Stowe, Mrs Harriet Elizabeth Beecher

Stowe, Mrs Harriet Elizabeth Beecher (1811–96), born in Connecticut, sister of Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87, divine, religious author, and journalist), was a schoolteacher in Cincinnati before marrying in 1836 C. E. Stowe. Her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852; serialized in National Era, 1851–2) had a sensational success and stirred up great public feeling. It describes the sufferings caused by slavery; pious old Uncle Tom, sold by his well-intentioned Kentucky owner Mr Shelby to meet his debts, is bought first by the idealistic Augustine St Clair, in whose New Orleans household he becomes the favourite of the daughter, the saintly little Eva. But both Eva and St Clair die, and Tom is sold again, this time to a brutal cotton plantation owner, Simon Legree, who finally beats the unprotesting Tom to death just before Shelby's son arrives to redeem him. A parallel plot describes the escape to freedom in Canada of Shelby's slave, the beautiful quadroom Eliza, her child, and her husband George. The sensational religiosity of the story and its dubious conclusion (in which most of the survivors, including the once-irrepressible little slave Topsy, disappear back to Africa to become missionaries) contributed to a shift of attitude which came to use the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’ pejoratively, to indicate a supine collaboration with the oppressor. The novel's success brought Mrs Stowe to England in 1853, 1856, and 1859, where she was honoured by Queen Victoria, although she later alienated British opinion by her Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), in which she charged Byron with incestuous relations with his half-sister. Her other works include Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856); The Minister's Wooing (1859); Old Town Folks (1869); and Poganuc People (1878).