SOURCE: Fisch, Audrey A. “Abolition as a ‘step to reform in our kingdom’: Chartism, ‘white slaves,’ and a new ‘Uncle Tom’ in England.” In American Slaves in Victorian England: Abolitionist Politics in Popular Literature and Culture, pp. 33-51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Fisch discusses themes in the anonymous 1852 novel Uncle Tom in England, asserting the work was published to illustrate England's moral superiority to the United States and to capitalize on the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.]

England, perhaps more than any other nation, owes a duty to America; and certainly no other people can perform such a duty so effectively as the English. We owe it, then, as a duty to God and to man, and to Americans especially, to speak out against the dreadful oppression of which the black slave is the victim … But how shall this voice be expressed? … [by] the united declaration of three millions of men, women, and youths of Great Britain against the enslavement of the negro race! There are three millions of slaves in the United States,—are there not three millions of people in Great Britain who will sign a friendly remonstrance against American slavery? Will not every man assert the right of his fellow-man—every woman the right of her fellow-woman—to freedom?

(original emphasis and capitalization, Uncle Tom in England, 126)¹

Closing with this exacting injunction that all of England sign and send to America a kind of national petition against slavery, Uncle Tom in England, an anonymous² novel published in September 1852, two months after Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in England, is explicitly posed as an amiable companion-piece to Harriet Beecher Stowe's attempt to mobilize the world against American slavery.³ It is clear that this self-described “Echo, or Sequel” (iii) to Uncle Tom's Cabin was conceived to ride the coat-tails of Stowe's extraordinarily popular novel in order to capture its own share of publicity and sales.⁴

And it seemed to succeed at that task. While Forrest Wilson has estimated that Uncle Tom's Cabin sold 165,000 copies in England in its first year of circulation (Crusader, 419), the precise circulation of Uncle Tom in England is more difficult to document. The title page of a subsequent American edition of Uncle Tom in England declares this new novel “A Book Selling Equal to ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’” and informs perusers “60,000 Copies Sold—Tenth Edition” (from New York: A. D. Failing edition in the New York Historical Society). Taking into account the fact that such advertisements do not present exact historical evidence, the boasted figure of 60,000 copies suggests a favorable comparison with the numbers for the “ordinary circulating-library novel” which Altick estimates sold in editions of “a thousand or 1,250 copies” and with the figures for cheap editions which Altick estimates sold in “prepublication printing[s] of 75,000 copies” (The English Common Reader, 264, 313).

The circulation and visibility of Uncle Tom in England is also confirmed by the number and placement of reviews (not all of high praise). For example, the Athenaeum, one of the leading weeklies known for its broad focus on literature, art, and science, notices the novel on October 2, 1852, calling its existence “the inevitable imitation to which [the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin] gives birth.” The review finds Uncle Tom in England “an echo [of Uncle Tom's Cabin] of the faintest. The volume, pitch, and quality of the original voice are all lost,—and nothing remains but a travestie of names and characters.” The review concludes by marking the writer's “boast” of completing the novel in “seven days and nights” with the following sarcasm: “We should rather he had taken more time—and done better.” Another review in the Spectator concentrates, perhaps typically for this “liberal, sometimes radical” paper on the anti-Chartist politics of the novel (Sullivan, British Literary Magazine, 392): “A sort of sequel to Uncle Tom; the freed negro, after sundry adventures, being brought to England; and some hits made at Chartism.”

Indeed, as the Spectator suggests, Uncle Tom in England was designed to do more than just capitalize on the general English interest in American “Uncle Tom.” Presenting a newly invented “Uncle Tom” and telling a vastly different story about England's favorite black man, Uncle Tom in England seeks to wrest control, authority, and power away from Stowe. Re-shaping his character and his life, Uncle Tom in England strives to defuse the transgressive potential of his predecessor's infiltration of Victorian society.

The novel begins on the coast of Africa where two children of Gucongo, an African chief, are being sold with 500 other men, women, and children as war prizes to slavers who will transport the group into American slavery. Renamed Marossi and Rosetta by the slave-ship's captain, the children arrive in Charleston where they are bought by George Harris. Harris, previously known to readers of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as the basically kind but financially embarrassed owner of George and Eliza, is here an “altered man,” no longer sympathetic to his slaves; he buys Marossi and Rosetta along with a middle-aged slave named Tom with whom he intends to introduce “a new discipline” (16) to his plantation in Kentucky. On Harris's plantation, this Tom, a different character from Stowe's Tom but also called “Uncle Tom,” discovers in another of Harris's slaves his long-lost wife, Susan. Later, their daughter Emmeline, another character from Stowe (the beautiful innocent with whom Cassie escapes from Simon Legree), comes to rescue her long-lost parents with the aid of a kind Quaker family, the Hanaways. Marossi, Rosetta, and Susan escape to the Hanaways, but Tom is caught at the last minute.

Tom is tried and sentenced to death for helping other slaves to escape; Emmeline, meanwhile, dies of grief and worry. A great outcry is raised, particularly from England, over Tom's trial and sentence; as a result, Tom goes unpunished and is bought out of slavery. Tom, Susan, Marossi, and Rosetta now go to England, both to escape any danger and to work to influence public opinion against American slavery. In England, Tom and Susan meet Chartists and discuss the shared plights of “white slaves and black slaves” (116). They decide that “we must make common cause and help each other!” (120): the black American slave and the white English worker must join forces in peaceful attempts to promote change. Thomas, the Hanaways' son, marries Rosetta. The two move to Canada and are praised by the Quaker Hanaways since “every such act of amalgamation contributes to break down the prejudice of the separate races” (123). Marossi goes to Africa as a missionary.

Uncle Tom in England is stocked with the conventions of writing about slavery: scenes of slave life, the thrill of escape, and all the standard discussions of the injustices of the slaves system. Yet the tropes common to literature about slavery are displaced in this novel by an overwhelming emphasis on social position. In effect, the novel translates the issues of American slavery into the home-grown English discourse of class.⁵

In its initial pages, for example, the narrative focuses on how the African-born children, Rosetta and Marossi, are inherently superior to those around them. The narrative describes the ways in which they differentiate themselves both from the other slaves aboard the slave-ship and from the rough and unmannered black and white working-class crew who man the ship. The children are distinguished physically as “likely little ones [who] will fetch well in the market … being pretty, and sleek” (8-9); moreover, their emotional bond, “always holding each other's hands, and often embracing lovingly, and whispering words which none understood but themselves” (11), reveals them as highly developed moral creatures. The children's beauty and domestic virtue are matched by a seemingly inherent sense of social position: Rosetta and Marossi segregate themselves from the other slaves and gravitate instead towards the sailors, in particular, the Captain, whose social standing is marked both by his rank and by the standardized diction of his speech (in contrast to the dialect of the mates). All of this is underlined by the facts of Rosetta's and Marossi's birth: as the children of an African chief, they represent not ordinary Africans but an aristocracy among the savages.

