Avoiding “Aunt Tomasina”: Charles Dickens Responds to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Black American Reader, Mary Webb

Abstract

This essay analyses Charles Dickens’s April 1857 letter to the Earl of Carlisle about Mary E. Webb, a mixed-race American actress for whom Harriet Beecher Stowe had written a one-woman performing version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Webb tried to see Dickens, bringing a letter of introduction from the Earl. Though clearly familiar with her status as a refined, trained elocutionist sponsored by British aristocrats, Dickens’s letter mocks her as a stereotypically uncultivated “Aunt Tomasina expounding King Lear,” a racially inferior outsider attempting unsuccessfully to invade the precincts of high culture and respectable public readings. Though Dickens was staunchly antislavery, the letter shows Dickens as obviously racist; my analysis contextualizes his response to Webb in relation to Victorian racial attitudes, blackface minstrelsy, the history of public readings, and the reception of African Americans in Britain, as well as Dickens’s personal anxieties about the security of his class status and his rivalry with bestselling author Stowe.