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from Harriet Beecher Stowe, staunch abolitionist and unwavering champion of the oppressed African American, the other from one of her most relentless opponents. But which is which? In this case the system is not slavery but the Highland Clearances, and it is the second quotation which comes from Stowe, whereas the first is taken from Donald MacLeod’s furious riposte to her. MacLeod’s account of the forced eviction of the tenants of the Duchess of Sutherland, their homes burnt over their heads, their surviving families removed to the barren coastal lands, the
causes and also the tactics employed by campaigns themselves, focusing on the example of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. Specifically, it examines the British activities of black American abolitionists and ex-slaves from the 1830s to the 1860s, and the visit of the American author Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1853. In the process, it explores the ways in which race and gender complicated the public reception of these individuals and, by extension, the cause they championed. Fame culture in nineteenth-century Britain Let us begin by observing a crowd gathered
such as epistolary networks, the use of proxies and the exchange of gifts (including personal relics) to maintain interest in themselves and their activities. 75 Moreover, abolitionism threw up at least one genuine transatlantic star in this period in the person of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 76 Arguably however, the sensation caused by Stowe’s visit to Britain in 1853 reveals the limitations of such extreme versions of personality politics, as she failed to heal the deep divisions in British abolitionism while such converts as she made to the cause mostly drifted away
This book addresses the special relationship from the perspective of post-Second World War British governments. It argues that Britain's foreign policy challenges the dominant idea that its power has been waning and that it sees itself as the junior partner to the hegemonic US. The book also shows how at moments of international crisis successive British governments have attempted to re-play the same foreign policy role within the special relationship. It discusses the power of a profoundly antagonistic relationship between Mark Twain and Walter Scott. The book demonstrates Stowe's mis-reading and mis-representation of the Highland Clearances. It explains how Our Nig, the work of a Northern free black, also provides a working-class portrait of New England farm life, removed from the frontier that dominates accounts of American agrarian life. Telegraphy - which transformed transatlantic relations in the middle of the century- was used by spiritualists as a metaphor for the ways in which communications from the other world could be understood. The story of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship is discussed. Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. Henry James and George Eliot shared a transatlantic literary network which embodied an easy flow of mutual interest and appreciation between their two milieux. In her autobiography, Gertrude Stein assigns to her lifelong companion the repeated comment that she has met three geniuses in her life: Stein, Picasso, and Alfred North Whitehead.
significant to see that for George Eliot she was a figure who needed no introduction. For Henry James, a generation later, although her death in a shipwreck in 1850 and the shock and distress that caused his parents was one of his earliest memories, she remained a poignant and virtually legendary figure.6 In October 1856, George Eliot reviewed a very different group of texts: novels which included Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred. She expressed her admiration for the American author and refused to deprecate her production of ‘a second Negro novel’ because: her genius seems to be
novel at length in a later chapter I will turn for my analysis of deathbed scenes first to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse ( 1761 ), and then to two Victorian examples: the deaths of Charles Dickens’s Little Nell and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva. In an effort to save her son from drowning, Rousseau’s Julie de Wolmar throws herself into the water
. The nature of the relationships examined in these essays range between the metaphorical and the actual, but they also reveal the intricate nexus of correspondences or connections which existed outside the main pairings investigated by contributors and which will bear further investigation. Take the case of George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charlotte Brontë, who were brought together through communications both earthly and other-worldly. Stowe wrote to Eliot describing a long ‘conversation’ she had held (via the planchette) with the spirit of Charlotte Brontë
by noting that when Harriet Beecher Stowe visited Britain, in 1853, abolition and spiritualism were ‘among the foremost topics of the day’.15 One observer wrote to her husband that ‘The great talk now is Mrs Stowe and spirit-rapping, both of which have arrived in England’.16 The notion of arrival is more fraught and problematic than this contemporary Spiritualism and the Atlantic divide 97 commentator suggests, but for the moment I will use it without challenging it.17 The implied substitution (by Owen) of ‘American’ for ‘transatlantic’ is also problematic, as
many forums, ranging from the Times to the Chartists’ Morning Star , and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to some of the several hostile parodies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. In a Punch cartoon of 1865 that takes its name from Bleak House , Britannia ignores the pleas of street urchins as she looks on at a ship of the Africa Squadron and an African coastal scene ( Figure
). Gunning persuasively argues that in this novel D’Aguiar commences the deconstruction of fixed representations of anti-racist positions: ‘Through an understanding of the mechanics of a society reliant on slavery, D’Aguiar can outline responses to a discourse around race that do not rely on the reproduction of stereotypes that work to stifle the reality of human variety’. 24 In this essay, which explores The Longest Memory alongside Richard Wright’s Native Son , and within the context of the legacies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , Gunning argues that