Uncle Tom in England: The black American abolitionist campaign, 1852-1861.

摘要

Between 1852, the date of the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and 1861, the start of the American Civil War, black Americans active in the struggle to abolish American slavery journeyed to England. These black men and women lectured on their life experiences, circulated slave narratives, displayed enormous panoramas depicting scenes of American slavery, and revealed personal scars and the instruments of torture used in slavery. All these were consumed by the British population. For black Americans in the abolitionist campaign in England, personal safety and personal ambition translated into public politics.;For British consumers and Victorian society, however, the meaning and consequences of the black American abolitionist campaign are less clear. Focusing on the controversies surrounding the circulation of and readership for Uncle Tom's Cabin, on the reception of American slave narratives in the British press, on the different spectacles of the abolitionist lecture tour, and on a fictionalization of the campaign in an anonymous "sequel" to Uncle Tom's Cabin, I examine the meanings American abolition took on for British consumers. The different events of the campaign offer insight into the ways in which the complexities of race, class, abolitionism, nationalism, and of the cultural marketplace worked themselves out in Victorian society. I argue that the events of the black American abolitionist campaign contributed significantly and unexpectedly to a wedding of abolitionist sympathies with social and cultural conservatism and with nationalism.