From slave cabin to windsor castle: Josiah Henson and "Uncle Tom" in Britain

Nineteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 16, Issue , 2002, Pages 37-50

  Marsh, Jan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949831065     PISSN: 08937931     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (37)

1. Now Russell-Cotes Gallery, Bournemouth (see Mark Bills, Edwin Longsden Long, RA, with essays by Juliet Kinchin and Simon Olding [London: Cygnus Arts; Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998], 77 and pl. 69).
2. For a retrospective account of the book's reception in Britain, see C. W. Warner, "The Story of Uncle Tom's Cabin," Atlantic Monthly 78, no. 467 (September 1896): 311-22. The British Library catalog records twenty-three editions from twelve British publishers in 1852.
3. Thomas Woolner, journal entry, 14 January 1853
4. quoted in John F. Cox, "Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Pre-Raphaelite's Reaction," Notes and Queries 20 (March 1975): 111-12, 111.
5. See Harry Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947), which traces the dramatic history of Uncle Tom's Cabin in America and Europe and is illustrated with playbills, daguerreotypes, magazine cartoons, and other items of popular and material culture.
6. A slightly different but also speedy reaction to Stowe's book was the anonymously authored Uncle Tom in England; or, A Proof That Black's White: An Echo to the American Uncle Tom (London: Houlston & Stoneman; New York: A. D. Failing. 1852), allegedly written in a week.
7. This work is discussed in Audrey Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 33-51, 108-14. The spoof appears to have had a very fleeting impact.
8. Illustrated London News 21 (21 October 1852): 284, with line illustration of Tom defying Haley in a "Scene from the new drama of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' at the Olympic Theater," in a version devised to provide a happy ending to the tale, which "will, doubtless, conduce to the popularity of this drama."
9. Illustrated London News 22 (15 January 1853): 46, 48, with a portrait of Stowe, who is said to enjoy "a reputation entitling her to rank with the author of Robinson Crusoe."
10. See Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), 83;
11. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 148-49.
12. Elizabeth Longford, Eminent Victorian Women (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 199.
13. Exhibited at the Fine Art Society, Bond St., London, spring 2000.
14. For a long discussion of Cruikshank in the context of this tradition of the graphic representation of blacks, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Routledge, 2000), 151-82.
15. W. Summers, Tregear's Black Jokes (London: S. Tregear, 1834). Given its date, this punning production may have been prompted by the 1833 Emancipation Act and intended to refer to Jamaica, although the scenes depicted are set mostly in Britain. They include fashionable dances, card parties, and fox hunting. One scene ("Blackberrying") sets a funeral in Africa.
16. The painting was later accidentally destroyed, but see The Works of Sir Edwin Landseer R.A., Library Edition (London: Henry Graves, 1881), vol. 1, engraving 97.
17. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to "Uncle Tom's Cabin": Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Boston: John P. Jewett; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor, & Worthington; London: Low, 1853), 26-27.
18. Although William Rossetti regarded Uncle Tom's Cabin as "really . . . talented and remarkable" (Rossetti to William Bell Scott, London, October 1852, Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990], 33), he was originally skeptical regarding the characterization of its hero.
19. He later asked William Whistler, the painter's brother, whether "a black slave of that exalted type of conscientious sentiment" were at all true to life. "Yes indeed," came the reply, "I think a nigger of that kind is by no means very rare, among such as 'take to religion'" (W. M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols. [London: Brown, Langham; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906], 2:320).
20. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, 27.
21. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (Boston: A. D. Phelps, 1849),
22. reissued in Britain as The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, as Narrated by Himself, with a preface by T. Binney (London: Charles Gilpin, 1852).
23. Richard Doyle, An Overland Journey to the Great Exhibition, Showing a Few Extra Articles and Visitors (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851), n.p.
24. John Tenniel, "The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Companion to Power's [sic] 'Greek Slave,'" Punch 20 (1851): 236.
25. Hiram Powers's (1805-73) "original marble statue, commissioned by Capt. Grant, was first exhibited in England in 1845 at Graves Gallery, Pall Mall, and is now at Raby Castle, Durham. A marble replica was shown at the Great Exhibition and six further marble versions were produced between 1847-66. An ideal figure . . . it achieved wide popularity throughout the nineteenth century and was reproduced in countless versions in plaster, bronze, alabaster, crude marble and Parian ware" (Paul Atterbury and Maureen Batkin, The Parian Phenomenon: A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain Statuary and Busts [Shepton Beauchamp: Richard Dennis, 1989], 70).
26. Quoted in Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain, 1850-1900 (London: Routledge, 2000), 131.
27. Henson reveals that, after arriving in Britain in 1851, he was charged with soliciting money on false pretences and was obliged to return to Canada with the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society to clear his name (Autobiography, 181-86). This accounts for his departure from the exhibition in the summer of 1851, following his encounter with the queen, and then return in the fall.
28. Peattie, ed., Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, 33.
29. Wood, Blind Memory, 196.
30. Originally published in the Christian Age, Fowler's encomium was reprinted in full in Henson, Autobiography, 293-98.
31. The list of "Public Services" from the Christian Age is reprinted in Autobiography, 325-28.
32. The date is given in a note appended to a gouache record of the event now owned by the American Museum in Britain (see n. 31 below). The information presumably derives from John Lobb, who is included in the depiction. For the Hensons' visit to Windsor, see also Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit, 238-40.
33. Quoted in full in Frances Cavanah, The Truth about the Man behind the Book That Sparked the War between the States (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 177-78. After the visit to Windsor, the Hensons returned to Scotland in order to embark for home as planned.
34. RA 1880, no. 1620; in the Royal Academy catalog, Calvi's address is given as Milan and as in care of Sacchi, Newman Street, London.
35. Uncle Tom's Cabin (London: Odhams, n.d.), published "three-quarters of a century" (p. 10) after Emancipation in 1865 - i.e., in the 1940s.
36. This cartoon appears as if it may have originated in Punch, but it is reproduced without credit in Longford, Eminent Victorian Women, 201.
37. James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," Partisan Review 16 (1949): 578-85.