This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 1/16/2025
STOWE, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896). Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1852. 8vos. Illustrated with title-page vignettes and 6 plates throughout. [2, blank], [iii, sic]-x, [13, sic]-312, [2, blank]; [i]-iv, [5]-322, [4, blank] pp. Publisher’s full brown cloth [BAL binding “b”] front boards paneled in blind with gilt central pictorial stamp, rear boards with blind central pictorical stamp, spines stamped in blind and lettered in gilt, (both volumes recased, spines worn and chipped with some repairs, some edgewear to boards (especially at corners), text soiled and with occasional ink markings, several gutters overopened, both volumes skewed). Very good. FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE OF ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN NOVEL. Housed in a beautiful full black morocco clamshell case with elaborate gilt on the covers, and gilt morocco labels and onlays on the spine. This is the only novel influential enough to be listed in Printing in the Mind of Man by Carter and Muir. “In the emotion-charged atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century America, Uncle Tom’s Cabin exploded like a bombshell. To those engaged in fighting slavery it appeared as an indictment of all the evils inherent in the system they opposed; to the pro-slavery forces it was a slanderous attack on ‘the Southern way of life.’ Whatever its weakness as a literary work - structural looseness and excess of sentiment among them the social impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the United States was greater than of any book before or since” (PMM 332). BAL 19343.