Census of Known Copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Edition for the Million

This is a draft post. I’m not concerned with the financial value of these copies, unless I’m trying to buy one. They are interesting to me for their publication history. But if monetary value is your interest, see the note to booksellers and collectors at end of post.

I am preparing a census of known copies of John P. Jewett’s paperback edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, billed as the Edition for the Million (1852/1853). Below is an in-progress snap-shot of the search, which lists those copies of which I am currently aware. No system of ordering or arranging the copies is yet settled upon, though the post concludes with a reflection on what such a system would require, if built as a database.

Personal Copy I
Title page slug has 193,000 copies sold. Printed title paper present. Rear end papers are missing. Spine absent. Text block fair to good. Untrimmed.

Personal Copy II
Title page slug has 153,000 copies, 306,000 volumes. Paper wrappers, both title and end papers, are missing. Spine absent. Text block fair to poor. Trimmed very close, sometimes edging text block.

Personal Copy III
Title page slug has 183,000 copies. Paper wrappers present. Spine absent. Text block good. Trimmed but with wide margin. Some pencil markings.

University of Miami, Ohio, Special Collections
Reported in online catalog. OCLC No. 1107483. 153,000 COPIES, Rebound, paper cover missing, advertisements present. Free endpapers. Prominent waterstain from front wrapper to page nineteen. Many discolored pages, including four leaf pressings.

University of Miami, Ohio
Bound with Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Institutional copy not held by Special Collections. No LOC record.

University of Chicago Library, Lincoln Collection
Reported in online catalog. No number statement. (OCLC 26297218, Call No. PS2954.U5 1853)

SUNY Morrisville
Three hundred and fifth thousand. Bound with A Key. (OCLC 1107483)

Stowe-Day Foundation Library
810.016 S892, bound with Key. No number statement. (OCLC 03796420)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852), 163,000 copies — 326,000 volumes. (OCLC 29289660)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852), 153,000 copies — 306,000 volumes. (OCLC 17762356)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852) “203,000 copies already published in America. / Two hundred and thirty-third thousand.” (OCLC 29289787)
Rare Books 810 S892, (1852) “223,000 copies already published in America. / Two hundred and thirteenth thousand.” (OCLC 29289700)
3 Copies, no number statement in catalog (OCLC 26297218)

Hartford – Connecticut Historical Society Library
1 Copy, no number statement in catalog (OCLC 26297218)

Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. (OCLC 79203208)

Kenyon College
Reported on OCLC, 1107483. But copy does not appear in online catalog. Query made to librarians in January. No response.

Seton Hill University, Reeves
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. Two hundred and thirteenth thousand. (OCLC 1107483)

Georgetown University, Lauinger.
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. No number statement. (OCLC 26297218)

University of Iowa
Reported in online catalog. Bound with A Key, Boston, 1853. No number statement. (Listed in OCLC 26297218, but link to WorldCat broken. See System Number 000598815)

University of Virginia, Small Special Collections
Reported in online catalog. 245th Thousand, 1853. Publisher’s advertisements. (OCLC 1107483)

Reported under same OCLC Number 1107483
Chicago History Museum
Hamilton College Library
Lawrence University
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
Trinity College
Western Illinois University
Missouri History Museum
Brown University
Wellesley College
Brandeis University Library
Atlantic School of Theology
Miami-Dade Public Library System
University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center
California State University, Long Beach

Note: It is unlikely that all would be marked 245th thousand. Not mis-cataloged, exactly, but further investigation is needed of each individual copy.

OCLC No. 9158851
Case Western Reserve (2 copies)

OCLC No. 32937105
Wittenberg University (bound with Key, two hundred seventy-fifth thousand)

OCLC No. 1107483
State Library of Ohio (Bound with Key, Three hundred and fifth thousand)

University of Miami, Ohio, Special Collections
OCLC No. 3796420 (Bound with Key, no number statement)

Notice the variety of OCLC WorldCat numbers for bindings and number sold statements on this “edition”:
03796420
05428664
1107483
17762356
26297218
29289700
29289787
32937105
3796420
79203208
9158851

Search So Far

The search is based primarily on OCLC WorldCat. I have also consulted Parfait, for which notes below.

