Volume 54, Number 16 · October 25, 2007
The Fever Dream of Mrs. Stowe
By David Bromwich
The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited with an introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins
Norton, 480 pp., $39.95
The death of Uncle Tom, the good husband and gentle slave who epitomizes the Christian virtues of charity and self-sacrifice, came to Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1851 in a sudden 'vision' that inspired the writing of the book over many months. She was thirty-nine, and known already as a gifted observer. Stowe had recently witnessed the death of her youngest child, 'the most beautiful and most loved' of seven children, as she described him; there were 'circumstances,' she said, 'about his death of such peculiar bitterness' that for the first time she was made to understand the feelings of a slave mother from whom a child at any moment could be snatched away. She believed that her private tragedy was the incitement for the book; but it had a longer and public background.
Review, 4711 words
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