HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896)

The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin came from the heart of the old New England Calvinism. Her father was Lyman Beecher, and among her six preacher brothers was Henry Ward Beecher, the well-known pulpit orator of Brooklyn. She was a daughter of the manse, like the Brönte sisters, reared amid bookish surroundings in an atmosphere redolent of theological controversy. Her temperament, naturally sensitive and intense, was rendered over-emotional and almost mor、 bidly introspective by her religious training. Her education was gained in private schools for girls and it went not far, for those were the days before colleges for women. It gave her a nunlike view of life and it fed her already over-developed emotional nature. Then at twenty-one came the really great educating influence of her life: she went West with her father who had been elected the first president of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, and there she lived for the next seventeen years, teaching in the schools for two years and then becoming the wife of Professor Calvin E. Stowe of the Seminary. Literary work she took up at first as a desperate resort for increasing the household income. Her first volume The Mayflower, 1843, she produced with a family of seven small children about her. When in 1850 Professor Stowe was called to Bowdoin, the family finances were at lowest ebb, and again, though almost overwhelmed by nousehold duties, she sought her pen, this time for a short serial for the National Era, an anti-slavery paper of Washington. She had never been in the 'black belt' of the South, though she had caught glimpses of slavery during a brief visit to a plantation in Kentucky, but she knew well the underground railroad' of Ohio and she had seen much of fugitive slaves. The story took complete possession of her. It ran from June 5, 1851, to April 1, 1852, until indeed it was material for two volumes. It was written with intense emotion: chapters of it she wrote sobbing in utter abandon like Dickens; after the death of little Eva she was ill for a fortnight. It was keyed perfectly to the emotionalism of the times, and it sold as no other book in our history has ever sold since. Nearly the whole population read it especially in the North,- and it swept over England and indeed over all Europe. As we read it to-day it seems in many ways crude and unbalanced, but even to-day one may feel its power. It has movement; it has what American prose, up to that time influenced so greatly by Irving, had greatly lacked dramatic force. Moreover, it contained an intense moral appeal which made it acceptable even to the puritanic element that classed fiction with playing cards. From the date it appeared its author was famous and internationally famous. She wrote much in the years that followed: Dred, or Nina Gordon, 1856, which was lost in the fierce light of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and among much general material several studies of Calvinistic New England days: The Minister's Wooing, 1859, The Pearl of Orr's Island, 1862, and Old Town Folks, 1869. These undoubtedly are her best creations. She was admirably fitted for interpreting early New England both by her early training and by the sense of detachment that had come from her long residence in the West. These books undoubtedly greatly influenced that later school of depicters of New England, the leaders of which were Mrs. Cooke, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Freeman, and Alice Brown.