Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s

Titled after Tom-Mania the name a British newspaper gave to the international sensation attending the 1852 novel Uncle Toms Cabin this study looks anew at the novel and the songs plays sketches translations and imitations it inspired. In particular Sarah Meer shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy the slavery question and Americas emerging cultural identity affected how Uncle Toms Cabin was read discussed dramatized merchandized and politicized here and abroad. Until Uncle Toms Cabin Meer says little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery. In addition to cutting across class gender and national lines the novel tapped into a huge preexisting transatlantic appetite for blackface performance. Even as it condemned slavery however Uncle Toms Cabin was ambiguous about racial equality and it portrayed blacks in demeaning ways. This gave copycat novels and minstrel stagings leeway to stray from Harriet Beecher Stowes intentions. Minstrel-show versions in particular had a huge influence on later incarnations of the Uncle Tom story converting the character into a comic or worse a proslavery stooge - a scorned figure in our popular memory. To look at how and why Uncle Toms Cabin both advocated emancipation and licensed a plethora of racist imitators Meer places it in the context of contemporary minstrel sketches melodramas songs jokes newspaper commentaries slave narratives travel writing proslavery novels and even Uncle Tom merchandise like china figurines and wall-paper. She goes on to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowes travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her second novel Dred. The publication of each unleashed the political energies of Uncle Toms Cabin and its revisions yet again.