The Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Volume I

The Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Volume I: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly is an authoritative edition with a critically established reading text, John P. Jewett's first American edition (March 1852) serving as its base text. Collation against the National Era serial ( June 1851-April 1852) and reprint editions authorizes emendation to Stowe's preferred linguistic forms, producing a corrected but not a conflated reading text, with variants reported in textual apparatus. Three further reprints, Jewett's "Edition for the Million!" (1852/1853), Jewett's "Illustrated Edition" (1853), and Houghton, Osgood & Co.'s New Edition (1879), supply corroborating evidence for authorial or proofreading correction and are reported selectively in the apparatus, including a revision to chapter 20, "Topsy," in the "Million" edition. The account of composition and publication shows that the Era installments issued simultaneously with and after the publication of the first edition include 'localizations' that may be considered 'revisions' of the first edition. The introduction outlines the work's textual history and the tradition of reception, including its prominence in the antislavery moment; its fall from literary heights from the Modernist through the Civil Rights era; and its restoration as a major cultural text in women's and African American studies in the late twentieth century. To a far greater degree than previous editions, the Oxford edition annotation highlights its mid-nineteenth-century cultural, political, and social moment—from domestic advice and flower symbolism to the Pearl incident, the European Revolutions of 1848, the Compromise of 1850, and HBS's documentation in the Key (1853). Supplementary texts include transcriptions of extant manuscript pages, Era editorials on political events during the serialization, and the inspiration for Eliza's Ohio River crossing on the ice. The edition's argument is that Uncle Tom's Cabin is not merely a symptom of its moment but a purposeful intervention, which exemplifies but also rewrites literary traditions from Shakespeare, the English Bible and hymns, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, autobiographical writings by enslaved persons, and British antislavery poetry—among others. The Oxford edition situates the work newly in our own time, as both a textually fluid work, in the sense proposed by theorist John Bryant, and a towering literary masterpiece.