I am an assistant professor at Kent State University in the Department of English. My major current project, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Digital Critical Edition,” will provide authoritative transcriptions, archival image facsimiles, and a textual apparatus for the surviving manuscript pages and for selected American publication forms of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: the National Era version, publisher John P. Jewett’s three initial print versions, and the 1879 Houghton Osgood New Edition. The edition will feature a textual introduction, an historical collation of the manuscript and the five printed texts, and a critically established reading text that promotes the study of authorial revision and other textual alterations. I am also at work on an edition of the letters of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.
My research interests (outside of Stowe’s monumental work) are the broader disciplines of bibliography, textual criticism, and digital humanities. My teaching interests include American literature (through the early twentieth century), scholarly editing, research methods, African American literature, sentimentalism (American and transatlantic), modernism, and regional writing. My faculty profile (from which this description is taken) has a list of my recent publications.
Before I joined Kent State as a faculty member, I served a two-year stint as the CLIR postdoctoral fellow (2006-2008) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The acronym CLIR stands for Council for Library and Information Resources, an organization that sponsors an annual fellowship program to place humanities and social science scholars with PhDs in libraries. I worked in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities during the early stages of Civil War Washington.
I came to Nebraska after finishing my degree in English at the University of Virginia in 2006. My dissertation was a web-based electronic edition of the National Era version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While I considered a career in libraries during the CLIR fellowship, I continued to seek an academic post. Kent State called, and my musings about possible library careers came to an end.
In the long-ago past (before returning to graduate school in 2012) I worked as a technical writer in various industries, mostly in the north Dallas area: toll collection, tax preparation, accounting and payroll software. I have an MA from the University of North Texas, and before that decade and I spent a brief stint in Bloomington, Indiana at the PhD program in Comparative Literature.
Hi! I have a bound copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that reads the following on the title page:
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN or, LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTH THOUSAND
BOSTON
John P. Jewett and Company.
Cleveland, Ohio:
Jewett, Proctor & Worthington.
London: Sampson, Low, Son & Co.
It is dated 1851 and is bound with “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” dated 1853. There is a note on the inside of the front binding cover that reads “Rebound by Walker, Plymouth 1896 June”. It is in relatively good condition.
Mr. Denby,
That sounds like a nice copy. Sampson Low was Stowe’s British publisher. Their illustrated edition (1853) is the same as Jewett’s illustrated edition (1853). Their paperback copy (like Jewett’s, both 1852/53) is same size as key (both have two columns of type), so they could be issued bound together.
According to BAL, the Key was published by Sampson Low in London and Jewett in U.S. I would suspect that you have a London-issued Key (1853) bound with London-issued paperback edition (1852). The reason it has 1851 is because Stowe claimed copyright in Maine in 1851 while story was running in the serial. I have not seen a title page with 1851 on it (but I have not examined any London-issued copies yet). In any case, the earliest that the UTC copy could have been issued is late 1852.
A Sampson copy may be more rare than a Jewett copy–of course, if title page is missing–the later re-binder may have combined an American-issued UTC with a Britain-issued Key–but WorldCat can be a bit deceptive about the comparative scarcity. Enterprising booksellers claim a lot about scarcity. But I watch eBay and bookfinder.com, and they come up for sale periodically, though seldom in bound sets.
Here’s why I would claim paperback UTC is not extraordinarily rare:
http://wraabe.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/census-of-known-copies-of-uncle-toms-cabin-edition-for-the-million/
The Keys are relatively common. Value, of course, depends on the condition and whether purchaser is interested in both bound together. But every one of these copies of UTC is important for another reason, which I explain here:
http://wraabe.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/the-jewett-paperback-topsys-alternate-route-to-heaven/
If you’d take a gander at pg. 96 of UTC (not Key), I’d love to know whether the passage on Topsy which is identified in that post is also in what is probably your London-issued copy–I would expect it to be.
Thanks,
Wesley
I have a similar one for sale except it has 285,000 . Bob