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Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. By Sarah Meer. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. x, 332. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $24.95.)
Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold far more copies than any preceding piece of American writing both in the United States and elsewhere. It marked the beginning of large-scale exportation of American culture. Sarah Meer examines writings that responded to and reworked the story in the United States and Britain during the 18505 in order to explore the range of messages and the effects on popular culture. Her thesis is that by innovatively developing existing literary tropes and by using popularly appealing ambiguities, Stowe gained high sales and great impact on mass thought about race.
Stowe used many conventions of the sentimental domestic novel, especially women's capability to uplift the morality of others, but she also satirized orderly housekeeping. She borrowed the plantation novel's emphasis on gracious living and fiscal mismanagement but reversed the proslavery message. The British genre of social problems fiction, especially the works of Charles Dickens, inspired...