Susan F. Beegel collection of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ephemera

Susan F. Beegel, a PhD in English from Yale University and former Editor of The Hemingway Review, has been a dedicated supporter of Bowdoin College Library. A Maine native and a scholar of American literature and history, she has contributed significantly to expanding Bowdoin's collection of Uncle Tom's Cabin ephemera. Her efforts in acquiring visual materials related to Harriet Beecher Stowe have been invaluable in deepening our understanding of Stowe's life and the lasting impact of her work.

The Susan F. Beegel collection of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ephemera consists of materials that showcase the dissemination of imagery that significantly contributed to the widespread fame of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the decades following the novel's publication in 1852. Written in Brunswick, Maine, Stowe’s powerful denunciation of slavery reverberated through an already fractured American society and quickly sparked intense reactions across Europe. The novel addressed several pressing international issues of the time—such as labor exploitation, gender violence, nationalism, and colonization. About Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frederick Douglass would write: “Its effect was amazing, instantaneous, and universal. No book on the subject of slavery had so generally and favorably touched the American heart.” But the book also prompted a range of intense responses from moral outrage about slavery to racist outrage about Stowe and her abolitionist message. Many historians credit the controversy created by the novel as an important factor in precipitating the Civil War.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also the runaway bestseller of its century, in an era when American authors had no copyright protection against unauthorized spin-offs from their work. The unrestrained rush to exploit the novel’s popularity led to an explosion of unsanctioned translations, editions, and adaptations, with its most memorable characters and scenes depicted across various media including advertisements, merchandise, music, and drama. Before the Civil War, theatrical adaptations in particular attempted to soften, erase, or even parody the radicalism of Stowe’s anti-slavery message. Some were serious productions, while others substantially rewrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, using the traditions of Blackface minstrelsy to perpetuate racist depictions of African Americans. In the decades following the Civil War, dozens of companies of circus-like traveling “Tom shows” played to millions of Americans around the country every summer, reaching a far larger audience than the novel had ever done and complicating the legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin still further with harmful stereotypes. At the same time, the Tom shows slowly began to introduce African American actors and authentic African American music to stage and screen. The broadsides, trade cards, photographs, and theatrical programs within the Susan F. Beegel collection of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ephemera depict a century of struggle between Stowe’s historically important anti-slavery novel and American racism.

[Works Cited: Exhibition on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the United States and Europe, Bowdoin College Museum of Art curatorial statement, 2023; Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1881.]