Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first edition, first issue

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Rare Books, Autographs & Maps

By Doyle

Nov 25, 2025

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• Lot Description
  STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., and Cleveland: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1852. First edition in book form, with all BAL's textual readings required for the first issue present. Original brown cloth, upper covers with gilt-blocked vignette replicating the wood-engraved vignette on the title pages, repeated in blind on back covers, cream endpapers; defective morocco pull-off case lacking top section. 7 5/8 x 4 5/8 inches (19.25 x 11.75 cm); x, [13]-312 pp; iv, [5]-322 pp.; six plates (three in each volume)/ Covers somewhat worn and the gilt design quite dull, some minor wear to extremities, a few signatures slightly proud but in all a solid copy, though it seems possible that the binding was professionally cleaned and tightened at some point in the past (there is no certain evidence of this that we can see, beyond a certain suspicious tightness to the binding and flatness to the blind tooling). The text bears a very few spots or pale foxing, minor marginal staining on a few leaves at the end of the first volume, and is a clean and very presentable copy overall. Laid-in is a cabinet card portrait with the mount signed by Harriet Beecher Stowe (one blank corner slightly chipped), and a fine early gelatin silver print (likely after a daguerreotype) of the writer. Published on 20 March 1852, this first printing comprised some 5,000 copies, which were swiftly exhausted, and a new printing was called for by the end of the month. The book was issued simultaneously in both cloth and wrappers (the latter is BAL's "A" binding). The present copy is in BAL's cloth "B" binding, the brown cloth variant (N.B. there is no priority between the binding styles, or the various cloth colors). The first issue is delineated by a variety of textual points, all of which are present here. PMM 332:. "Into 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'...The social impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin...was greater than that of any book before or since." Heavily read at the time and later, it is a difficult book to find in true collector's condition. It remains a record best-seller in proportion to population, for in one year 305,000 copies were sold, while the total U.S. population at the time was 23 million. BAL 19343; Grolier American 61; Grolier English 183.

  Condition

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