Seven Novels

#7 - Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

When I was nine, my mother began reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to my siblings and me. Not able to wait for what came next, I took the book and puzzled out the dialect. Since then I’ve reread it several times.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is somewhat uneven and Stowe occasionally spoke directly to her readers, in the tradition of “Shed a tear, dear reader, and move on.” She has also been accused of stereotyping black people. That may have been an unfortunate result of her success. She drew her characters from what she saw and knew; slave traders, slave owners, Christians, and brutes. There is a wide variety, whom she made so vivid that all of them were in danger of becoming the accepted picture; in short, stereotypes.

I’ll never forget those characters: Eva, Chloe, Eliza, Simon Legree, Cassy, St. Clair, Prue, Haley—and, of course, Uncle Tom. It has always always struck me as unjust to label anyone as an Uncle Tom with a sneer, when Tom is one of the noblest characters ever invented in fiction—a character who evoked so much sympathy he helped to overthrow the system of slavery.

Once of Stowe's best traits is that her characters speak openly, but not ostentatiously, of their Christian faith and of sin and salvation.

Continue with the countdown: Book #6