Audiobook · read by volunteers
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
Read by John Greenman · 45 chapters · 18 h 06
About the book
Uncle Tom is a devoted, deeply religious man enslaved on a Kentucky farm. When financial trouble forces his owner to sell him, he is separated from his family and begins a journey that takes him down the Mississippi, into new households and finally to a place where his faith and his courage will be put to the hardest test. Around him, other lives cross his: a mother who risks everything to save her child, a little girl of rare kindness, and men and women of every temperament.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote this novel to make Americans feel what slavery meant to the people it held. It became one of the best-selling books of its century and one of the most controversial. Over forty-five sections and more than eighteen hours, you will hear a story that is emotional, argumentative and historically significant, and that still provokes debate today.
Introduction
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist. Her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly appeared in 1852 and treats slavery as its central theme. It was banned in parts of the slaveholding South before the Civil War, and it was published at a time when the question of slavery was dividing the country.
The book was enormously popular, selling in huge numbers in America and abroad, and it was adapted for the stage in many versions. It is often credited with influencing public opinion on slavery in the years before the Civil War, although the extent of that influence is a matter of historical discussion. Today it is also read critically. The name Uncle Tom later passed into the language as an insult, and some of the book’s portrayals of race reflect the assumptions of its time. Any listener should expect language and attitudes that are painful and that need to be approached with care.
The recording comprises 45 sections and runs for a little over eighteen hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer. The length allows the story to unfold with its many strands: the escape narratives, the Southern households, the arguments about religion and morality, and the long shadow of the slave trade.
Why listen now? Because it is a landmark of American literature and a document of its period, and because understanding how stories were used to move public feeling is part of understanding history. It is not an easy book, but it remains a powerful one.
Public domain
Harriet Beecher Stowe died in 1896: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text