50 Fun Facts About Uncle Tom's Cabin

Who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin?

She was a Connecticut-born teacher from the famous Beecher family of preachers and reformers.

In which year was Uncle Tom's Cabin published in book form?

It appeared in two volumes on 20 March and sold 3,000 copies that day alone.

What is the novel's subtitle?

Stowe wrote it in response to a federal law passed in 1850 that forced Northerners to help return escaped slaves.

The passage of which law in 1850 prompted Stowe to write the novel?

Much of the book was written at her home in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College.

In which abolitionist periodical was the novel first serialised over 40 weeks?

Readers protested to the office when she missed an issue; the final instalment ran on 1 April the following year.

How many copies of the book sold in the United States in its first year?

Eight printing presses running constantly could barely keep up.

In the 19th-century United States, Uncle Tom's Cabin was the second best-selling book after which title?

It was the century's best-selling novel outright, and is generally called the first best-selling novel.

Which president, in a likely apocryphal story, greeted Stowe as 'the little lady who started this great war'?

Stowe's own letter to her husband written hours after the 1862 meeting makes no mention of the remark.

Whose slave narrative, published in 1849, partly inspired the character of Uncle Tom?

He had escaped from a Maryland plantation across the northern border in 1830 and helped other fugitives settle there.

What was the title of the 1853 non-fiction book in which Stowe documented her sources for the novel?

It cited 'real life equivalents' for the major characters and mounted a more aggressive attack on slavery.

In which state does the novel open, on the farm of Arthur Shelby?

Facing debts, Shelby sells Tom and the boy Harry to a coarse slave trader.

What is the name of the coarse slave trader who buys Tom and Harry from the Shelbys?

He then takes Tom down the Mississippi by riverboat toward a slave market.

Which river does Eliza cross on the ice to escape her pursuers?

The scene was inspired by a real 1838 escape by a woman named Eliza Harris that John Rankin described to Stowe's husband.

How old is Harry, the son Eliza flees with?

He is her only surviving child; the novel says she had already miscarried two others.

What is the name of Eliza's husband, who has already run away when she flees?

He shoots the slave hunter Tom Loker in the side, then agrees to take him to Quakers for treatment.

To which country do Eliza, George and Harry escape, crossing from Lake Erie?

They eventually travel on to France and then to Liberia, the African nation founded for former American slaves.

How does Tom first meet the little girl Eva?

She falls from the riverboat into the Mississippi and Tom dives in; her grateful father then buys him.

What is Eva's full first name?

The year the book came out, 300 baby girls in Boston alone were named Eva after the character.

In which city does Tom live with the St. Clare family?

He becomes head coachman there and spends most of his time with Eva.

Who is St. Clare's Northern cousin, opposed to slavery yet prejudiced against black people?

To challenge her views, St. Clare buys a young slave girl and asks her to educate the child.

What is the name of the young slave girl whom St. Clare buys for his cousin to educate?

Eva convinces the dour girl that she deserves love, and Topsy vows to better herself after Eva's death.

What does Eva give to each of the slaves before she dies?

She tells them they must become Christians so that they can meet again in Heaven.

How does Augustine St. Clare die before he can free Tom?

He was trying to stop a brawl between two drunken men, one of the novel's understated temperance lessons.

Who buys Tom at auction after St. Clare's death?

He is a Northerner by birth and one of literature's most notorious villains.

In which state is Legree's plantation?

Reports in the late 1800s claimed Stowe had a Red River planter named Meredith Calhoun in mind.

What order from Legree does Tom refuse, earning the planter's hatred?

Legree resolves to crush Tom's faith, but Tom keeps reading his Bible and comforting the others.

Which enslaved woman on Legree's plantation turns out to be Eliza's long-lost mother?

She escapes with Emmeline and later meets Eliza's husband's sister, Madame de Thoux, on the boat north.

Why does Legree finally order Tom killed?

As he dies, Tom forgives the overseers who beat him, and both men become Christians.

Who arrives to buy Tom's freedom just before he dies?

He returns to the family farm, frees all his slaves and tells them to remember Tom whenever they see his cabin.

What did Tom's name eventually come to mean as an insult?

Stowe intended him as a noble hero who refuses to betray friends or abandon his beliefs.

Which real slaveholder did the man who inspired Uncle Tom say Legree was modelled on?

Henson said the man 'broke my arm and maimed me for life'.

Which black abolitionist promoted the novel in his newspaper while also publishing criticism of it?

Martin Delany, writing in that paper, accused Stowe of profiting from black writers' work and backing colonisation.

What gruesome item was reportedly mailed to Stowe by an angry Southerner?

A bookseller in Mobile, Alabama, was also run out of town for stocking the novel.

What name is given to the pro-slavery novels Southern writers produced to rebut Stowe?

Seven appeared in the novel's first year alone, and more than half of the twenty to thirty were written by white women.

Which anti-Tom novel was written by Caroline Lee Hentz, a former close friend of Stowe's in Cincinnati?

Its heroine, an abolitionist's daughter, marries a Southern slave owner and comes to defend slavery.

What were the hugely popular stage adaptations of the novel known as?

Far more Americans saw the story on stage than read it; a quarter of a million performances had been reported by 1902.

Whose stage version of the novel was the most popular play in the US and Britain for 75 years?

Stowe distrusted the theatre and refused to authorise any adaptation, but she saw this one and was delighted by its slave-girl character.

Which songwriter's tunes, such as 'Old Folks at Home', were often used in stage versions of the novel?

All the shows drew on melodrama and blackface minstrelsy, and their politics ranged from abolitionist to pro-slavery.

Who directed the first film version in 1903, one of the earliest full-length movies at 10 to 14 minutes?

It used white actors in blackface for the major roles; the book was the most-filmed of the silent era.

How much did the 1927 silent version cost, making it the third most expensive picture of the silent era?

Black actor Charles Gilpin was cast as Tom but fired for a portrayal the studio judged too aggressive.

Which organisation's protests led MGM to abandon a planned film of the novel in 1946?

For decades after the silent era the story was judged too sensitive to film in Hollywood.

Which musical adapts Uncle Tom's Cabin as the ballet 'The Small House of Uncle Thomas'?

Anna gives Tuptim a copy of the book, and the characters are rewritten as Buddhists.

Which country produced a 205-episode television soap opera based on the novel in 1969-70?

A German-language film version had appeared in 1965.

Which later protest novel is said to owe a large debt to Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is cited as another descendant.

Which critic's 1985 essay 'Sentimental Power' famously defended the novel's much-mocked style?

She argued that sentimental novels showed how women's emotions could change the world.

By 1857 the novel had been translated into how many languages?

Lin Shu's 1901 version made it the first American novel translated into Chinese.

In which Connecticut town was the novel's author born in 1811?

She was the sixth of 11 children of the Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher.

Much of Uncle Tom's Cabin was written at Stowe's house in which Maine town, where her husband taught at Bowdoin?

Stowe was also inspired by the life of Phebe Ann Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who laundered clothes for Bowdoin students there.

Who published the first Chinese translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1901?

By 1857 the novel was already available in 20 languages, and over 1.5 million mostly pirated copies circulated in Britain.

Which writer's 1945 essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel' branded the book 'a bad novel' of 'virtuous sentimentality'?

He called Stowe 'not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer'; Tolstoy, by contrast, ranked the book above any Shakespeare play.