrs. Stowe commanding her to “write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” Mrs. Stowe read the letter in her little Brunswick parlour, and then crushing it in her hand, as if it were the monster, said, erecting her tired body, “I will write something. I will, if I live.” No vow was ever kept more sacredly. Once launched upon the tide of her story, she was swept along with passionate sympathy. Much of it was written in the small hours of night, after the baking, mending, child-nursing, house painting, and other drudgery of the day. The book written in this fashion had the defects of its qualities. The plot was loose and rambling; the style had ailing spots; the knowledge of Southern life and character and situation had its defective side. But the author had the divine gift of imagination, and her book was all alive. Every character had reality; so had the scenery of the book; so had its main effect. It did not exaggerate the horrors of slavery. It confessed the better side.

Dred, 1856

  I wish I were within reach of you to read “Dred” to you: not that it is so good as “Uncle Tom”—that, indeed, was impossible, for she could never write her first book again; but I think the comic part of this last one admirable.

  She has lately published a new book called “Dred,” which contains some fine things, but is not likely, from its exaggeration, to advance the cause she has so much at heart, and which just now appears to be anything but in the ascendant in the United States.

  “Dred,” intended by the writer to be in some sort a complement to the earlier novel, appeared in 1856, and one hundred thousand copies were sold in England within four weeks. Harriet Martineau thought it superior to “Uncle Tom,” and the work certainly contains some vivid scenes, and, moreover, has the merit of depicting the normal social conditions of the South during slavery days.

  It was less an inspiration than its predecessor, and more a deliberate construction; and was judged to be inferior in power. Yet it was a very strong book, both in human interest and in effective attack upon the slave system. In logical sequence to the simple story of the earlier book, it went on to portray the treatment of slavery on its own ground by the church, the law, and the would-be reformer. It showed how its essential evils were supported by statute and by judicial interpretation. It pictured the ways of the clerical politician. It depicted the attempt of a high-minded slaveholder to elevate his servants and purify the system, and his defeat by mob violence and by statute law. These were trenchant attacks on the system they were aimed at. But the more abiding charm of the book is in its life-like picturing of men and women; and especially in “life among the lowly.” Best of all, perhaps, are “Old Tiff,” a counterpart of the “Uncle Remus” whom the present generation knows and loves; and Milly, the slave “mammy,”—the type which of all the negroes Mrs. Stowe portrays best, and perhaps the finest type of character which slavery produced.

The Minister’s Wooing, 1859

  Marked a new era in American novel-writing. Here we had the genuine novel,—no mere romance, or allegory, or evolution from the inner consciousness, but a work saturated with American life,—not local, but spanning the whole arch of the States.

  She was the first to break the spell of a theology which had wrought terrible mischief with sensitive minds and which is to-day responsible for the indifference of multitudes…. Contained the keynote of the later Andover movement and led the way to the larger hope. If this is the significance of this book to-day, it is to be valued also as a delineation of New England society at the beginning of this century. It is refreshing to read it in comparison with the highly-seasoned fiction of the hour. It holds and entertains the reader by its truth to life, and yet the sensational features of the modern story are entirely wanting. In the character of Candace Mrs. Stowe gives her solution of a religious problem, and in the person of Mrs. Marvyn one sees what the effect of the teaching of eternal punishment was upon a sensitive and devout mind. This novel shows a conscious effort on the part of Mrs. Stowe to write up to the level of her great reputation. She would have been more than human had she not betrayed this weakness, and it is the only one of her later writings in which it appears.

  The most artistic and complete of all her books.

  Late in 1858 began in The Atlantic Monthly her widely liked and good novel of colonial life, “The Minister’s Wooing.” Lowell, then editing the magazine, prophesied that her fame would chiefly rest upon the new story, and other readers agreed with him. It is almost needless to remark that, if this ever happens, Mrs. Stowe’s fame will have shrunk to such small dimensions that it will make little difference what it rests on.

Lady Byron Vindicated, 1869

  Forty years after his death his wife produces notes she had taken nearly half a century past, accusing her liege lord of a heinous offence. Mrs. Beecher Stowe, a New England Puritan of the deepest dye, is called into council, and these two pious and remorseless saints, after conferring, condemn the Poet, and the stern Yankee lady puts on the black cap and passes sentence of death on the memory of a great man, without counsel being fee’d, or witnesses summoned on either side, and when all implicated are mouldering in their graves. If men’s characters are to be thus summarily impugned and condemned, who is safe amongst the dead from being dragged from his grave and trailed in the mud as Cromwell was.

