Uncle Tom's Cabin in American novels

by Doctor Science

I just finished reading Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America by David S. Reynolds. I highly recommend it for giving some real sense of how and why Uncle Tom's Cabin became the most popular and influential American novel of the 19th century.

One point I hadn't appreciated before is how huge "Uncle Tom plays" were for shaping American popular culture. I knew that Stowe's novel had epic sales, though I hadn't realized how important it was in Great Britain, where it sold a *million* copies in its first year (all without any money coming back to Stowe, as this was before international copyright). But it was the stage productions that really brought Uncle Tom's Cabin to most Americans -- they were the first true American mass culture performances.

Although the main roles were usually taken by white actors in blackface, Tom Shows were also the first opportunity for many African-American entertainers to perform for white audiences. This photo of a Tom Show performance is from the University of Virginia's Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture archive, a fascinating and invaluable resource.

The thing was, Uncle Tom Shows were the first ones to be both enormously popular *and* respectable. Ministers went to them -- in a period when religious disapproval of the stage was a package with sermons against dancing and drinking. Over the second half of the nineteenth century traveling stage productions of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" covered the country -- except the South, of course. Most Northerners, though, had the opportunity to see the play over and over, by different troupes and actors. Tom Show companies competed with each other in special effects, singers, and associated acts. One of the most common variations was the "double" performance, in which there were two of every character. Reynolds reports that it's now very difficult to figure out *how* the doubling worked, because everybody knew it and no-one bothered to explain.

Poster for a "Double Mammoth" production of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I don't recall reading any 19th-century novels (or historicals about the period) in which the characters read Uncle Tom's Cabin, discuss it, or go to a Tom Show. I'm pretty sure it's not mentioned in Little Women, for instance, and Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up too far off the beaten track for it to be a feature of her youth. Can any of you-all think of any examples? It's brought up in Gone With the Wind, but only as something to be rejected, not as a normal part of American cultural life.

It's a curious gap, not unlike the way TV tends to be erase from contemporary American novels, and even more from TV shows. The culture seen in our cultural productions is not the culture that is our culture; the mirror it holds up to our world shows no mirrors.

There was a whole universe of Uncle Tom collector's items or Tomitudes. This is a Limoges vase showing Uncle Tom and Eva.

Comments

[Doctor Science]

I won't be around much for the next couple of days: I'm a pollworker, so tomorrow I'll get up at 4:30am and get home at 9pm; Wednesday I'll still be recovering, I figure. Don't burn down the Internet.

[John Ballard]

No reference to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" would be complete without a footnote noting its appearance in "Anna and the King of Siam" aka "The King and I." It was called "Small House of Uncle Thomas" and had a fairly good place in the plot-line.
http://youtu.be/-2ekNKr8otk

[McKinneyTexas]

Dr. S, good post. UTC has gotten a lot of undeserved bad press since the 60's.

[liberal japonicus]

they were the first true American mass culture performances.

Doc, you are busy now, but I think that this is a bit of an overstatement. I'm not sure about the precise timing, but PT Barnum's extravaganzas were around 1840. And I'm not as read in American lit of the period, but there are no mentions of that, or the FeeJee mermaid or General Tom Thumb, so I think you are right about in your observation about TV shows.

[Doctor Science]

lj:

In fact, PT Barnum put on Tom shows, though he changed the plot to be more Southern-friendly: in his version, Uncle Tom is rescued from Legree ... and returned, as a slave, to his former plantation.

One difference between the Tom shows and Barnum's early extravaganzas was that women, girls, and respectable people were far more likely to go -- they were mass culture that reached more of the masses, including the middlebrow ones.

[dr ngo]

No explanation, but a curious sideshow. In the early 1950s (before Disneyland opened, and before "The King and I") the prime entertainment venue in Orange County, California, was Knott's Berry Farm and Ghost Town, a semi-recreation of a "historical" 19th-century American town, including a small theatre. Playing there, in repertory, were "The Flying Scud" (a classic melodrama about horse racing) and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." I saw them both, and thus the latter imprinted itself upon my young mind . . .

[RAM]

After the Civil War through the late 1890s, lots of traveling theatrical troupes had at least one "Uncle Tom's Cabin" show as part of their repertoire. In our area of northern Illinois in the 1880s, the troupes would often perform a humorous or dramatic play one night and a performance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the next before moving on. Later on, specialized Uncle Tom troupes traveled from town to town with extensive and elaborate sets.

From our local weekly newspaper on Oct. 27, 1870: "The Barretts, a theatrical troupe, performed two evenings of last week. Their principal plays were 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin,' and 'The Sea of Ice.,' which were splendidly executed."

And again on Aug. 8, 1894: "An 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' show company, with their own [railroad] car, stayed here over Sunday, after having given a sort of performance of the play Saturday evening in a tent in Shoger's pasture."

