Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction:Communicating “a correct knowledge of American Slavery”: J. B. Estlin and the “breeder” in Frederick Douglass's Narrative
- 1 “Exhibiting Uncle Tom in some shape or other”: the commercialization and reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England
- 2 Abolition as a “step to reform in our kingdom”: Chartism, “white slaves,” and a new “Uncle Tom” in England
- 3 “Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing”: the ideological work of American slave narratives in England
- 4 “Negrophilism” and nationalism: the spectacle of the African-American abolitionist
- Epilogue:“How cautious and calculating”: English audiences and the impostor, Reuben Nixon
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - “Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing”: the ideological work of American slave narratives in England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction:Communicating “a correct knowledge of American Slavery”: J. B. Estlin and the “breeder” in Frederick Douglass's Narrative
- 1 “Exhibiting Uncle Tom in some shape or other”: the commercialization and reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in England
- 2 Abolition as a “step to reform in our kingdom”: Chartism, “white slaves,” and a new “Uncle Tom” in England
- 3 “Repetitious accounts so piteous and so harrowing”: the ideological work of American slave narratives in England
- 4 “Negrophilism” and nationalism: the spectacle of the African-American abolitionist
- Epilogue:“How cautious and calculating”: English audiences and the impostor, Reuben Nixon
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“Uncle Tomism has had its day,” reports an 1853 essay in the Westminster Review, but “Slave tales continue to be the literary staple among the products of the American press [exported to England]. The ladies of England are so interested in ‘those dear blacks’” (“American Slavery and Emancipation,” 298). Whether or not Uncle Tom's Cabin had met its demise by 1853, tales of slavery were indeed a “staple” in the Victorian literary marketplace: at least twenty American slave narratives appeared in English editions by mid-century, and it is likely that other narratives circulated in American editions. The catalogues of Mudie's Select Library, that institution of Victorian society and “the surest guide to the make-up of the mid Victorian public and what it read” (Terry, Victorian Popular Fiction, 6), list the narratives of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Solomon Northup (1853) among the offerings available to subscribers. Slave narratives, R.J. M. Blackett writes,
sold faster than they could be printed. Pennington's quickly sold six thousand copies and ran through three editions between August, 1849, and July, 1850. William Wells Brown's went through three British, two American, one French, and one German edition. In 1844, Roper estimated that he had sold twenty-five thousand copies of the English edition that first appeared in 1837 … by 1856 the English edition had gone through ten printings … Those who could not afford to buy their own copies borrowed them from others, and they were read in churches, Sunday schools, mechanics institutes, and working-class associations.
(Building an Antislavery Wall, 25–6)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- American Slaves in Victorian EnglandAbolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture, pp. 52 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000