Onkel Toms Hytte
1852
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote this novel in 1852 as a direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act, and it became the best-selling novel of the 19th century. Through interwoven stories of enslaved people and their owners, Stowe constructed an emotional assault on American slavery that readers could not ignore. The novel follows Uncle Tom, a deeply religious man sold away from his family, and Eliza, who makes the desperate choice to flee north with her child. Stowe shows both the brutality of the system and the humanity of those trapped within it. The book ignited a firestorm of controversy, with Southerners denouncing it as slander and Northerners finally confronting the moral cost of a nation built on bondage. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year and is credited with hardening Northern sentiment against slavery. Today it remains essential reading not because it's flawless Stowe's portrayal contains stereotypes and her endings are often tragic but because it changed the course of American history through the sheer force of human feeling.
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“The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,”
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through…””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Any mind that is capable of a real sorrow is capable of good.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Treat 'em like dogs, and you'll have dogs' works and dogs' actions. Treat 'em like men, and you'll have men's works.””
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