Claire Parfait in The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002 (2007) reports the following printing slugs on title pages, some based on Margaret Hildreth in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Bibliography (1975), designated MH: 153,000, 163,000 (MH), 173,000, 193,000, 203,000 (MH), 213,000, 223,000, 230,000 (MH), 233,000, 245,000 (NUC). According to Parfait, cover and title pages after 213,000 bear different imprint dates (1852 or 1853). After 295,000, volumes bear date 1853.

I am cautious about Parfait’s results. Parfait appears to base some work on personal examination, but her statement on sources does not distinguish those slugs based on personal examination and those based on catalogs. Also, the work relies in part on the National Union Catalog, which has been superseded by WorldCat. I also hesitate to trust Hildreth’s biography.

For the original census, I believe that the most thorough system is the arrangement by OCLC catalog number. However, such a system will not serve for what I need to do, to examine multiple printings. In choosing those, I need to be certain of what the title page slug says about the number printed. Librarians may not necessarily group same printing slug under same catalog number, so this temporary system will need to be revised. I believe that this will require something closer to a database record. And these will be the fields:

Print Date (1852, 1853, or other?)
No Printed Slug
Number of Pages
Cover Present
Bound with Key
Ad Pages
Institution
Bibliographic State (1, 2, 3, etc., if applicable)
Institutional Location
Available for ILL
OCLC Catalog No.
Description
Damage Level (Bookseller Categories, supplemented by text field?)

Note to Booksellers and Collectors: If you have a copy of the John P. Jewett’s paperback printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin dated 1852 or 1853, booksellers often sell it as an “affordable alternative” to the two-volume edition. This work is preliminary, but it seems clear that libraries hold 40-plus copies of the paperback printing. Affordable is relative, as prices at present moment (early 2009) range from $40 or $50 to upwards of $300, depending on condition. Booksellers seem not to distinguish between early and late printings in assigning values. But if you’d like to, my belief is that the title slug 153,000 probably represent the early printings of paperback. I’m curious about paperback printings later than 245th thousand, and I’d welcome queries about privately held copies.

American Literature: The State Department History

The State Department has published a “Revised Edition” of “Outline of American Literature,” by Kathryn VanSpanckeren. In the section on the fiction of 1820-1860, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation [...].”

On Stowe, not one of the greats, the essay has inaccuracies and curious emphases. VanSpanckeren emphasizes Uncle Tom’s service to St. Clare and belittles sentimentality–”The most touching scenes show an agonized slave mother unable to help her screaming child and a father sold away from his family. These were crimes against the sanctity of domestic love.” The mother in the first case is presumably Cassy (Aunt Hagar and Lucy and Dinah are also torn away from children, though “screaming child” not part of those scenes) and the second Tom. The phrase “crimes against the sanctity” seems aimed to demean Stowe’s politics. UTC does not “represent” the first great “literary” generation because it appeals to emotion and an ideology which affirms reform that originates from religious conviction and domestic transformation. So why, exactly, should that disqualify the work from “greatness”?

A partial explanation of why one group of literary figures is “great,” and another is not, may reside in a comment on Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom: “It is terrible poetry — but everybody loved it.” Now that sounds to me like a good reason to read it. We face one of the legacies of industrial book publication and Modernist suspicion of popularity: those works which are loved by the public, such as those written by Hawthorne’s “scribbling women,” must be terrible. Since popularity equals badness, the State Department survey does not seek to determine whether likes and dislikes from past moments might lead us to question whether our current definitions of artistic excellence reflect not timeless judgments but our historical context. Or maybe the strange citation that serves as judgment on Dickinson explains the ideology of literary appreciation from the State Department, from R. P. Blackmur, that her poetry “sometimes feels as if a cat came at us speaking English.’ ” As Stowe said of young George St. Clare, our literary critic is “dangerously witty.” Blackmur is clever, and one can pardon a slip–Homer nods and all–but a quip that seems at best obfuscatory highlights the contradictions in identifying “great” literature without investigating why some works are excluded from the concept of greatness. If a poem impersonates a cat speaking English, then it’s great?