In this sense, the children resemble the transplanted orphans who populate so many Victorian novels: their physical appearance, behavior, and internal virtue render visible a class status obscured by their unfortunate circumstances.⁶ Moreover, the reader is assured that this kind of social dislocation will not remain uncorrected, that the young hero and heroine will be restored to the social position from which they were unjustly ousted. The conventional happy ending the children achieve re-assures Victorians that the social order really outweighs unlucky circumstances, even such horrendous circumstances as slavery. Like the dispossession of Oliver Twist, cast into a lower station to which he did not belong, the oppression of Rosetta and Marossi is vilified. The novel insists (and I use the racially coded cliché deliberately) that cream will rise to the top; those who, like Rosetta and Marossi, ought not to be slaves will escape.

Because the novel stresses Rosetta and Marossi's exceptionalness, its protest against slavery is muffled. Like many abolitionist texts, Uncle Tom in England registers a fundamental ambivalence about the need for a larger social overhaul in which all black men and women, deserving or not, would be freed from slavery.⁷ The novel avoids the question of whether human worth is constituted by race or skin color,⁸ but it insists that social class is natural, that one's place in the world is always determined by and will eventually correspond with one's physical and moral value. What this means, as we will see below, is that the novel concedes that some men and women (black and white) are inferior and their inherent inferiority justifies the degraded circumstances of their lives.⁹

If the exceptional Rosetta and Marossi do not deserve the violent upheaval and displacement of the slave trade and slavery, the future for Tom and Susan is far less secure. Lacking the good birth and innate superiority that ensure Rosetta's and Marossi's success, Tom and Susan struggle to attain what Rosetta and Marossi seem “naturally” to possess. Their fight to lift themselves up and thus to earn the privilege of freedom bears the strong imprint of the middle-class Victorian discourse of working-class self-improvement.

The key to this discourse is education. For the middle class in mid-Victorian England, according to Dorothy Thompson, the thinking on this subject went as follows: “anyone who is not educated is not anything. Literacy is the test of humanity” (The Chartists, 241). The working class, by and large uneducated, at least by the standards of the middle class, were in this sense less than human. By mid-century, however, there was an explosion of working-class education. The attempts of working men and women to acquire proof of humanity, however,¹⁰ were met with a concomitant anxiety, on the part of the middle class, about the consequences of education for these new groups of people. In the same way as they were preoccupied with measuring and maintaining the taste and character of the newly-educated readers entering the emerging literary marketplace discussed in the last chapter, the middle class were obsessed with the idea that the working class would now have access to that which had once served as a “trump card in … class competition” (Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 150). Anxieties about working-class education were mollified through a variety of philanthropic undertakings. Foremost among these was “provided” education which could be touted to the working class as the medium for class improvement and social mobility but safely underwritten by the unstated goal of trying “to raise a new race of working people—respectful, cheerful, hard-working, loyal, pacific, and religious” (Johnson, “Educational Policy,” 119). Education, in other words, was fundamentally about social control of the working class.

Of course, “knowledge is power” is also a common and important trope in the genre of slave narratives. The acquisition of knowledge, particularly literacy, is often represented in the slave narrative as a scene of figurative emancipation and psychological empowerment after which the journey towards physical emancipation begins.¹¹ For example, Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) discusses how a kind mistress begins to teach him to read and write. “Mistress,” Douglass writes, “in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell” (original emphasis, 53). Douglass directly links the acquisition of literacy skills with his burgeoning desire for freedom. He writes:

the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave … In this dialogue, the whole argument in [sic] behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master—things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master.

(original emphasis, 54)

This particular reading material and his education generally help Douglass to articulate his discontent, and this articulation, in turn, initiates the start of his actual journey towards freedom.

Susan's and Tom's struggle for education engages both these discourses. As in Douglass's experience, Susan's education is thoroughly intertwined with her struggle for freedom and her reading materials contain both figuratively and literally the keys to that freedom. For example, Susan says that she “looked for encouragement to the examples of Pennington, Douglass, Cuffe [sic], Garnet, Bayley,¹² and others of whom she had heard and read, and she resolved that she would succeed, in the struggle [for freedom], or die in the attempt.” Her study also includes the “Life of Washington” which contains “a map of the United States [and] knowledge of the country through which she must pass, and the distance she would have to travel” (41). With “examples” and “encouragement,” metaphorical maps of her personal journey, as well as maps of the physical landscape, Susan's education sets her free.

Tom also experiences empowerment through education:

Under Susan's influence, Tom's heart became enlarged, and his mind developed. He was no longer a slave, though in fetters … It is astonishing how rapidly truth takes root, when its seeds are cast upon a soil rich with the elements of productiveness, yet long left neglected and uncultivated. Every new truth which entered Tom's mind … produced a rich harvest for the struggle in which Tom subsequently engaged. His very words, in course of time, became refined, his manners less harsh and mechanical.

(40-1)

Tom's education, detailed as “Susan's influence” and as a “harvest” of the mind, figuratively and psychologically frees him from slavery and prefigures the literal freedom Tom will shortly attain.

Acquiring education, Tom and Susan can reap their reward. Education is the key not just to the salvation of the soul but to literal mobility. Susan and Tom escape from slavery to live happily in England where, the novel tells us, “Uncle Tom and Susan fulfilled a sphere of immense usefulness in the advocacy of the abolition of slavery” (123). Now “useful” workers in the dignified fight against slavery, Tom and Susan have made it.

It is important to notice how the exploration of the power of education for the slave is underwritten here by the ideology of “provided” education. Education is not just about finding one's way out of the psychological and physical prison of slavery; it is about the re-making of the self.

Two examples betray the middle-class educational agenda undergirding the narrative of education within the novel. Returning to Susan's course of study, we see that her reading influences not just her ability to escape but her very identity. She tells Tom: “I have ‘The Life of Franklin,’ ‘The Life of Washington,’ a part of Milton's works, some of ‘Shakespere's [sic], the ‘Life of William Penn,’ the ‘Life of Howard,’ the ‘Life of Gustavus Vasa Equiano,’ the ‘Narratives’ of ‘Pennington,’ of ‘Douglass,’ and of ‘Phillis Wheatley.’”¹³ This literature has, Susan says, “Taught me to know myself.” Knowing herself, Susan's “mission,” as she terms it, is to teach Tom “to speak well and correctly,” to transform Tom through the process of education so that he too may “know” himself. That Susan names Tom's course of study a “mission” underscores that this is not a vision of education in which knowledge facilitates the emergence of some inner self; Tom is imagined here as a savage for whom education will be not revealing but transforming (30).

The second example which illustrates the political agenda underlying the educational program of the novel occurs near the start of the story, at the moment when Tom and Susan are first reunited: “Tom perceived, in the course of this conversation, that during his separation from his wife, a great deal of refinement had been acquired by her; she had become, in fact, the greatest lady he ever knew, and had picked up such a lot of learning that he could scarcely understand her at times” (27). Education is here most explicitly revealed as “refinement.” Susan's transformation is ultimately defined neither by her self-knowledge nor by her quest for freedom but by the appellation Tom uses: Susan had become a “lady.” Ironically the source of less, not more, communication between husband and wife, Susan's evolution is tellingly registered in the language of social class.