[liberal japonicus]

I guess what I'm getting at (and this may be me misreading here) it's not that these Uncle Tom shows were the first instance of US mass culture performances, but that they were an example of a phenomenon that was percolating around at the time. In fact, you can't really have these shows unless there were theatres to put them on. In fact, large gatherings for cultural purposes are something that is in the American personality, because in the early 1800's, there was a desire to see the same things as were trendy in Europe, such as music and speaking tours. I'm not precisely sure about dates, but to argue that these shows were the first instance seems a bit strong.

[bob_is_boring]

Very interesting stuff; anyone know if there's ever been an opera version? (A perfunctory Google search turns up only lots of performances at opera houses.)

[Hartmut]

There is of course also Disney's version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfpgkm8gg5Y>Mickey's Mellerdramer.
Undoubtedly very funny but of course with a lot of jokes that would get anyone fired for proposing today. I still think it gets what the atmosphere must have been at the time when the real thing toured the country.

[Laura Koerbeer]

I've been thinking about this in terms of how the concrete experience can influence a person's atttitudes and actions. Before UTC all Americans knew about slavery but many knew about it only as an abstraction. After UTC the number of people who knew about slavery and were upset about it, offended,saw it as a moral evil and were inclined to take action to stop it went up. Lincoln called Stowe the "little lady who started the big war" or something close to that.

I have been trying to think of something similar in contemporary mass media culture but I think that there is so much contemporary mass media culture now that the effects of any one piece of propaganda must be diluted. Micheal Moore's movies are intended to take the abstraction out of a problem and make it concrete and real to people not otherwise affected by the problem. Facebook is a good vehicle for this sort of thing. About a year ago there ws a big Facebook driven reaction to a local media market story about an abused dog. The story started in Baltimore, I think. The dog, Patrick, was found nearly dead of starvation in a dumpster. The photo got on Facebook and suddenly the Patrick Movement was under way. Money was raised, Patrick was saved, local authorities were pressured into prosecuting the person responsible, and there was lots of discussion about the need to stregthen laws agsint the abuse of animals. After tht it sort of fizzled out. That's just one example about how a specific incident can galvanize people who cared about the problem in the abstract but didn't take action as long as the problem was an abstraction.

The problem from the propagandists' point of view now is that there is so many ways for an individual to be bombarded with compelling empathy-inducing narratives
that, well, empathy stops getting induced after awhile. I know I can't care about all of it. I can't care about everything. I deliberately screen lots of things out. I have not seen The Inconvenient Truth, for example. And I absolutley refuse to know anything about what is happening to the gorillas in Africa.

[Jay C]

@ Laura Koerbeer:

It's a good point you make about empathy-burnout, but I think you're slightly off-the-mark about Uncle Tom's Cabin and its effects on the non-slaveowning/anti-slavery segment of American society. While UTC was certainly important and influential, it didn't arrive into a cultural vacuum. The Slavery Question (i.e. a national discussion of the moral implications of the institution itself), which had been swept under the rug or relegated to dismissal as fringe nuttery for decades had suddenly been thrust into the (non-slaveowing/anti-slavery) public's eye by the Mexican War of 1846-48, and its aftermath. The realization that a near-majority of the American polity viewed the expansion of slavery to new territories as a principle aim of the War - and were willing to use both physical and legal violence (see to achieve their aims - opened a lot of people's eyes: and set the stage, as it were, for the reception Uncle Tom's Cabin would receive.

[Jay C]

Accck! Formatting disaster! 10:02 comment was meant to contain a link to the Wikipedia article on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850

dunno what happened - sorry!

[McKinneyTexas]

I have been trying to think of something similar in contemporary mass media culture but I think that there is so much contemporary mass media culture now that the effects of any one piece of propaganda must be diluted.

It's difficult, in the age of mass media, to duplicate a phenomena like UTC because so much else competes for our attention. That said, I nominate To Kill a Mockingbird, The Feminine Mystique and MLK's Letter from a Birmingham Jail as having singularly disproportionate and lasting effects on the body politic.

[CJWhite]

There is I kids book I remember from a loooong time ago called "Betsy and Tacey Go Downtown." The girls get to see the play are quite moved by it.

[Phil]

I would also nominate Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Alex Haley's "Roots." Particularly the miniseries adaptation of the latter.

[Roger Moore]

The first one that comes to mind to me, at least for its polemic effect, is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

[Doug]

You can read more description of Double Casting in Nineteenth-century women at the movies: adapting classic women's fiction to film by Barbara Tepa Lupack, page 218, Popular Press, 1999. Or see Google Books excerpt by googling "Uncle Tom's Cabin" double cast.

[Becky]

[Thank you, Becky; your spam was excellent! I had it with some eggs spam and sausage spam, with a bit of spam! - Ed.]