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12 - Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Susan Bernstein
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

Despite the tradition of reading nineteenth-century American and British writers as part of an exclusively national community, more recent scholarship has attended to the robust transatlantic circulation of print that structured what Amanda Claybaugh describes as the “Anglo-American world” of social reform. As Meredith McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting has noted, we know that British and American writers were frequently mingled together in miscellany magazines like Littel's Living Age, sometimes called The Living Age (1844–1941). If such studies of the circulation of British writing in American print make manifest a tendency toward what Elisa Tamarkin calls “Anglophilia” (Anglophilia, 179), or the cultural capital of British literature for American nineteenth-century writers and readers, in fact American women writers in particular had a profound impact on Victorian culture through the transatlantic print network. The most celebrated example is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851–2), the all-time bestseller in England in the 1850s, even outstripping the enormously popular Dickens. Before international copyright laws kept at bay pirated editions, some thirty or more versions of Stowe's novel were issued in Britain. Within the advertising pages that surround the fifth part issue number of Bleak House, released in July 1852, only a month after the last installment of Stowe’s novel in The National Era (1847–60), ran a notice for London publications of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Negro Life in the Slave States of America,” from a cloth gilt edition to a version in twenty-four “penny weekly numbers” to promote the novel’s “circulation among all classes of the community." Positioned to the right of an advert for Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–79), the notice for these British editions of Stowe’s novel includes snippets of reviews, one describing Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a deed of accusation – drawn up by a woman, inspired with such fervour and strength of imagery and language as a prophet of old . . . written in letters of fire, with a pen of iron . . . It is only after reading such a book that we can fully appreciate and realise the humanity of a principle which has annihilated slavery in the British Colonies.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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