Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s.

Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. By Sarah Meet. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. x, 332. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8203-2737-9.)

Sarah Meer's Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s is a fascinating study of the myriad transatlantic cultural phenomena spurred by Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Meer's main focus is not so much on Stowe's novel itself but rather on the ways it was rewritten and reread by various elements of American and British culture. Meer's arrangement of her chapters follows the trajectory of Stowe's novel--its stage productions and the anti-Tom novels from the U.S. to Britain and back--and examines how blackface minstrelsy, abolitionism and its working-class critics, and British-American relations shaped the various mutations, receptions, and meanings of Stowe's novel.

By studying Stowe's novel alongside the concurrent mania of minstrelsy and by analyzing Stowe's use of minstrel humor and blackface stage productions of the novel, Meer skillfully traces the often ambiguous racial ideologies of Uncle Tom's Cabin, its various theatrical appropriations, and minstrelsy. Moreover, Meer's reading of blackface elements in the novel and in the copycat novels that critiqued or mocked Stowe reveals how minstrelsy was used for both proslavery and antislavery purposes. Meer also illustrates how the British reception of Stowe and her novel intersected with the transatlantic phenomena of minstrelsy and abolitionism as well as with British travelogues that criticized American hypocrisy and vulgarity, its endorsement of slavery, and its literary shortcomings.

Meer's study is well grounded in recent scholarship on minstrelsy and transatlantic culture. Yet her analysis of the so-called Tom mania goes further in tracing its transatlantic context and relationship to minstrelsy than has any previous study. Her use of various primary sources--including novels, correspondence, newspaper articles, play scripts, and travelogues--is impressive in its range. Likewise, the complexity of this book is admirable; it connects Stowe's novel to "Tom shows" and minstrelsy, melodrama, anti-Tom novels, American-British relations, gender ideologies, and working-class critiques of abolitionist hypocrisy.

At times, however, Meet has difficulty tying together the various strands of her book. For example, in her chapter on Stowe's novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Boston, 1856), the transatlantic focus becomes lost, and blackface is brought up abruptly in the last six pages of the chapter. In addition, while Meet analyzes the nationalism of British abolitionists, travelogues, and Tom shows in Britain that took America to task for sanctioning slavery, more attention should be paid to American minstrelsy's anti-British nationalism and hostility toward abolitionism (despite its ambivalence toward slavery), since this hostility complicated blackface appropriations of Stowe's antislavery novel. The book also could benefit from more information regarding white abolitionist racial attitudes in the U.S. and Britain in general, so that readers might understand how Stowe's depictions of African Americans and her use of minstrel elements overlapped with and differed from those of white abolitionists more broadly.

Nevertheless, Uncle Tom Mania makes a significant contribution to the study of racial representations in the Atlantic world during the 1850s, and scholars interested in abolitionism, minstrelsy, American literature, and nineteenth-century American-British relations will find it well worth reading.

ROBERT NOWATZKI

Ball State University