Anti-Uncle Tom Novels
"These novels ... adopt a variety of polemical strategies, from defending the plantation as a good place to attacking the North for its treatment of "white slaves" (the working class) to depicting blacks as either happy in slavery or racially unfit for freedom. None of these novels attained anything like the popular success of Stowe's book, but some went through a number of printings and were widely read in the North." (Source: Anti Uncle)
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"This was probably the best-selling 'Anti-Tom' novel ... it consists of a good deal of talk ... about the essential happiness of slaves in the South as compared to the inevitable sufferings of free blacks and the working classes in the North. ... She quotes Uncle Tom's Cabin several times throughout the novel, to put her representation of slavery in direct opposition to Stowe's text, and her 'Concluding Remarks' are a very unsentimental, even sarcastic critique of Stowe." (Source: Aunt)
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"After an incident with another slave raises 'the devil' in Tom, he is tempted to run away by a northern schoolteacher who is depicted as envious of the happiness he sees on Mr. Erskine's Virginia plantation. Tom suffers miserably in the north ... and inadvertently winds up in Canada -- until he is rescued from his freedom and happily carried "back to old Virginia" and his slave cabin." (Source: Life) |
"'Nicholas Brimblecomb' ... identifies himself as a slave-owner, writing to expose Stowe's errors. ... [He is] using an exaggerated version of the kind of critique the apologists for slavery were writing to expose the idea of "defending slavery." (Source: Abolitionist Irony) |