Uncle Tom in England thus follows the pattern of most writing about slavery. Many of these works, including slave narratives authored by African-Americans, struggle to wage their protests against the harsh conditions of slavery while at the same time working to make themselves accessible and comprehensible to readers by operating within the literary and social conventions of the historical moment—in this case, conventions about the relationship between self-worth and social position. Interestingly, Uncle Tom in England eschews the traditional economy of literature about slavery in which skin color correlates with self-worth and social position; this novel maps its characters along a seemingly color-blind scale. The scale remains, however, and, for Victorians, its calibrations—birth, virtue, and education—were politically weighty.

Uncle Tom in England's politics cannot be explained, however, as the simple correlative of literary or social conventions. For the novel pursues more than just a hackneyed English translation and transposition of American slavery. Capitalizing on the popularity of slavery as a literary theme, writing from the moral high ground of the anti-slavery movement, and manipulating the powerful rhetoric of abolition, the novel engages in a deliberate act of cultural appropriation.

I suggested earlier that the fight by Tom and Susan to lift themselves up from the lowly station of slavery bears the imprint of the middle-class Victorian discourse of working-class self-improvement. In fact, Tom and Susan are explicitly identified with the English white working class; their unifying bond is ignorance. Susan tells Tom that when Milton wrote, “knowledge was not so diffused as now, and there were people in England who knew as little of truth, as our unfortunate race now does” (46). She continues, explaining that black American slaves are like this distant English working class: “we are in the same position as those ignorant people, from whom the rulers of the olden time would have excluded the light” (46). Ironically, while this passage works to consider the relation between the oppressions of class and slavery, the novel here turns from current realities, as if working-class exclusion was a thing of history and as if “knowledge” and “truth” were fully diffused in nineteenth-century England. With the issue of English class oppression firmly re-assigned to the distant past, the novel is stripped of any progressive potential.

Obviously, all such oppression in England was not far distant. Thomas Carlyle was one of the many Victorian thinkers to consider this issue and in “Signs of the Times” he identifies ignorance of what Uncle Tom in England terms “the light” as one of the consequences of the Industrial Age: “By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilized ages” (Selected Works, 35). Without explicitly singling out the working class as the ones with the problem of “moral” inferiority of “soul and character,” Carlyle offers a solution of reform that threatens no one. Describing the scope of his task as “To reform a world,” Carlyle writes that “to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself” (original emphasis, 44). A radical reorganization of the Victorian world, in other words, would be unwise. Carlyle envisions the world re-made by the self-perfection of the English worker; like Susan's “mission” to overcome the “defect” of the slave, Carlyle's plan encompasses self-improvement but not social reform.

We have seen already how Uncle Tom in England applies this Carlylean program of “slower reformation” (44) to the problem of American slavery—freeing the deserving and placing the burden of earning freedom on those slaves who are not exceptional in their birth or breeding. The second half of the novel turns directly to the issue of working-class reform, insisting that this too can be achieved through a peaceful, orderly movement based on the idea of individual transformation. In this pursuit, Uncle Tom in England proceeds as if the transformations of worker and slave were strictly parallel, as if both needed only education to begin the self-improvement that leads to freedom, and as if the Chartist and abolitionist movements were articulated around projects of individual self-improvement rather than more radical collective change.

The novel initiates its focus on the problems of the English working class by producing a distorted rewriting of Chartism, resuscitating the virtually defunct working-class reform movement as a nearly unrecognizable Carlylean movement aimed only at slow, individual “reformation.” In the world of the novel, Chartists can be divided into two distinct categories: those who advocate physical force versus those who advocate moral force. This division does not reflect the historical reality of the movement in which “no clear line of demarcation [existed] between the two types of method or between the men who inclined to the one or the other.” In fact, while moral-force Chartists believed that “they could carry the Charter by means of public meetings, agitation, petitions and direct or indirect influence at the polls,” physical force Chartists differed only in their sense that these measures might not prove sufficient and that “sooner or later an armed insurrection would be necessary [and acceptable] to force the government to yield” (Slosson, The Decline of the Chartist Movement, 83).¹⁴ Viewed through the novel's distorting lens, however, physical-force Chartism represents the danger of violent anarchy through the irresponsible actions of unenlightened men, whereas moral-force Chartism articulates middle-class values such as the self-education and self-improvement of the working man.¹⁵ These representations are personified in two characters: William Clarke, a moral-force Chartist, who stands opposed and superior, not just politically but morally, to Richard (“Dick”) Boreas, a physical-force Chartist.

Dick complains that he has not had any work and that he and his family are starving. He argues that this misery justifies his, and by extension any, unlawful actions against the government:

Ain't I justified in fighting?—ain't I justified in stealing?—ain't I justified in doing anything to get food and clothing for myself and those who look to me for help? What matters it to me if the hinstitutions of the country, as they calls 'em, fall to pieces? We can't live upon hinstitutions, and constitutions, and them d———d things; it's our rights as we wants—it's the Charter—to let us manage our own affairs, and not let 'em tax us and grind us in the way they do.

(114)

Violence, according to Dick, is morally acceptable when the institutions of society, such as Parliament, have become so grossly unjust that they “grind” the people.¹⁶

The odds, however, are stacked against Dick and the philosophies of physical-force Chartism. Described as an “idle,” “drunken man” who might work more if he applied himself but who instead indulges his vices and beats his wife (115), Dick is thoroughly discredited by the novel.¹⁷ Moreover in the passage above, Dick's ideas are trivialized by his flawed mispronunciation; his misnaming of “hinstitutions” stands as a signal of his general ignorance of and inability to understand or critique institutions. Because of the presentation of Dick as one of the unenlightened, his indictments of English institutions as corrupt bureaucratic machines can be easily dismissed by the novel.

Not content with belittling Dick and depicting the representatives of physical-force Chartism as men who lack good “habits and opinions” and “cannot govern [themselves]” (115) let alone the nation, the novel ensures the repudiation of physical-force Chartism by associating it with the bogeyman of Victorian England—the French Revolution.¹⁸

[W]hat have violent revolutions ever done? … What have they done in France—do they enjoy liberty there? No. And you will find that in proportion to the revolutions by force, which occur in any country, so do the liberties of the people decline. These fighting Chartists destroy our chances of success. They are, as a body, people defective of habits and opinions.

(115)

Should physical-force Chartism ever succeed by violent revolution in actually toppling the institutions of society and giving power to these masses of unelevated, unenlightened people, the result, the novel insists, would be disaster.