While the essay acknowledges that works like Harriet Wilson’s have been “overlooked until recently,” it persists with generic categories of “great literature” and fails to inquire whether works characterized as outputs of particular identity formations–Stowe, Wilson, and Douglass are in category “Women Writers and Reformers”–might invite a reconsideration of the category of literary quality. The profession of American literary and cultural studies has moved to a study of a wide range of texts from authors formerly forgotten, dismissed because female, dismissed because popular, dismissed because regional, dismissed because ethnic. And such a range of interests befits a multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual society. Yes, the United States (and the land masses on which the political entity formed) is multilingual, and it always has been. See Marc Shell and Werner Sollors’ Multilingual Anthology of American Literature. In the State Department version of literary history, multiculturalism is a recent development, part of Contemporary American Literature.

Stowe is not alone among newly recognized writers to receive short shrift. When discussing realism, Twain is a writer in his own category. But I would think that the category of “Black Writers” deserves revision. Charles Waddell Chesnutt may be called black for the same reason that Barack Obama is called black. But like Obama he’s also white. To categorize Chesnutt as black says as much about America’s continuing legacy of racial concepts as it does about Chesnutt.

The essay is certainly serviceable as an introduction to American literature. But the scholarly canons of pre-20th-century literature have been re-shaped by the same trends that make 20th-century literature multicultural. The survey could be improved, both as a representative of the contemporary study of American literature and as a product of the State Department–whose purpose might be to foster dialogue with other nations–if the essay offered more attention to multicultural American literature and less emphasis on those works whose distinctive Americanness is taken as a mark of greatness. It may be that the works that represent vibrant multicultural traditions will be enduring as well.

And dear sub-sub aide to Madame Secretary, if by some freakish coincidence your department has become aware of this brief comment, this is not a guide for a thorough revision. Please appoint a committee with an advisory board of eminent scholars in American literature. Tell them to get right to work. In my dream-fantasy, the next mid-term election will turn on the State Department’s most recent revision of the history of American literature.

Teaching Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: A Fluid Text for Undergraduates

In my general literature surveys, I try to introduce students to textual variations. Today’s plan for my British Literature survey is to investigate two related questions. 1) From whence does the wife derive authority, from what she has been taught or what she has has thought. 2) Does the authority that she derives from her sexual experience allow her to achieve pleasure or profit?

I can’t put this in the larger context of Chaucer scholarship (I’m not a scholar of the middle ages), but I think that these concerns are embedded at the poem at the level of the textual variants. And I believe they can be made accessible to undergraduates. The 8th Edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature prints a modernized and annotated transcription of the the Hngwyrt MS. The Canterbury Tales: Geoffrey Chaucer: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, ed. Paul C. Ruggiers, (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1979) offers a facsimile and transcription of Hngwyrt with marginal annotation of variants from Ellesmere. So after I introduce the issue of MS authority (Hengwyrt as probably earlier, Ellesmere as more polished) I’m going to have students review their texts on the following Discussion Questions.

• Does the Wife of Bath base the authority of Scriptural doctrine on what she has been taught based on the text? Or what she has thought based on her own Judgment?
• In particular, as for what the Wife euphemistically calls the “membres [y]maad of generaccion” (ll. 76), and we can call euphemistically the male and female sexual organs, is the wife’s experience that these parts were they made perfect [by the Creator] for certain uses, including to derive pleasure? Or were they made for the individual to profit by?

And then I’m going to have them annotate their anthology texts with variants. The Hengwyrt and Ellesmere MS vary interestingly on the source of the Wife’s learning on a concern with a state of perfection or of profit.

