Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911 by Barbara Hochman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911 by Barbara Hochman Samantha Christensen Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911 by Barbara Hochman. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2011. 400 p. ISBN: 9781558498938. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution, Barbara Hochman uses paratextual material, readers’ comments and marginalia in order to conduct a study of the cultural meaning of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). She explores how responses to Stowe’s widely read abolitionist text began to change after the American Civil War, and is interested in “the powerful hold of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on antebellum readers, its waning appeal for white readers at the turn of the century, its heightened appeal for African Americans of the same period, and the implications of that shift” (6). Throughout her analyses, Hochman looks to two distinct reading revolutions to understand the cultural significance of the novel: that which took place with the rise of print culture and mass-produced literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the reading revolution in the 1970s that returned the reader to literary scholarship. She suggests that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most heavily read novel in the antebellum period next to the Bible, became a different work during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Segregation periods, and whereas the novel was once viewed as the most important piece of sentimental fiction in the nineteenth century, it became problematic during the 1880s and 1890s. Children’s editions, stage adaptations, and cultural material of Uncle Tom’s Cabin emerging in the late nineteenth-century reflect its shifting significance in American culture, and Hochman traces these shifts by considering consumer responses in the decades following the American Civil War. Hochman dedicates two of her seven chapters to the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in children’s lives, which will be my primary focus in the interest of Bookbird readers. Chapter 4 looks at the cultural influence of Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), an illustrated children’s edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Hochman suggests had a particular appeal to antebellum child readers in the North, “in part because the book violated widely shared conventions for antebellum children’s literature” (105). She notes that this particular edition “radicalizes” Uncle Tom’s Cabin by minimizing racialized language and emphasizing the themes of fairy tale and legend in the figures of Topsy and Harry. She explores the two child characters throughout the chapter, and is interested in the ways they resist racial stereotypes in Pictures and Stories and assert themselves not as “objects of sympathy, but subjects for identification” (108). The notion of deep character identification was a subject of anxiety in the nineteenth century—sympathetic reading was encouraged, but “ministers, educators, and benevolent reformers … cautioned against the confusion that the reading of fiction might produce through identification” (109)—but Hochman suggests that Stowe [End Page 165] actually encourages this absorptive reading and persuades white child readers to place themselves in the positions of Harry and Topsy. As the early children’s edition avoids racial markers while emphasizing universal children’s behavior in the young black characters, Hochman looks at the ways Pictures and Stories constructs Eva as a character for children to imitate while inviting young readers to identify with the child slave characters. She concludes her chapter with the reminder that each child responds differently to what they read, yet Pictures and Stories welcomes the white child reader to align their own experiences with those of Harry and Topsy, thereby “challeng[ing] generic norms and expand[ing] the experiences available to young readers” (130). In Chapter 7, the second chapter dedicated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a children’s text, Hochman turns her focus to a later edition of the novel as a children’s book and traces its cultural influence at the turn of the twentieth century. Stowe died in 1896, the same year that segregation became nation-wide practice in America, and her death sparked a rise in reprinting and new editions of Uncle Tom’s...