It is worth noting that, even within the context of the fight against slavery, Dick Boreas's argument that oppression justifies violence would have been worrisome to middle-class Victorians. The Times, for example, while it recognizes the “stain” of slavery, warns that violence in the name of abolition may produce Arnoldian “anarchy and confusion” (Culture and Anarchy, 97): “Hate begets hate, and a war of races secures the rapid deterioration and decline of all the combatants. We may well shrink before rashly inviting so bloody and disastrous a conflict” (“Uncle Tom's Cabin”).¹⁹ The non-violent escape of a few deserving individuals, such as Tom, Susan, and the children, is acceptable; more radical, large-scale social upheaval portends, for The Times, an undesirable “war of races.”

Reactions to the bloody insurrection of John Brown at Harper's Ferry (1859) demonstrate the same antipathy towards the use of violence. “[T]here was no use disguising the fact that he was prepared to defend himself, even to blood, if any attempt were made to prevent the success of his enterprise,” concedes the Anti-Slavery Reporter. The paper cannot expect such an enterprise to be acceptable to Victorians and thus it works to re-construct Brown's use of violence as a defense against, rather than an initiation of, violence.

John Brown went not as an insurgent against peaceable men, but against an armed band of insurgents. Blood was there already—blood, drop by drop wrung from the hearts of poor defenseless people, deprived of every means of freedom. He interfered; he saw a strong man in the act of beating out the brains of a weak man, and he interposed himself between.

The sanction of Brown's use of violence to overthrow the institution of slavery is won by the fact that violence preceded Brown, that armed conflict was already in place in the United States. Thus, Brown was not commencing “mad” anarchy but merely reacting to it. It is the slave-holders, “an armed band of insurgents,” who are portrayed as the rash and the violent. Further, the Anti-Slavery Reporter characterizes Brown's endeavor not as social upheaval, not as the overthrow of the institution of slavery, but as an attempt to obtain for a few “poor defenseless people” the chance of freedom, an attempt to help “a weak man” who is being unjustly beaten by “a strong man.” Only by downplaying Brown's attacks on the institution of slavery and by constructing Brown's attack as an attempt to restore peace and order can the Anti-Slavery Reporter condone his violent insurrection.

Turning, then, from the drunken, uneducated, and irresponsible advocates of physical-force Chartism and the violence about which Victorians were so skittish, the novel presents William Clarke, representative of the model working class and of (morally superior) moral-force Chartism. Unlike the unemployed Dick Boreas, Clarke is introduced to the reader as “an intelligent mechanic” (115).²⁰ Gone is the parodic language of the people; Clarke speaks in formal, rational language. And while Richard Boreas owns the nickname “Dick”²¹ and the unusual, unflattering “Boreas”²² (with its connotations that Dick is a bore and an ass), William Clarke remains respectfully addressed as “William.”

With physical-force Chartism dismissed, the novel uses its endorsement of Clarke to present a reform agenda which poses no threat to the social and political status quo. Clarke begins by suggesting that he shares Boreas's sense that England's institutions are to blame for the social discontent among the lower classes. All similarity between Clarke's and Boreas's political positions, however, ends there. Clarke argues that these institutions are necessary and benevolent, if temporarily malfunctioning. He explains to Tom and Susan that “much of this evil [both the inadequate social conditions of working-class life and the violence they provoke in physical-force Chartists] arises not so much from political as from social misgovernment.” English “good institutions” have become “enfeebled,” and Clarke proposes that “an enlightened system of education … would suffice to enlighten the minds of the whole of these degraded creatures, or as many of them as are capable of, or willing to receive it” (116). Finally, for Clarke, it is not so much that the institutions of society are to blame for the existing social problems, but that the working classes have never been properly “enlightened.” Clarke sounds a Carlylean note in his insistence that the solution lies in self-improvement: the working class needs to “acquire the power of governing themselves” (115). Just as Tom's literal freedom was a nearly automatic consequence of his education (“He was no longer a slave, though in fetters” [40]), the novel suggests, by way of Clarke, that following enlightenment the “gates of liberty will fly open of their own accord” for the working classes.

It is important to notice that Clarke's argument labels the working class as not only “degraded” but responsible for their own degradation and concedes that education will “enlighten” and “relieve” only some of the working class: “as many of them as are capable of, or willing to receive it” (116). Recall that the novel's protest against slavery was launched only for those black slaves who, because of birth and virtue or self-improvement, had shown themselves worthy of freedom. In both cases, the novel insists that only those who lift themselves up (together of course with those who are born enlightened) deserve freedom from oppression. In the end, pitting physical-force Chartism, constructed as violently and politically irresponsible, against moral-force Chartism, constructed as rational and peaceable, the novel secures support only for reform made, as Matthew Arnold put it, “by due course of law” (97).

Why does the novel pick a fight with physical-force Chartism when the entire Chartism movement, by the time of the publication of this novel in 1852, is, if not dead, then on its last legs?²³ And why, in revivifying Chartism, does the author give character to physical- and moral-force Chartism, so as to replay a contest between the two that is, by 1852, moot? The answer, I believe, is that the novel, like many of the industrial novels written after the demise of Chartism, wants to celebrate and glorify England: in particular, England's management of its own reform movements.²⁴ In the face of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and with what the English perceived as the time bomb of slavery steadily ticking away in the United States, a revisionist depiction of Chartism, caricatured and hamstrung as the movement is by the novel, serves to authorize for the English a nostalgic pride over the nation's superior handling of its domestic reform problems and a sense of international superiority.²⁵

Depicting moral-force Chartism as a movement for self-improvement, as a movement basically at peace with the existing structure of society, and discrediting physical-force Chartism as the irrational whim of drunken uneducated men, Uncle Tom in England's re-writing of the history of the movement allows the novel to suggest that Chartism, at least all of Chartism that ever really made any sense, succeeded. The novel can claim that Chartism's real goals, self-enlightenment and self-education, have been peacefully achieved and incorporated into mainstream Victorian society. (This explains why Clarke is never allowed to speak specifically about universal male suffrage, the crucial goal of all Chartists, which was incontrovertibly not achieved.) Moreover, the defeat and disappearance of physical-force Chartism is justified by its depiction as a misguided upstart movement doomed by its internal anarchy and confusion and by the incompetence of its members. Uncle Tom in England, then, refutes any suggestion that the Chartist movement was squelched by those in power and paints a picture of England as a leader among nations, gracefully accommodating social change and promoting justice.²⁶

What should be clear by this point is that the abolition of slavery is not the ultimate agenda of Uncle Tom in England. An examination of the novel's argumentative, clumsy, and deliberately paradoxical subtitle, “A Proof that Black's White,” confirms this. One might conjecture that the awkwardness of the subtitle stems from the fact that the novel's ostensible purpose—to prove black is white—goes against the grain of Victorian common sense. Despite the popularity of the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” abolitionist slogan, few among nineteenth-century Victorians would have accepted the idea that blacks could or should be the political, social, cultural, or moral equals of whites.²⁷ Furthermore, the publication of the novel in 1852 places it within a period during which attitudes about race and ethnicity in England were undergoing a reconfiguration which would culminate in the imperialism of the turn of the century.²⁸

The novel offers an explanation for its seemingly provocative subtitle:

The intention of this work has been to show, in the words of its title, “that Black's White.” By this is meant that there is no natural disqualification of the black population, which should deprive them of the right to enjoy equal political and social privileges with ourselves; or, in the words of Uncle Tom, in his defence, it has been attempted to prove that “as far as our colored brethren have had the advantages of education and of civilization, they have been as peaceful, as orderly, as devout, as those of fairer skin.”