• On l. 12 of your anthology, underline the words “taughte he me,” please write, in the margin, “thoughte me.” In the margin, write letters EMS, ll. 12.
• Beginning with ll. 45 of your anthology, which begins “Of which…” strike through (gently) that line, the next line, 46, and continue crossing out to line 49. In the margin, put the letters EMS ll. 44-45.
• On ll. 98 of your anthology, which begins “Moore parfit,” underline the word “parfit.” Please write, in the margin, “profiteth“. And again, put letters EMS 92.
• On ll. 117 of your anthology, word “parfitly,” scratch through, with a dark line, the letters “ar.” In the margin, write HMS. Insert a closing square bracket. Write the following letters: “p~~fitly.” Again, write EMS 111. The tildes signal an expansion of an abbreviation. That is, MS has abbreviated letters.
• On ll. 123 in anthology, underline word “parfit” and write in margin “profit” followed by EMS 117.

As they do this, I’ll pass around the facsimile, so they can review for themselves.

With what time remains in short class, I want to discuss the moral given by the Knight in Wife’s tale and the moral drawn by the Wife at the tale’s conclusion. In the blogs that my students write, they’ve given me a entry point for these topics. They cited the two morals. And another student cited the Wife’s effort to show that the Bible text has been misinterpreted by the Church.

If they want to follow up (I’m also having them do an Oxford English Dictionary exercise), then I’m going to suggest the following prompts.
Was “perfect” in the legal sense (alternate spellings include parfait, perfite, perfect) current in Chaucer’s day?
Is “profitly” meaning profitable in the adverbial form (alternate spellings include profeytly) current in Chaucer’s day?

With hope and a bit of trepidation–this is the first time that I’ve introduced these students to the nitty gritty of textual scholarship–I’ll see how it goes. By the way, medievalists with their cross-bow or long-bow drawn in anger at the shoddiness of this scholarship–with seven articles that I should have read before embarking on this topic–are welcome to aim and fire. I’d appreciate it if they would. I’ll gather up the bolts and shafts and rebuild the fortress before revisiting this topic next semester.

The Perils of Modernization: Enslaving Charles W. Chesnutt’s Julius

In Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, she requests critical attention to “the way an Africanist idiom is used to establish difference or, in a later period, to signal modernity” (52). There is perhaps no better way to investigate the rhetorical assertion of modernity than to investigate the reimagination of Black dialect into a modern idiom for children. I take as my example an effort to rescue Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman Tales in the early 1970s, while Chesnutt was little more than a footnote in the canon of American literature.

Ray Anthony Shepard “retold” the tales from Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman as an E. P. Dutton children’s book under the title Conjure Tales (1973). Shepherd’s translation of Chesnutt’s tales, which he offers as a counterpart of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, inform about slavery in a way that a “tired old history book can never do” (viii-ix). More than three decades later–after Chesnutt’s ascent into undisputed canonical status for scholars of American literature–Shepard’s re-telling is itself revealing of historical silence about the period of Reconstruction and the late 19th Century, an inevitable consequence of re-telling Chesnutt’s dialect tales as stories of the present.

Shepard’s refashioning is considerable: he omits the narrative frame of white northerners Annie and John, he translates Julius’s dialect into near standard English, and he omits racist stereotypes. Chesnutt’s opening of Julius’s story in “The Goophered Grapevine,” a catalog of racist stereotypes to mark the appeal of scuppernong grapes and their raisins, offers a formidable challenge: “Now, ef dey’s an’thing a nigger lub, nex’ ter ‘possum, en chick’n, en watermillyums, it’s scuppernon’s. Dey ain’ nuffin dat kin stan’ up side’n descuppernon’ for sweetness; sugar ain’t a suckumstance ter scuppernon’. W’en de season is nigh ’bout ober, en de grapes begin ter swivel up des a little wid de wrinkles er ole age,–w’en de skin git sot’ en brown,–den de scuppernon’ make you smack yo’ lip en roll yo’ eye en wush fer mo’; so I reckon it ain’ very ’stonishin’ dat niggers lub scuppernon’ ” (13). In Shephard’s 1970s retelling for young readers, the implicit and seemingly naive celebration of the stereotypes of race minstrelsy are unconscionable.

