Uncle Tom's Cabin at the World's Columbian Exposition.

The framing of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Columbian Exposition raises questions about the appeal of Stowe's novel for post-Civil War readers. I tackle those questions by considering the governing conception behind the Stowe exhibit and then analyzing dramatic differences in two American editions included in the Woman's Library. In the Stowe display, as in other contexts throughout the 1890s, Uncle Tom's Cabin was employed to support a self-congratulatory narrative of moral and social progress in U.S. culture while subtly outlining a program of continued subordination

as the proper place for African Americans.

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Uncle Tom's Cabin was the most popular book in the antebellum United States, with the possible exception of the Bible. During and shortly after the Civil War Stowe's influential novel was not much reprinted, (1) but Uncle Tom's Cabin gained a new lease on life in the course of the 1880s and especially the nineties. In both the North and the South the end of Reconstruction generated rising optimism about a return to social stability; (2) but by 1890 this optimism had been displaced by widespread concern that the legacy of slave culture and the Civil War might be long-lasting racial and sectional tension in the United States. Interest in Uncle Tom's Cabin revived in this context. One significant expression of that interest was the Stowe exhibit at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

This essay examines the perspective created on Uncle Tom's Cabin by the World's Columbian Exposition. Attention to the framing of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the "White City" also raises a larger question: how are we to understand the renewed appeal of Stowe's novel for post-Civil War readers? I tackle that question, first, by considering the governing conception behind the Stowe exhibit in the Woman's Building Library; second, by opening the closed doors of the library bookcase to consider some dramatic differences in the two American editions included in the Stowe display: the first edition (1852), with illustrations by the celebrated abolitionist illustrator Hammat Billings, and the most recent edition at the time of the fair, with illustrations by a popular graphic artist of the 1890s, E. W. Kemble.

Although visitors to the fair could not look through the volumes, (3) the two American editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Stowe exhibit epitomized the cultural importance of Stowe's book for the United States. The similarities and differences between these two editions provide insight into the way Uncle Tom's Cabin was presented to readers separated by forty turbulent years of cultural history. Analysis of a few representative illustrations in each of these books will help clarify the cultural functions of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the antebellum and postwar United States. In the course of the 1890s Uncle Tom's Cabin became an American "classic." (4) At the peak of its canonization, however, a book written largely to affirm the humanity of African Americans sharply circumscribed their horizon. I suggest that in the bookcase in the Woman's Building, as in many other contexts throughout the 1890s, Uncle Tom's Cabin was employed to support a self-congratulatory narrative of moral and social progress in U.S. culture. At the same time, however, new editions of Stowe's radical abolitionist text in this period subtly outlined a program of continued subordination as the proper place for African Americans.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe display at the Columbian Exposition was the centerpiece of the Connecticut women's exhibit in the Woman's Building Library. Describing the Stowe collection in a report on the work of Connecticut women at the fair, Kate Brannon Knight, president of the Connecticut Board of Lady Managers, stressed "Mrs. Stowe's unique place in literature" and the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin: "Since we were so fortunate as to be able to claim for our own State the writer of the most marvelous work ever written by a woman, we naturally gave Mrs. Stowe's Works and Uncle Tom's Cabin the most prominent place in our exhibit." (5) Knight's account of the Stowe display stresses the genius, international standing, and universal appeal of Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as its important role in the history of America as a nation.

