Devouring Uncle Tom's Cabin: Antebellum 'Common' Readers

Soon after its publication in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin pervaded Anglo- American culture as theatre, song, poster and game. Eric Lott, Linda Williams and others have heightened our awareness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as performance and visual artefact.1 But this awareness threatens to obscure our understanding of Stowe’s novel as a book that was avidly read. My chapter analyses antebellum responses to Stowe’s book in order to remind us that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had deep roots in the nineteenth-century American culture of reading, and a vital existence there for decades. I also raise questions about how we select and interpret evidence for the reading experience.