“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was dispatched chapter by chapter, almost before the ink was dry, to the editor of The National Era, an anti-slavery paper published in Washington, in which the story ran from June, 1851, to April, 1852. The modest author who was accustomed to think of herself as a mere household drudge with very few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping, did not dream what was in store for her. In fact, she had at first a profound feeling of discouragement; she feared the book would fall to the ground unnoticed and do no good for the cause. That this might not happen, she sent copies to significant persons in England and in her own country to call their attention to the work and to win their interest if possible. Charles Dickens, Prince Albert, Macaulay, Charles Kingsley, Lord Carlisle and the Earl of Shaftsbury received copies and acknowledged them in courteous and feeling letters.

But Mrs. Stowe found that far from needing help from the great to make it find its way, her book of love and pity had struck a chord in the universal heart. It can almost be said of her as it was of Byron that she awoke one morning and found herself famous. No book in American literature ever achieved so immediate and so wide a popularity. There was an unprecedented call for it. Three thousand copies went off the first day, and soon eight power presses were kept busy night and day to supply the demand. It swept over the country, and people everywhere were reading it into the small hours of the night, weeping and sobbing over the death of little Eva and over the heroism of Uncle Tom. Before the year was over, more than three hundred thousand copies had been sold. As Emerson said, it “found readers in the parlor, the nursery and the kitchen of every household.”

The daughter of William Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Henry Villard, in a passage recently written, said: “I read it as a little child with tears and sobs, as did many an older person, thrilled by its recital of the horrors of slavery, and touched by the kindness of those who were slaveholders, contrary to their wishes and the dictates of conscience. A moral whirlwind followed in its path, the anti-slavery agitation which preceded it having prepared the way for its wonderful reception in the north.”

Mrs. Stowe was now called the greatest of American women; her book was declared “a work of undoubted genius”; it was “epoch-making”; Julia Ward Howe called it an “offering on the altar of a heavenly intuition, destined to go down to posterity as of supreme desert and of undying memory.” The poet Whittier wrote: “What a glorious work Harriet Beecher Stowe has wrought! Thanks for the Fugitive Slave Law! Better for slavery that law had never been enacted, for it gave occasion for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”

Yet not all the breezes that blew were balmy. There were many astonished outcries, some execrations. But these things influenced the mind of the author very little. She knew that they would not change the heart of her friends toward her, and they could not change the truth. So what had she to fear?

Very soon editions began to appear in England, and within a year a million and a half copies had been sold in that country. Through France and Germany, Italy and Sweden, too, the book went like wildfire. That good, friendly soul, Frederika Bremer, wrote to Mrs. Stowe that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had been translated and read and praised in Sweden as no book ever was before, adding that she had an unwavering faith in the “strong humanity of the American mind.” She said: “It will ever throw out whatever is at war with that humanity; and to make it fully alive, nothing is needed but a truly strong appeal of heart to heart, and that has been done in ‘Uncle Tom.’” In France George Sand wrote a notable review of the book in which she said that it was no longer permissible to those that could read not to have read it. The people devour it, she said; they cover it with tears. In a short time there were few places in Italy also where “Il Zio Tom” could not be found.

Soon the pebble that had been thrown into the water began to make wider circles. Florence Nightingale wrote to Mrs. Stowe that the British soldiers amid the hardships of far eastern campaigns read the story of heroism. The book was printed at Venice by a fraternity of Catholic Armenian monks so that in the Armenian language it now was carried in all the wanderings of that intelligent people, in the towns and villages along the banks of the Euphrates, through southern Russia, and in the farthest confines of Persia. At last it reached Bengal, and, in their own language, became a household book among the Bengalese. Flying across the straits into Siam, it reached the royal group, where a member of the family liberated her own slaves to the number of one hundred and thirty as a result of its influence, and always signed her own name “Harriet Beecher Stowe,” because of her admiration for the author of the book. Professors Lin Shu and Wei-I of Peking together made a translation into Chinese, and Professor Takenobu of the Waseda University, Tokio, translated it into Japanese.