Shepard modernizes the dialect, replaces offensive words–Chesnutt’s word “nigger” is translated into “slave”–and omits offensive passages: “Now if there ’s anything a slave likes, it’s scuppernong. There ain’t nothing that can stand up ’side the scuppernong for sweetness. And when the season is just about over the grapes swell up and the sugar is strong. So I reckon it ain’t very astonishing that slaves liked scuppernong” (61). While Shepard’s “slaves” enjoy scuppernong grapes, the reteller’s technique for dealing with with Chesnutt’s comparative contexts is to omit, so modern readers have no possum, chicken, or watermelon to compare with grapes, and no smacking lip or rolling eye.

While Shepard’s aims are laudable from a perspective on undoing the work of racist stereotypes, another aspect of Shepard’s re-telling deserves attention. Shepard’s Julius speaks in both present and past tense whereas Chesnutt’s Julius speaks in present tense. Chesnutt’s Julius lives as a late nineteenth-century freed slaves looking back to the antebellum past of slavery, but his stories reveal the horrors of slavery while also influencing John’s present-day management of the farm. In Shepard’s translation, Julius must switch tenses from present to past to accommodate Shepard’s substitution of “slave” for Chesnutt’s “nigger.”

Even someone aware of recent scholarly criticism, who knows that Chesnutt aimed to reshape the sentiments of the magazine audience by appealing to the latent racist stereotypes of even readers who express outward sympathy to the “Negro” race, could find the bald offensiveness of Julius’s assertions troubling. And yet, “The Goophered Grapevine” was Chesnutt’s breakthrough tale, the first to appear in Howells’s Atlantic and the opening tale in Chesnutt’s 1900 collection.

The Julius of Shepherd’s re-told tale ends his observations in the antebellum past, where “slaves liked scuppernong,” but he begins his remarks with an observation that applies to the storytelling present: “if there’s anything a slave likes, it’s scuppernong.” At the outset of Shepherd’s telling, Julius is trapped in a prison-house of modernized language: his present tense re-enslaves him into a past that is contemporaneous with the storytelling present. While Shepherd’s translation addresses the harm of racist language, Chesnutt’s designs on the semi-consciously racist reader, his effort to alter sensibility, has been impaired in Shepard’s version of the tale. The original Julius’s tale of antebellum times, unmoored from its consequences for the late-nineteenth-century audience’s present, is shunted into the antebellum past, with Sheperd’s teller Julius, if only by accident, forced in the re-told tale to narrate the present as a “slave.”

Joseph Grigely, in a searching analysis of the Reader’s Digest revision of Tom Sawyer, commented incisively on the consequence of absent history in absent words: “The absence of a certain history is therefore a rationale for the absence of certain words; and by this process, a new history of absence is constructed, a history that is in part about purifying and cleansing” (Textualterity 43). While Shepard’s revision of Chesnutt addresses an implied audience of children in the 1970s, his work participates in a larger amnesia, in which the landmarks in American historical memory are slavery and the Civil Rights struggle. As Shepard’s intended audience presumably knows history only as taught in primary and secondary school–it is a children’s book, after all–one can understand a reluctance to offer an introduction to a hundred years of history. But the span of nearly 100 years between the the Civil War and twentieth-century Civil Rights movement–Chesnutt wrote in the last decade of the nineteenth century–is nearly invisible.

When a text from some past moment is reprinted, it joins the present even as it echoes in altered form its previous moment in the past. When a text is prepared for engagement with present culture, some aspects of a text’s engagement with earlier historical moments are silenced. The act of editorial modernization in translating Black dialect to standard English for children provides an indisputable marker that cultural work is being done, but more subtle acts may also participate in modernizing an Africanist idiom by marking out that which cannot be translated against that which can. Perhaps even the most subtle of silent modernization–reforming typographic features thought to reflect idiosyncratic printing practices of an earlier age–have consequences for our reading of historical texts.

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Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900.

Grigely, Joseph. Textualterity : art, theory and textual criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Shepard, Ray Anthony. Conjure tales by Charles W. Chesnutt. New York: Dutton, 1973.

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A subsequent post will focus on the practices of silent modernization in texts prepared for scholars, in Kenneth S. Lynn’s (1962) and Ann Douglas’s (1986) Uncle Tom’s Cabin.