Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, volume 456, no. 10, October 1853

--The present United States of America, after having been, perhaps, more than once split asunder and soldered together again--or the whole, or a large portion voluntarily reannexed to the mother country, and by and by again detached--after these and other, possibly more or less sudden, violent, and bloody vicissitudes--have become a great Empire, under the stern, but salutary, one-willed sway of the Emperor of America: his majesty a jet black, who had shown consummate and unexpected high qualities for acquiring and retaining the fear and submission of millions of the stormiest tempers of mankind; but his lovely empress a white. He has an immense army devoted to his person and will, composed of men of every complexion--from black, through copper-middle tints, down to white; and correspondingly diversified are his banners, but black, of course, the predominant: a quadroon being commander-in-chief. As for his majesty’s civil service, he has a coal-black chancellor, equally at home in the profoundest mysteries of white and black letter; a mulatto minister of instruction, and a white secretary of state; black and white clergy, and a similarly constituted bar--here a big black face frowning out of a white wig, and there a little white face, grinning out of a black wig, with black and white bands, and gowns varied ad libitum. And the laws which they are concerned in administering, accord with these harmonious diversities--it being, for instance, enacted, under heavy penalties, that no black shall, by gesture, speech, or otherwise, presume to ridicule a white because of his colour, nor, vice versâ, shall a white affect to disparage a black because of his complexion; that the emperor and empress shall always be of different colours, and that the succession to the throne shall alternate between black and white, or mulatto, members of the imperial family. By this and other provisions have been secured a complete fusion between North and South, between black and white, glitteringly typified by intermingled gems in the imperial crown; the central one being the identical black diamond that figured in the famous Exhibition in Great Britain in 1851, and presented to the emperor by one of the descendants of her Majesty Queen Victoria, then on the British throne! “To this _complexion_” shall it be that matters have “come at last?”

Or will our sturdy cousins of 1953 be still republican, a united republic, but with offices, honours, rights, and privileges, equally distributed, as in our fancied empire, among those of every shade of colour? Or, after a fearful succession of struggles between black and white, ... the ... is predominant; ... slavery, after a ... sang-- ... or a noble spontaneous....[2]

From a preliminary dissertation prefixed to the book, our critic of 1953 learns that it excited, almost immediately on its appearance, a prodigious sensation among all classes, both in Europe and America; that both sexes, high and low, young and old, literate and illiterate, vulgar and refined, phlegmatic and excitable, shed tears over it, and wrote and talked about it everywhere; that, within a few months’ time, impressions of it were multiplied by millions, and in most languages of the civilised world. That its writer, an American woman, immediately came over to England, and made her appearance in public assemblies, called in honour of her; and she was also “lionised” [a word explained, in a long note, as indicating a custom prevalent in that day, among weak persons, of running after any notorious person weak enough to appear pleased with it] among the fashionables and philanthropists of the day, but preserved, nevertheless, amidst it all, true modesty of demeanour, and silence amidst extravagant eulogy. Inflamed with curiosity, our shadowy successor sits down to peruse a work--then possibly little, if ever, mentioned--anxious to see what could have produced such a marvellous effect, in the middle of the intelligent nineteenth century, on all classes of readers; and whether it produced permanent results, or passed away as a nine days’ wonder. Having at length closed the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and judged it according to the critical canons of 1953, will he deem it adequate to have produced such effects? What estimate will he form of our intellectual calibre?