  What grounds had she to publish to the world such a tale of impurity, from which even as a woman she was doubly bound to hold aloof? She desired, she says, to meet the accusations against Lady Byron contained in the book of the Countess Guiccioli, which she characterises as “the mistress versus the wife.” But surely this was the business of the family or of their solicitors,—it was clearly not her affair; not to mention that the imputations of the Countess Guiccioli do not go beyond what had been said again and again before her, and said with justice against Lady Byron. It causes no pain to the pious soul of Mrs. Stowe to heap accusations on the dead, who cannot defend themselves; she appears to think that the end justifies the means, and that the godly are exempt from the application of the ordinary standards of morality. She might, no doubt, have considered herself absolved from any feelings of respect to the memory of Byron; for he of course, before and after his death, was considered by the pious world as proscribed and outlawed. But her feelings as a woman should have restrained her from branding with such infamy the memory of Mrs. Leigh, especially as some of Mrs. Leigh’s children are still living. That from her religious point of view she should be ready to impute to Byron every possible deed of infamy, is conceivable; but what could entitle her to hold Mrs. Leigh capable of such an enormity? Where in Mrs. Leigh’s life and character could she find any ground for such an accusation? Here, too, Mrs. Stowe betrays an utter want of the discrimination requisite for the sifting and weighing of evidence.

  In the “Byron Controversy,” many who agree with Dr. Holmes that Mrs. Stowe had made good her accusation, will equally agree with George Eliot that the advantage to Lady Byron’s character from Mrs. Stowe’s disclosure was no sufficient compensation for the harm it did to the community, by fixing its attention on a matter so intolerably vile.

  She startled the repose of society by publishing in the Atlantic Monthly what she conceived to be the true story of Lord Byron’s quarrel with his wife, afterwards amplified and published as “Lady Byron Vindicated.” It was a revelation so utterly ghastly that it aroused a large part of her readers against it; and as it was incapable of further proof—resting entirely upon verbal statements of Lady Byron—it never succeeded in establishing itself in the public mind. That Mrs. Stowe fully believed her own theory as to Lord Byron is unquestionable, but the motive of the exposure still remains unexplained. Had Lord Byron been a falsely canonized saint, there might have been some possible object in unveiling his sins; but as he occupied no moral eminence, it was not worth while to disgust the public in order to settle the mere question of more or less, and as Lady Byron had died in the odor of sanctity, there seemed no reason for vindicating her from the charge of a too zealous and exacting virtue. In the long run the publication neither helped Lady Byron’s reputation nor hurt that of the poet, and it gave temporary stimulus to the sale of his works, which were steadily losing their influence.

General

  Her book, though it is called a novel, is better to be described as a series of pictures of life as seen from the kitchen, and best-room, and barnyard, and meadow, and wood-lot of a Massachusetts parsonage of the pre-locomotive days. So far as it is a novel, “Oldtown Folks” cannot be said to call for remark except from those whose duty it may be to point out defects of literary workmanship. Such persons will discover matter for fault-finding throughout the book. There is none of Mrs. Stowe’s books that we know in which she has not failed as completely in the creation of character as she has succeeded decidedly in depicting typical Massachusetts men and women who—embodied in this and that individual person—have been under her observation ever since she began to observe, and whom she puts before us as she has seen the outside of them, and not as she has tried to imagine them…. Nothing could be much better in its way than Mrs. Stowe’s picture of the village do-nothing Sam Lawson—whose do-nothingness is perhaps a little too much insisted upon—a being with whom every observer who knows New England villages is perfectly familiar in one or another incarnation of him, and whose traits lie upon the surface crying to be drawn. But no ’prentice hand could do much worse work than Mrs. Stowe’s picture of Horace Holyoke. The entirely needless mistake is made, too, of putting the whole story into the mouth of this person, who has a deal too much to do to look like a man in his own place in the story without having it imposed on him to think and talk like a man about men’s and women’s acts and thoughts and feelings.

  A special influence may be attributed to this single marked manifestation of force, to this imposing popular triumph. In the face of the fact that the one American book which had stormed Europe was the work of a woman, the old tone of patronage became ridiculous, the old sense of ordained and inevitable weakness on the part of the “female writer” became obsolete. Women henceforth, whatever their personal feelings in regard to the much discussed book, were enabled, consciously or unconsciously, to hold the pen more firmly, to move it more freely.

  Mr. James Russell Lowell considered Mrs. Stowe a woman of genius; at any rate she was the possessor of high talent, even if a certain lack of clearness of mental perception, which caused her judgment to be sometimes faulty, makes us hesitate to apply to her the word genius. She was an emotional rather than an inspired woman. If we compare her with country-women of her own, we find she had neither the large mental grasp of Margaret Fuller nor the spiritual height and breadth of Louisa Alcott. Yet, within her narrower sphere, she was admirable—an earnest, brave, and pious woman. If she erred in judgment, assuredly she was never false to the highest truth she knew…. Other works followed from Mrs. Stowe’s pen, only less powerful than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for the special end she had in view, and superior to it as contributions to literature. In her time she was the victim of extravagant praise and of equally extravagant censure; and it speaks well for the steadfastness of her character that neither one nor the other spoiled her in the least. From first to last there is the same cheerful outlook upon life, the same fidelity to duty, and the same simplicity.

  The greatest of American women.

  No woman in history has ever gone on living her life as Harriet Beecher did, recklessly individual, provincial, shut out from the metropolis of art and letters, criticized by inferiors or not at all—only to be suddenly, by a single story, confronted with the whole human race, an audience no mortal has had before or since. This concentration of praise and obloquy was as if the whole universe of the human spirit had opened itself with a flash and arched itself over this hidden life, and almost cosmic criticism—all for one little woman writing across a cradle in a New England town.