|
For more articles like this go to the Look and Learn articles website. |
The little girl who “dreamed of being a poet” was something of a disappointment to her father. In a world filled with “pain and suffering,” the Reverend Lyman Beecher would have preferred another son, to bring comfort to those who were “without Christ and without hope.”
From her earliest days in her home town of Litchfield, Connecticut, young Harriet Beecher felt that, whatever distinction she might achieve in later life, it would never meet the standards set by her father.
Yet one thing about her father’s work always puzzled her. Although he constantly besought his congregations to repent of their sins, he ignored the great sin that was right on his doorstep – the sin of slavery.
In 1811, when Harriet was born, slavery was legal in Connecticut. The Negroes worked hard under harsh conditions. And the plight of the slaves in Jamaica was far worse. Harriet’s Aunt Mary, who had once lived there amongst the English settlers, often told Harriet that she wished “the island might sink in the ocean with its sin and misery.”
When Harriet was five, her mother died and her father then married a strict and methodical woman whose rule for the household was that there should be “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” Harriet was no longer allowed to bring her pet pigs into the house!
She took refuge from this ban by “plunging into books.” Soon her reading inspired her to compositions of her own, and when she was 14 she started a play in blank verse about the sufferings of a noble young Christian at the court of the Emperor Nero.
But even this harmless activity was forbidden her, and Harriet despaired of ever pleasing her parents.
By the time she was 21, however, life had become more rewarding for Harriet. Encouraged by her sister Catherine, who ran a girls’ school in Cincinnati, she wrote A New Geography For Children, for which she was paid about £60.
This book, which was more like a story than a collection of facts and figures, was an immediate best-seller. More than 100,000 copies of it were snapped up by children who were tired of the duller kind of text-book.
Harriet felt this to be a signpost to her literary future, and she followed the school book with a short story about New England life called Uncle Lot. The story won a magazine competition, but Harriet did not publish her first work of fiction until 1843, when her collection of sketches entitled The Mayflower proved very popular.
Before this, in 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, the Professor of Biblical Literature in a theological college of which her father was the Principal. For the first few years of their marriage, the young couple lived in near-poverty, and Harriet gave up her writing plans in favour of motherhood.
Then, with the successful publication of The Mayflower, she decided that she could be both a mother and an author.
But once again Harriet Beecher Stowe’s literary career was delayed, this time by a cholera plague which swept through Cincinnati in the summer of 1849, claiming nearly 5,000 lives, including that of the youngest of Harriet’s six children, her baby boy, Charles.
Harriet’s friends and family now considered her to be a writer of “genius.” The only trouble was that she lacked a theme which would do justice to her growing talent. The theme was provided when her sister-in-law wrote her a letter saying, “Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”
Harriet read the letter out loud to her children. She noted the enthusiasm on their faces, and said firmly: “I will write something. I will if I live.”
It was then that her childhood memories of slavery came crowding in on her. She recalled a Negro barber called Jackson who had escaped from the South to the more democratic northern states dressed in women’s clothes . . . Sam, a mischievous coloured boy, who was imprisoned for his pranks . . . the slave she had watched on an Ohio steamboat being manacled and then sold by a gang of unscrupulous dealers.
Harriet decided there and then to write a novel about slavery which would appeal to the imagination, much as her geography book had done more than 20 years earlier.
She thought the story could best be told as a magazine serial, and wrote to the Editor of the National Era saying: “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. . . .”
She worked diligently on the novel, and in 1851 the first episode of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among The Lowly appeared in the National Era. The story, about the lovable slave Uncle Tom and the hardships that beset him when he is sold to the cruel plantation owner, Simon Legree, became an immediate favourite. When it was published the following year in book form, it sold more than half a million copies.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin soon began to gain readers and sympathy in England. Queen Victoria was one of its warmest admirers. It was particularly enjoyed by children and their mothers, and a group of 500,000 British women signed an “Affectionate and Christian Address” to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who journeyed to London to receive the honour.
The novel, which was subsequently translated into 22 foreign languages, made Harriet Beecher Stowe world-famous.
In 1856, Harriet resumed her anti-slavery campaign by publishing Dred: A Tale Of The Great Dismal Swamp, which she described as “a parable – a story told in illustration of a truth or fact.” For the remainder of her life, until her brain was “tired out,” she continued the campaign. Her battle was finally won in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed four million Negroes from their bondage.
Harriet Beecher Stowe died in 1896, 45 years after writing her immortal Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And to the end of her days she maintained that she had not really been the author at all.
“The Lord Himself wrote it,” she said. “I was but an instrument in His hand.”