We cannot tell, and shall not attempt to conjecture. Dismissing, therefore, but for a while only, the imaginary occupant of our critical chair a century hence, let us say for ourselves, that though our silence, and that of one or two quarterly contemporaries, may have excited notice, both in America and this country, we have been by no means indifferent spectators of the reception which this singularly-successful book has met with; regarding it as one of those sudden phenomena in literature, demanding, even, a deliberate consideration of cause and effect. We apprehend no one will doubt that, to excite such attention and emotion among all classes of readers, in both hemispheres, as this work has excited, it must possess something remarkable; and what that is, it will be our endeavour to determine. We ourselves never read this work till within the last month, and then as a matter of mere critical curiosity, uninfluenced by the past excitement of others, and the favourable and unfavourable opinions which we heard expressed as to the merits of the work. If we could have been biassed at all, it would have been rather against, than in favour of, a writer who had been over persuaded by her friends to come to this country, for the purpose of making a sort of public appearance, at the moment that admiration of her work was at fever height. Nothing could palliate such an indiscretion on the part of this lady’s advisers, in the eyes of a fastidious Englishman, but the belief that she was a simple-minded enthusiastic crusader against American slavery, considering that the totally unexpected celebrity of her work had afforded her an opportunity of accelerating a European movement, in a holy cause, by her personal presence. Criticism, however, ought not to be influenced by petty disturbing forces like these, nor will ours. We shall judge Uncle Tom’s Cabin by its own intrinsic merits or demerits--occasionally looking for the light which she has thought proper to reflect upon it from its companion volume, “THE KEY.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a remarkable book unquestionably; and, upon the whole, we are not surprised at its prodigious success, even as a mere literary performance; but whether, after all, it will have any direct effect upon the dreadful INSTITUTION at which it is aimed, may be regarded as problematical. Of one thing we are persuaded--that its author, as she has displayed in this work undoubted genius, in some respects of a higher order than any American predecessor or contemporary, is also a woman of unaffected and profound piety, and an ardent friend of the unhappy black. Every word in her pages issues glistening and warm from the mint of woman’s love and sympathy, refined and purified by Christianity. We never saw in any other work, so many and such sudden irresistible appeals to the reader’s heart--appeals which, moreover, only a wife and a mother could make. One’s heart throbs, and one’s eyes are suffused with tears without a moment’s notice, and without anything like effort or preparation on the writer’s part. We are, on the contrary, soothed in our spontaneous emotion by a conviction of the writer’s utter artlessness; and when once a gifted woman has satisfied her most captious reader that such is the case, she thenceforth leads him on, with an air of loving and tender triumph, a willing captive to the last. There are, indeed, scenes and touches in this book which no living writer, that we know of, can surpass, and perhaps none even equal.

No English man or woman, again, could have written it--no one, but an actual spectator of the scenes described, or one whose life is spent with those moving among them; scenes scarce appreciable by FREE English readers--fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters. We can hardly realise to ourselves human nature tried so tremendously as, it seems, is only adumbrated in these pages. An Englishman’s soul swells at the bare idea of such submission to the tyrannous will of man over his fellow-man, as the reader of this volume becomes grievously familiar with; and yet we are assured by Mrs Stowe that she has given us only occasional glimpses of the indescribable horrors of slavery. To this part of the subject, however, we shall return. Let us speak first, and in only general terms, of the literary characteristics of the author, as displayed in her work.

Mrs Stowe is unquestionably a woman of GENIUS; and that is a word which we always use charily: regarding genius as a thing _per se_--different from talent, in its highest development, altogether, and in kind. Quickness, shrewdness, energy, intensity, may, and frequently do accompany, but do not constitute genius. Its divine spark is the direct and special gift of God: we cannot completely analyse it, though we may detect its presence, and the nature of many of its attributes, by its action; and the skill of high criticism is requisite, in order to distinguish between the feats of genius and the operations of talent. Now, we imagine that no person of genius can read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and not feel in glowing contact with genius--generally gentle and tender, but capable of rising, with its theme, into very high regions of dramatic power. This Mrs Stowe has done several times in the work before us--exhibiting a passion, an intensity, a subtle delicacy of perception, a melting tenderness, which are as far out of the reach of mere talent, however well trained and experienced, as the prismatic colours are out of the reach of the born blind. But the genius of Mrs Stowe is of that kind which instinctively addresses itself to the Affections; and though most at home with the gentler, it can be yet fearlessly familiar with the fiercest passions which can agitate and rend the human breast. With the one she can exhibit an exquisite tenderness and sympathy; watching the other, however, with stern but calm scrutiny, and delineating both with a truth and simplicity, in the one case touching, in the other really terrible.

“_Free_ men of the North, and Christians,” says she, in her own vigorous and earnest way, “cannot know what slavery is.... From this arose a desire,” on the author’s part, “to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality. She has endeavoured to show it fairly in its best and its worst phases. In its best aspect, she has perhaps been successful; but oh! who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death that lies on the other side?... The writer has only given a faint shadow--a dim picture--of the anguish and despair that are at this very moment riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair.”