(123)

The phrase “no natural disqualification” effectively sidesteps the issue of racial equality. While “education” and “civilization” may produce “colored brethren” who are as “peaceful,” “orderly,” and “devout” as whites, the passage's back-handed string of negatives—“no natural disqualification of the black population, which should deprive them of the right” (my emphasis)—stops short of demanding political and social privileges for blacks.

More importantly, the passage speaks of “qualifications.” If “there is no natural disqualification of the black population” (my emphasis), there are still those who are disqualified. The exceptionally qualified (like Rosetta and Marossi) or those who earn their qualifications through “education” and “civilization” (like Tom and Susan) may win privileges. Those without the necessary qualifications, however, such as Dick Boreas or the slaves whom Tom and Susan left behind on George Harris's farm, may be justly deprived. In other words, the unstated connection between black and white in the contraction “black's white” seems to be that the white working class are no more “naturally” qualified for the political and social privileges of society than are black slaves. Both the white working class and the black slaves, the novel implies, may be disqualified and denied privileges.

If the novel's title provides a strange and slightly obscure argument for the color-blind deprivation of both black slaves and white workers, an equally unexpected argument is suggested, near the end of the novel, for the interdependence of Chartism and abolitionism. William Clarke argues not only that the campaign to abolish American slavery is connected to rather than in competition with Chartism, but that abolition must take precedence over Chartism.²⁹ He says:

We have … our grievances. Where is the country that has not? But this I believe,—that we have more real liberty in England than is enjoyed in any other kingdom in the world. But we can't make much advance while what are called the enlightened governments maintain such oppressions as they do. What do our opponents tell us here? “Why,” say they, “look to America; there they have your vaunted charter, and there are three million of slaves bowed to the very dust.” I consider, therefore, that a very important step to reform in our kingdom would be the abolition of slavery by the republic of America.

(115)

Clarke's reasoning, in other words, is that abolition is a stage in the fight for Chartism. And he bases his prioritizing of the two reform agendas not on some sense that the cause of the “white slave” and the cause of the black slave are linked but on the idea of the responsibilities of “enlightened governments.”

Under this rubric of national chauvinism comes a moral and political charge: England and America set the standards of reform and lead the rest of the world in the right direction. In general, the novel insists that “Reciprocal influences prevail between nations as among individuals—and one nation may determine the conduct of another nation as effectually as one man may exercise suasion upon the mind of his fellow.” England, for example, having kindled the “flame” of the Anti-Corn Law-League “lights up a kindred element in European nations … [t]he eyes of Europe have been upon England during the recent struggle, and her example has extended its influence wherever misgovernment exists” (125).

On the other hand, the United States, having lit the “flame” of English Chartism with its “vaunted” American charter, has failed to shine its beacon of light onto England because the stain of slavery blocks that light. England might “look to America,” to America's accomplishment of the charter, but the accomplishment can only be seen in the context of the “three million of slaves bowed to the very dust.” Despite the so-called advance of the charter, America still permits slavery. Since even without a charter England claims “more real liberty” than anywhere else, England does not look up to the American charter for guidance, it looks down on that charter, scorning the “American constitution [as] the greatest anomaly in the world” (120).

America has failed to enlighten the world, and England is among “the nations throughout the world” for whom American slavery is proving a “stumbling block” (123). This is why Clarke prioritizes the fight against American slavery. With the stumbling block of the contradiction of the existence of slavery in a nation which has a charter, England cannot achieve Chartist reform.

The proposition that American reform must be primary, that the contradiction of America's lack of freedom hinders English reform, however, suggests that influence in the “kinship” of “enlightened governments” flows from the United States to England. In the example of the Anti-Corn-Law League, influences flow in one direction: from England to the rest of Europe. With the abolition of slavery, influences also flow from England: having abolished colonial slavery, England sends its influence on such matters to the United States which takes the lesson from its superior and goes to work on the reform. Indeed, the novel, originally published in England but subsequently circulated in America as a piece of anti-slavery advocacy, offers itself as an example of just such an influence, a literary beacon sent with moral and political purpose from the enlightened nation of England to America.

But are we really to believe that England, this center of influence, cannot accomplish Chartist reform without the influence of American reform? Why would England look to America at all, let alone allow the instance of the failed charter in America to stand in the way of reform in England? Are we to believe that in this instance (alone) England looks to the influence and leadership of the United States, using the American charter to set an example for English Chartism?

The reversal of the transatlantic power relations is convenient for undermining the urgency of Chartist reforms, but it is ultimately unconvincing. For all the while the United States is accorded this particular role of leadership in the instance of American slavery, the novel firmly insists that England is the real leader among nations. The critique of the American Constitution as a “vaunted charter” is a critique of American nationalism and an attempt to reaffirm English superiority. It forms part of a series of taunts running through the novel focused specifically on the icons of American nationalism, particularly the American flag, in which English nationalism is constructed and affirmed against the model of the United States. For example, when the slave-ship carrying Marossi and Rosetta arrives in the United States, “in the harbor of Charleston,” the novel plays on the ironic juxtaposition of symbols: “the American flag of stars and stripes floating at its mainmast!” (11). This joust resonates with the many sarcastic references to the stars and stripes of the American flag throughout the abolitionist campaign: the “national flag was the symbol of their [both the slaves' and the Americans'] shame; the white man might aspire to the stars, while for the poor black man there was no reward but stripes” (Wright, An Historical Parallel, 2-3).³⁰ Entitled “The Stripes and Stars of America,” the chapter which describes Tom's trial continues this jab, illustrating his protest against the injustice of a legal system which would condemn him for seeking his and his family's freedom as a scene of “vaunted,” specious American justice.

A number of other passages work as both obloquies to the United States and accolades to England. For example, during the auction at which Tom is sold to George Harris, the auctioneer announces that Tom is a Christian. The novel queries sarcastically, “What think you, Christian reader, would the repetition of this qualification have enhanced the value of the lot? ‘Going—a Christian—for four hundred dollars!’ Who, on this side of the Atlantic, will bid another fifty?” (original emphasis, 16). While Americans bid for and barter in human flesh, the novel confidently asserts the difference across the Atlantic. No English citizen, the passage presumes, would add fifty to the count.

