Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Early UK edition. 7 engraved plates plus vignette title-page. 8vo. Original publisher's brown ribbed cloth stamped in blind with gilt pictorial titles to spine. A little rubbed with headcap frayed, corners bumped and lightly soiled. Textblock tight and clean with just a few spots and one toned quire. One pair of pages roughly opened causing a tear, but no loss. A very good unsophisticated copy. iv, 355 [1ads]pp. London, Ingram, Cooke & Co.

"In the emotion-charged atmosphere of mid-ninteenth-century America, Uncle Tom’s Cabin exploded like a bombshell. To those engaged in fighting slavery it appeared as an indictment of all the evils inherent in the system they opposed; to the pro-slavery forces it was a slanderous attack on ‘the Southern way of life.’ Whatever its weakness as a literary work - structural looseness and excess of sentiment among them - the social impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the United States was greater than of any book before or since" (PMM).

 

Reaching the London presses only two months after the Philadelphia first, in the following year of publication more than forty editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin were printed in England, and it was the only novel of the nineteenth century to sell more than a million copies in Britain. The illustrated editions were vital in clarifying the image of North American slavery in the English mind and assisted in the ongoing efforts toward its abolition.

 

This Ingram & Cooke edition was somewhere close on the heels of the first UK illustrated edition by Cassell, and represents an early example of the ever evolving depiction of the characters in light of the novel's extraordinary popular success. The plate titled "George's sister whipped for wishing to live a decent Christian life", in particular, despite its pious title depicts a shocking scene of a kneeling, chained woman, naked from the waist down, with a man standing over her wielding a lash.

 

This salacious and evocative scene was illustrated in many different editions, though in the text itself is only mentioned cursorily. As such the choice to visually represent this brief moment of the novel tells us as much about the British publishing market as it does of Stowe's intentions. 

 

Though later editions of this Ingram & Cooke illustrated version of the text had an additional, typographic title-page, this, the first thus, is complete with only the illustrated vignette title-page. 

 

This copy with the ink ownership inscription of a "Laura Smirke" to the head of the title-page, and an Eyre & Spottiswood chromolithographic postcard loosely inserted between the pages, a mountain scene on one side and the poem 'New Year' by Eden Hooper on the other.

 

PMM 332; Holohan, M., "British Illustrated Editions of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin': Race, Working Class Literacy, and Transatlantic Reprinting in the 1850s" in Resources for American Literary Study Vol. 36 (2011), pp.27-65. 

Stock Code: 246271