A poem by Dr. Holmes sums up, in his characteristic merry vein, the tale of the nations that learned to recognize the author of “Uncle Tom.” If we should call the roll,

Of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Germany has nine separate translations and France thirteen, besides dramas and abridgments, and chansons, and Russia has five. In Welsh and in Italian there are three; Finnish and Flemish must now be included and Hungarian and Illyrian, Portuguese, Modern Greek and Servian; Wallachian and Wendish and Yiddish are not in Dr. Holmes’ list, but should be. By 1913 there were sixty-six translations of this almost universal book, not counting abridgments or dramas. Of English editions there are forty-three, and in this country, how many? We have lost count. It would be also quite impossible to add up the dramatic versions of Eliza’s fateful adventure.

All of this goes to show that Whittier was hardly stretching the truth when he wrote his poem

It was a long time before people could look at the book fairly and judge of its literary rank; and even to this day there are writers who call “Uncle Tom” merely a colossal piece of journalism. It was indeed written at white heat and with the swiftness of a bird’s flight. “Hurry! help! hurry! help!” must have been ringing in her ears as she wrote.

During the winter that she wrote the book she had been running through with her children the novels of Scott, and Scott is the writer to whom she is the nearest of kin in the art of writing. There was a time when the tireless hand of that great story-teller was seen by an observer in a window across the way, to go back and forth, back and forth, through the evening and the night and into the wee sma’ hours. This makes us think of Mrs. Stowe’s smooth fluent script and the lightning swiftness of her little hand. She wrote like the wind, listening not for the cackle of literary critics, but to the inner voice that kept saying, “Write!”

So it happens that its lapses of style, its carelessness of technical laws have been a stumbling block to some good souls that have fed on other traditions and theories. The truth is that words grow from age to age; laws of style perish and new laws blossom out of their graves; but a torch of human sympathy once truly set alight will burn on forever.

Mr. Howells in “My Literary Passions” says that he felt the greatness of the book when he first read it; and as often as he has read it since he has seen more and more clearly that it is a very great novel. He says that the art in it is very simple and perhaps primitive, yet it is still a work of art. Its power, however, is to him inexplicable.

This is one of the greatest things that could be said about the book. It does possess that consummate quality which supreme works of art always have, namely, that their power over us is great, but that we do not see why it should be so great. Their charm is inexplicable. Mrs. Stowe’s fellow genius, George Sand, said that in art there is but one rule—to paint and to move. By this law, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a great work of art. It painted; it made a great people see; and it moves the whole world. The same generous critic said that Mrs. Stowe may not have “talent, but she has genius as humanity feels genius. And we ought to feel,” she said, “that genius is heart, that power is faith, that talent is sincerity, and success is sympathy, since this book overcomes us, since it penetrates the breast, pervades the spirit, and fills us with a strange sentiment of mingled tenderness and admiration for a poor negro ... gasping on a miserable pallet, his last sigh exhaled toward God.”

Time alone can pass final judgment on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Let a few centuries move by and if as an Epic of Compassion, dissevered from variable historical associations, it continues to console and to strengthen, then its place among masterpieces will be secure.

For “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is not a story of slavery; the system of slavery only happened to be the material out of which the story was made. It has a far wider meaning as a story of human love and pity. As such its mission is to carry comfort to any souls that are in doubt and sorrow. It makes us feel that to have faith is possible and it reinforces our belief that God will help in time of need. A reading of “Uncle Tom” has led myriads of distraught souls to a rereading of the Bible, that book so beloved by the black hero because it gave him strength to bear his sore trials. In his “Life” of his mother, published by her son in 1889, Mr. Charles E. Stowe says that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” shows that “under circumstances of utter desolation and despair, the religion of Christ can enable the poorest and most ignorant human being, not merely to submit, but to triumph—that the soul of the lowest and weakest, by its aid, can become strong in superhuman virtue, and rise above every threat and terror and danger in a sublime assurance of an ever-present love and an immortal life.”