Debunking America's advances (the charter) and symbols of advancement (the American flag), since none represent real progress in the achievement of liberty, the Englishman or woman can feel superior to his or her American counterpart. Likewise, the novel asserts, the Englishman need not feel any national inferiority based on the comparatively large size of the United States:

The Yankee … looks upon this little island … and taunts us with wanting elbow room. There is one thing, we confess, we cannot find room for here, and that is slavery—traffic in human bodies to the sacrifice of human souls. And from our hearts we deplore the humiliating fact that so vast a country as America—a country boasting of free institutions, and having a constitution in which the rights of mankind are nobly asserted, should be stained by so foul a spot, her name a byeword [sic] among nations, a reproach upon the tongues of honest men!

(17)

Rather than representing its superiority to England, the size of the United States and its relative advances in freedom, such as the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, come to represent instead the meagerness of the United States. Little England, with its ancient monarchic institutions, without the benefit of grand size and the grand institutions of freedom, is made to look that much the better in contrast.

Such explicit praises of England recur throughout the novel. England “has already heard and heeded the voice of slaves, and struck off their shackles!” (94); the fact that England eliminated the slave trade and colonial slavery is a commonly cited source of national pride. Tom praises England as “a truly Christian land [with] a peculiarly Christian people” (110). England is even represented as a land free of color prejudice. As Susan tells Tom, “Phillis Wheatley was a poor negress … she went to England, a beautiful country, where there are people of great minds and noble hearts, and where men and women are not bought and sold, and there she was treated as a child of God without reference to the color of her skin” (30). Likewise, we see the entire family treated with kindness and respect in England, conversing with rich and poor without remark upon their complexions.

In all of these comparisons between England and a belittled United States, we see England constructing itself as the true leader among nations.³¹ Ironically, the very examples the novel uses expose the contradictions within this tidy national façade. The novel's self-congratulation that in England, “we cannot find room for … slavery—traffic in human bodies to the sacrifice of human souls” (127) flies in the face of several decades of criticism of the treatment of women and child laborers and of the working class generally. Indeed, it flies in the face of criticism that established “white slavery” as the name for that treatment; by 1850, the “slavery of the working class” had become the dominant term around which the plight of the condition of the working class was debated.³² Elsewhere, when insisting that “there is no natural disqualification of the black population, which should deprive them of the right to enjoy equal political and social privileges with ourselves” (123), the novel placidly creates an England, “ourselves,” in which all enjoy political and social privileges, an England which bears little resemblance to reality.³³

Contradictions notwithstanding, then, the novel politically contorts itself in order to construct this vision of a superior England set against the example of a besieged America.³⁴

Appropriating the slave's story and exploiting its popularity, Uncle Tom in England attempts to redress and harness the transgressive power of “Uncle Tom.” Victorian readers can still enjoy the pleasures of the company of “Uncle Tom,” but they will read of his troubles and his travails in a novel which also serves as a kind of national autobiography, confirming for middle- and upper-class Victorians English national superiority and the security of the nation's cherished values: stability, order, and slow progress. First, the novel assures its readers that the values they hold dear are just: internal value, measured in terms of birth and virtue, always corresponds with social status; those who are deserving in life will always be rewarded. Second, it seeks to persuade those readers that these values actually underpin Chartism and abolitionism: abolitionism and Chartism are reform movements structured by the ethic of self-improvement, not a vision of widespread social transformation, movements which can be celebrated as posing no threat to the social and political status quo. Thus Uncle Tom in England allows its readers to revel in their support of a hamstrung version of American abolitionism while at the same time assuaging any anxieties about England's treatment of Chartism and its own “white” slaves.

In blunt terms, Uncle Tom in England stages a literary version of a cultural trafficking in black bodies and black experiences to produce a powerful narrative of English national superiority for the English middle class.³⁵ Ironically, “Uncle Tom” had experienced this treatment already; Harriet Beecher Stowe had “adapted” Josiah Henson's story to fit her purposes in Uncle Tom's Cabin.³⁶ But African-Americans would be travelling in England over the next decade: speaking, writing, appearing on platforms, telling their own stories. Victorians concerned about their nation's consumption of American abolitionism and of the consequences of such consumption would find that re-inventing and rewriting these flesh-and-blood men and women posed different challenges than had the fictional “Uncle Tom.”

Notes

1. All references to Uncle Tom in England are from the London edition of the novel. Several English and American editions of Uncle Tom in England were published. The editions vary in terms of title-page illustrations and title-page marginalia, but the texts of all editions seem to be identical. The American edition states on its title page that it is published “from an advance copy from England.”

   A version of this chapter was presented at the London Seminar for Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and at the University of Southampton. I am grateful to audiences at both universities for helpful comments and to Isobel Armstrong and Ken Hirschkop for making the respective arrangements. For patient reading and criticism of this chapter, I am thankful to Claire Berardini, Elise Lemire, Kate Ellis, John Gillis, Donald Gibson, Richard Blackett, and Mark Flynn.

2. A German translation of the novel exists, entitled, Onkel Tom in England. Fortsetzung von Onkel Tom's Hütte, which was incorrectly attributed to Thomas Clarkson, probably because “Sclaverei und der Sclavenhandel,” an excerpt translated from one of his works, appears in volume ii of the edition. This misleading attribution is the only speculation I have encountered with regard to the identity of the author of Uncle Tom in England.

3. Wilson identifies August 20 as the exact date on which Uncle Tom's Cabin turned in England from “a moderate success into a national sensation” (Crusader, 325). And the author of Uncle Tom in England claims to have penned the novel in seven days. So the timing of events here is reasonable.

4. Lorimer estimates the sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin in both the United Kingdom and the British Empire for the first year at 1.5 million (Colour, 82).

5. It is crucial to understand the novel's preoccupation with class as a part of a larger ideological shift in which the middle class was struggling with self-definition. As Morris writes, “In the early decades of the nineteenth century, marginalization by class was still a new and harsh experience; it only became the dominant form of social relation with the seizure and consolidation of hegemonic power by the middle class which brought into being the Victorian social formation” (Dickens's Class Consciousness, 5). As the dominant form of social relation, and following the disruption by the French Revolution of the aristocracy and of aristocratic values, the middle class defined itself against the corruption of the aristocracy by asserting the importance of “inner worth” (8) or internal virtue: “the moral virtues of enterprise, diligence, and thrifty sobriety” (6). At the same time as these internal virtues distinguished the middle class from the corrupt aristocracy, the middle class also defined themselves against the working class. To “define and justify bourgeois hegemony,” the “myth of divine and economic causation … proved to be … efficacious” under which “prosperity and respectability were held to be the inevitable outward signs and consequences of inner moral worth” (8). See also Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes.

6. For a discussion of the ideological traditions on which the novel's treatment of the children is based, including “romance idealism” and “naive empiricism,” see McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel.

7. See Edelstein who writes that the narratives of Frederick Douglass and others “seemed unrepresentative for several reasons: these fugitives had such special leadership qualities and other outstanding personal characteristics that their very uniqueness belied the claim that they spoke for four million oppressed southern slaves” (The Refugee, xv), and thus undermined the generalizability of their political claims.

8. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, lighter-skinned blacks are the superiors (intellectually, morally, and socially) of darker-skinned black characters. This narrative economy is the logical consequence both of Stowe's racism and of the ideology of nineteenth-century American society generally, in which so-called white blood was thought to improve the African. For a fuller discussion of the politics of skin-color in Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel.” In contrast, within the narrative economy of Uncle Tom in England, the “whiter” mulattos, Tom and Susan, are identified as intellectually and socially inferior to Rosetta and Marossi, the “full” black children, who are, in turn, more fully rewarded within the narrative. The difference might arise from the slightly different politics of skin-color in England where a discourse of contagion, rather than improvement, signalled the corruption of slavery but also the contamination of “blackness.” Hence mixed-blood characters would be considered more degraded and dangerous than their “pure” counter-parts of either color, all black or all white. For a fascinating discussion of this discourse of contagion, see Meyer, “Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre.”

9. As Morris writes, “If prosperity and respectability were held to be the inevitable outward signs and consequences of inner moral worth, then it followed that those who failed in the competitive struggle to make a living and succeed were morally unfit” (Dickens's Class Consciousness, 8).

10. Of course the working classes had their own traditions of education, in trades, in oral culture, and in popular culture, not considered of value by middle-class standards; see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. For a related discussion of the ways in which the working class both absorbed and disrupted dominant middle-class values about education, see D. Thompson, The Chartists, and Goldstrom, “The Content of Education.”

11. For discussion of the relationship between freedom and literacy in the slave narrative, see V. Smith, especially her discussion of Frederick Douglass (Self-Discovery and Authority, 20-8). For a related discussion of the political complications of white culture for black slaves, see Gates (The Signifying Monkey, 127-69).

12. James Pennington, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Solomon Bayley were all American ex-slaves. William Cuffee, also spelled “Cuffay,” was an English free-born black and a Chartist; see Fryer, Staying Power, 235-46.

13. These are Gustavus Vasa, or Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, the African, Written by Himself (1789); J. W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1849). Phillis Wheatley was an American slave and poet whose first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in London in 1773.

14. Roughly, moral-force Chartists advocated self-education, self-improvement, and self-enlightenment in pursuit of the goals of equality and suffrage for the working classes. Physical-force Chartists, in contrast, were willing to advocate violence in the hopes of pressuring the middle and upper classes to accede to their demands. Both groups sought, primarily between 1837 and 1848, adoption of the “People's Charter.” See Jones, Languages of Class.

15. The novel is also misleading in its representation of self-improvement and self-education among Chartists as a thorough submersion in middle-class values and ideas. As Dorothy Thompson writes, Chartists “had in many cases proposals for change and improvement which did not involve the abandonment of cherished customs, and above all did not involve the total relinquishment of control over their own work and environment” (The Chartists, 111). Further, Chartists were often “preserving customs and institutions which were under attack by the forces [the middle class, for example] making for conformity and respectability in early Victorian Britain” (117).

16. Dick Boreas, in his condemnation of the “hinstitutions,” may have been thinking of the 1845 General Enclosure Act which, instead of preserving peasant properties and creating legitimate peasant ownership of land, allowed the enclosure of common land. Obviously, this law was a blow to the peasant farmer and was among the many causes for the general deterioration of peasant culture and life. Notice as well the allusion to Dickens's Hard Times (1854), a similar attack on “hinstitutions.” As Raymond Williams puts it, “Public commissions, Blue Books, Parliamentary legislation—all these, in the world of Hard Times—are Gradgrindery” (Culture and Society, 106).

17. This description of Dick is in keeping with middle-class observations of Chartists and of the working class more generally. Dorothy Thompson remarks: “To the middle-class observer what predominates is the drunkenness, brutality and lack of formal moral education” (The Chartists, 246).

18. See Gregory, The French Revolution and the English Novel; Prickett, England and the French Revolution; and Scott, “‘Things as They Are.’” In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1860), Arnold complains about the French Revolution in terms that recall Carlyle's “slower reformation” discussed above: “the mania [in France] for giving an immediate and political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal” (525).

19. Because it was wary of the violence associated with abolitionism, The Times tried to have it both ways: to abhor slavery and to criticize attempts to abolish slavery. For a fuller discussion of The Times's complicated attitudes towards slavery, see C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class; Fulton, “‘New Only The Times’”; and Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis.

20. The novel's choice of trades for Clarke may be an attempt to justify his particular political views. The term “mechanic” does not determine precisely what kind of trade Clarke worked in but it is worth noting that mechanics, because of “the comparative rarity of their skills … were not as likely to be permanently excluded from employment in their trades as members of overstocked trades like weavers, shoemakers and tailors. Mechanics, therefore, who were active in the high point of Chartism, even those who served terms of imprisonment, were probably able to get work again” (D. Thompson, The Chartists, 200).

21. As far as I can tell, in the mid nineteenth century, the nickname “Dick” contained no reference to Richard's genitals. “Dick” did, however, connote the generic man, as in “Tom, Dick, or Harry: any three (or more) representatives of the populace taken at random” (OED). Dick Boreas, in other words, stands as the novel's representation of the average, unenlightened working man.

22. “Boreas” in Latin is “North wind,” commonly associated with destruction and barbarism. Thus Dick's name may also be a slighting allusion to the preeminent Chartist newspaper, Feargus O'Connor's Northern Star.

23. Dorothy Thompson writes that “As a mass movement … Chartism declined rapidly after 1848” (The Chartists, 299). “[T]he better economic climate which accompanied and followed the Great Exhibition of 1851, the increasing stability of Britain's major industries in that period and the organisations which these conditions allowed to develop among the new industrial workforce,” according to Thompson, “account for [Chartism's] decline and death” (330). “[A]lthough it took a decade to die,” Thompson observes, “it persisted only as a marginal force in British social history in those years” (329). Cole writes that “After 1848 Chartism was merely a residue” (Chartist Portraits, 22).

24. See R. Williams's discussion of the industrial novels (Culture and Society, 99-119).

25. Disturbances in Ireland were among the 1848 revolutions which threatened English national identity, if not English material politics (see Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 170-4). That the novel ignores the question of Ireland and eschews any linkage between the black slave and the Irish (see Gibbons, “Race Against Time”; Curtis, Apes and Angels and Anglo-Saxons and Celts; and Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland) may indicate the difficulty Ireland posed for the construction of a history of “glorious” England.

26. While historians continue to debate the reasons behind the decline of Chartism, they agree about the effectiveness of police action and the English legal system in squelching the movement. The Newport Rising, for example, illustrates this point: police violence against the Chartists left twenty-two dead and three protesters sentenced to death for their actions in the uprising. See D. Thompson, The Chartists, 330-9, 70-87.

27. For further discussion of English attitudes on race, see Lorimer, Colour; Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race; Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science; and C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class.

