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2 - Abolition as a “step to reform in our kingdom”: Chartism, “white slaves,” and a new “Uncle Tom” in England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2010

Audrey A. Fisch
Affiliation:
Jersey City State College
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Summary

England, perhaps more than any other nation, owes a duty to America; and certainly no other people can perform such a duty so effectively as the English. We owe it, then, as a duty to God and to man, and to Americans especially, to speak out against the dreadful oppression of which the black slave is the victim … But how shall this voice be expressed? … [by] the united declaration of THREE MILLIONS of men, women, and youths of Great Britain against the enslavement of the negro race! There are three millions of slaves in the United States,– are there not three millions of people in Great Britain who will sign a friendly remonstrance against American slavery? Will not every man assert the right of his fellow-man – every woman the right of her fellow-woman – to freedom?

(original emphasis and capitalization, Uncle Tom in England, 126)

Closing with this exacting injunction that all of England sign and send to America a kind of national petition against slavery, Uncle Tom in England, an anonymous novel published in September 1852, two months after Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in England, is explicitly posed as an amiable companion-piece to Harriet Beecher Stowe's attempt to mobilize the world against American slavery. It is clear that this selfdescribed “Echo, or Sequel” (iii) to Uncle Tom's Cabin was conceived to ride the coat-tails of Stowe's extraordinarily popular novel in order to capture its own share of publicity and sales.

And it seemed to succeed at that task.

Type
Chapter
Information
American Slaves in Victorian England
Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture
, pp. 33 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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