The strategies employed to showcase Uncle Tom's Cabin as the jewel in the crown of the Connecticut women's exhibit were designed not only to confirm the book's value for longtime devotees but also to make Stowe's novel attractive to a new generation of readers. In 1851, when Uncle Tom's Cabin was first serialized in the National Era, it took the reading public by storm. It was published as a book even before the final installment appeared ten months later. In her report on the Stowe exhibit Knight recalled what antebellum advertisements and reviews had repeatedly emphasized: printing presses, running "day and night," were hard put to "satisfy the demand of the public." (6) Stowe's popular novel was reprinted and translated all over the world (forty-two translations were on display at the fair). Vilified by Southerners, celebrated by abolitionists, praised by men and women of letters, Stowe's book became internationally famous in the course of the 1850s. But after the war, with the institution of slavery abolished and the South in disarray, Stowe's abolitionist text had less appeal. As Knight's account itself acknowledged, the present generation did not read the book "with the intensity of other days." (7) The suggestion that "the most remarkable book of the age" might have a different meaning for readers of the 1890s was a muted but recurrent refrain in discussions of the novel. (8) The somewhat uncomfortable sense that "the stir which the book made at its birth" was not palpable to late-nineteenth-century readers informed many introductions and discussions of the book toward the end of the century. (9) Anxiety about a possible time-lag was inscribed in the report on the fair and implicit in the exhibit itself.

The year of the Columbian Exposition, 1893, was also the year that Uncle Tom's Cabin entered the public domain. Houghton Mifflin, Stowe's publisher, knew that expiration of copyright would open the way to a flood of cheap editions. Anticipating that moment, Houghton Mifflin issued a variety of reprints in the late 1880s and early 1890s, hoping to "fill as many market niches as possible." (10) In advertisements, prefaces, and introductions Uncle Tom's Cabin was presented as both a literary masterpiece and an agent of history. These claims were asserted by the visual rhetoric of the Stowe exhibit in the Woman's Building as well.

The collection of books in the Stowe display occupied a "bookcase of mahogany, elliptical in shape, with glass upon every side, and glass shelves, the whole about five feet in height." (11) The exhibit also included an early portrait of the author, a marble bust of Stowe on a pedestal, and a "beautiful silver inkstand" representing "two slaves freed from their shackles." (12) All of these artifacts (including the bookcase itself) asserted substantial achievements worthy of commemoration. Not only was Uncle Tom's Cabin Stowe's most successful book and the heart of the exhibit; it was presented as America's most important contribution to world literature.

Many literary commentators of the 1890s emphasized "universality" as the defining feature of serious art. As James Russell Lowell put it in 1894, great "books are not national, but human." It is their "universal and perennial application to our consciousness and our experience [that] accounts for their permanence." (13) Knight's report on the Stowe exhibit cites Walter Besant along similar lines: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Knight suggests, "answer[s] in a remarkable degree to ... Besant's test of a great book, 'that it appeals to every age and all ages." (14)

Yet the mantle of universality and literary greatness did not rest comfortably on Uncle Tom's Cabin. Its politics, its evangelicalism, its melodrama, and its didacticism made it seem dated to many readers of the 1890s. Discussions of Stowe in this period often included explanations designed to counter a widespread feeling that Uncle Tom had "outlived his usefulness, his day and generation." (15) Knight's report on the Stowe exhibit at the fair reflects her assumption that both Stowe's piety and her "message" would constitute a problem for turn-of-the-century readers. (16) Knight's praise of Uncle Tom's Cabin stresses neither Stowe's religious nor her political aims but rather her "unsectarian" Christianity, her "genius," and her success in representing "enduring 'flesh tints of the heart.'" (17)

The ideal of a timeless, "universal" literature had distinct advantages in a society riven by racial and class conflict. Praising "the genius and not the moral" of Stowe's book, Lowell suggested that Uncle Tom's Cabin was a literary masterpiece despite Stowe's moral purpose, not because of it. (18) But since claims for the universality and literary greatness of Uncle Tom's Cabin were more easily asserted than supported, publishers and editors of the nineties sought additional grounds for claiming the cultural significance of Stowe's text. The idea that Uncle Tom's Cabin played an important role in the history of the United States provided a way around many of the problems posed by the novel's uneasy position in the emerging American literary canon. As a historical document the book gained new stature; in the age of American realism and the "Culture of Professionalism" an alliance with history signaled progress, objectivity, and truth. The idea of the book's historical significance gave it amplitude--it was more than a "marvelous," "wonderful" fictional work, (19) it was a significant social force: "Changes Wrought by One Book," one headline of 1911 proclaimed, marking the centenary of Stowe's birth.

Both the image of Uncle Tom's Cabin…