28. As Lorimer writes, this period “saw the birth of scientific racism and a change in English racial attitudes from the humanitarian response of the early nineteenth century to the racialism of the imperialist era at the close of the Victorian age” (Colour, 12-13). See also Brantlinger's exploration of the relationship between the imperialist ideology of mid-century imaginative writing and the more vitriolic jingoism of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods in Rule of Darkness.

29. Another historical distortion on the part of the novel, this argument flies in the face of the tense and charged relationship between abolitionism and Chartism. See Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 3-36; and Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems.

30. See, for example, a reading of the American flag in a review of Slave Life in Georgia in the Christian Weekly News: “The stripes on the American flag are truly more significant than the stars, unless the latter are intended to indicate how ill-starred are the subjects of the stripes.”

31. The Crystal Palace might be taken as the paradigmatic moment in the reconstruction of England as a glorious nation in an age of Progress, “an occasion for national pride” (Altick, The Shows of London, 456).

32. The comparison of worker and slave in political rhetoric has a long and tempestuous history in England (see Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 3-35; Cobden, The White Slaves of England). The transnational tenor of the comparison in this novel, American slaves with English workers, however, is more unusual. See two other texts which employ this comparison in order to re-direct sympathy for American slaves back towards the English poor: Coatsworth, Slavery in England, and Rymer, The White Slave.

33. See a number of other responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Americans (many also published in England), in which discussion about American slavery, in contrast to the English treatment of the working class or laboring poor, forms the basis for a creation of American national identity through competition and comparison with England, thus enacting the ideological work of Uncle Tom in England in reverse. The Mud Cabin (by Warren Isham), a book “design[ed] … to furnish a test by which to estimate the value of the institutions of our own country [America]” (preface), argues that “the character and tendency of their [England's] institutions is to produce the evils of which I have spoken, while the character and tendency of ours is to destroy the evils … In the one case, the evils in question are the spontaneous outgrowth of a vicious system, and in the other, they are but fungous excrescences, which the healthful development of the system itself will shed off” (312). Two works of fiction, The Cabin and Parlor (T. B. Randolph) and Tit for Tat (Marion Southwood), defend the slow march of American slave reform while criticizing English hypocrisy. The author of Tit for Tat, a “lady of New Orleans,” as the title page proclaims, explains her motivation for writing her tale of English children chimney-sweeps:

    “The year of grace, Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-four, will be memorable for England, for the breaking out of the Uncle Tom fever. A chronic ophthalmia overspread the vision of English Humanitarians, who, look at what they might, could see nothing but specks of black. They were haunted by black spectres. In all the races of the Earth, none was worthy of pity unless its color was black. The Black fever was at its height, when I took it kindly. The English, acclimated to the home disease, caught it from America. I, an American, was infected in England. There is a race of beings, by the initiated, facetiously denominated ‘chummies,’ which exists only in humane Britain. Outside barbarians call them chimney-sweeps. This race is black, not from blood, but from soot. I beheld the specimens of these crippled, distorted, bleeding bits of humanity, and, at sight, was taken down by a sympathetic fever. In my paroxysms, I would exclaim—‘Oh! ye Dukes and Duchesses! ye Lords and Commons! ye Priests and Laymen! who lift up your hands and let fall your tears at the woes of Uncle Tom, thousands of miles away; heard ye never the wailing cry of the poor “chummy” who weeps daily on your thresholds? Oh! Sutherland House! Oh! Exeter Hall! whose walls reverberate with shrieks for freedom to the African, have ye no echoes for the wretched children who shriek relief from torture on your hearthstones?’”

    (i-ii).

34. The novel's appropriation of abolition for a middle-class political agenda conflates the range of conservative and radical agendas historically present within the ranks of English abolitionists. For a discussion of one abolitionist whose attitudes on issues of class in England reflected neither the hypocrisy nor the political machinations often perceived behind “telescopic philanthropy,” see Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge (85-134). For a thorough discussion of the range of relations between English abolitionism and working-class radicalism as well as of the political range within the abolitionist movement, see Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery; Hollis, “Anti-Slavery and British Working-class Radicalism”; and Fladeland, “‘Our Cause being One and the Same.’”

35. Given the nationalist foundation of the colonial anti-slavery movement and the frequency with which the English stressed their virtue at having initiated the world anti-slavery movement, it is entirely consistent to find English popular rhetoric about anti-slavery, as this novel evidences, turning to American slavery as further ammunition for the construction of a superior Englishness. Of the association of the colonial anti-slavery movement with English nationalism, Catherine Hall writes that the rhetoric of anti-slavery contributed to a “morbid celebration of Englishness”: the development of an English national identity which was white, male, and middle-class, and which refused the recognition “that Englishness is an ethnicity” (White, Male and Middle Class, 205-6). For further discussion of the colonial anti-slavery movement and the ongoing construction of an English national identity, see Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, especially pages 443-6; Turner, Slaves and Missionaries; Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery; and Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa.

36. For a generous reading of Stowe's transformation of the narratives of escaped slaves, particularly those of Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb, see Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 211-13. For a more critical and sardonic reading of the politics of this process, see Ishmael Reed's novel, Flight to Canada.

Primary Texts

Coatsworth, J. Slavery in England, Or A Picture of the Many Hardships Endured by Our Fellow Countrymen in their Several Stations of Life. London: E. Marlborough, 1860.

Cobden, John C. The White Slaves of England. Buffalo, NY: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1853.

Isham, Warren. The Mud Cabin: Or, the Character and Tendency of British Institutions, as Illustrated in their Effect Upon Human Character and Destiny. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1853.

Onkel Tom in England. Fortsetzung von Onkel Tom's Hütte. Leipzig: O. Wigond, 1853.

Randolph, T. B. [Peterson, Charles Jacob]. The Cabin and the Parlor: Or, Slaves and Masters. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson; London: Clarke, Beeton and Co., 1852.

Rymer, James. The White Slave: A Romance for the Nineteenth Century. London: E. Lloyd, 1844.

Rev. of Slave Life in Georgia, by John Brown. Christian Weekly News, February 27, 1855 (vol. 2, no. 35): 140.

[Southwood, Marion]. Tit for Tat: A Novel by a Lady of New Orleans. London: Clarke, Beeton and Co., 1854.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly. (New York, 1852) New York: Penguin, 1986.

Uncle Tom in England; Or, A Proof that Black's White. London: Houlston and Stoneman; New York: A. D. Failing, 1852.

Secondary Texts

Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Victorian Studies in Scarlet. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1970.

Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988.

Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes to Race. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.

Boyce, D. George. Nationalism in Ireland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Crawford, Martin. The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850-1862. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England. University of Bridgeport, 1968.

———. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971.

Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Edelstein, Tilden G. Introduction. The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery. By Benjamin Drew. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1969: ix-xxviii.

Fladeland, Betty. Abolitionists and Working-Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

———. “‘Our Cause being One and the Same’: Abolitionists and Chartism.” Slavery and British Society: Ed. James Walvin: 69-99.

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