Tag Archives: emancipation

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 15, 16

Chapters 15 and 16 introduce Tom’s new owners, a New Orleans family by the name of St. Clare. Augustine St. Clare and his wife Marie have an angelic daughter named Eva, and Augustine’s cousin Ophelia has come from her home in New England to manage the household due to Marie’s apparent incapacity. The chapters illustrate the various attitudes toward slavery among slave holders, and through Ophelia, Stowe draws the consciences of readers in her native New England into the fray.

CHAPTER XV

Of Tom’s New Master, and Various Other Matters Continue reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 15, 16 →

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Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 5, 7, 9, 12

Prior to Chapter 5, we are introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, farmers in Kentucky who own a fairly large estate and are presented as slaveholders who are kind to their enslaved workers. Eliza is the enslaved handmaid to Mrs. Shelby; she is light-skinned and is the mother of a young boy named Harry (her husband George Harris is enslaved on a neighboring farm). Chapter 4 introduces life in Uncle Tom’s cabin, where Tom, his wife Aunt Chloe, and their children live in the warmth of family and Christian devotion. We have also been introduced to Haley, a slave trader who has secured ownership of Shelby’s debt and is squeezing him to settle the account by selling some of his human property. The events in Chapter 5 illustrate how precarious the lives of “human property” can be even for those who live under “kind” masters.

from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

CHAPTER V

Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners Continue reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 5, 7, 9, 12 →

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Mark Twain, Samuel L. Clemens

from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Shifting from Clemens’s comical letters, speeches and short pieces to his classic, we get a sense of the depth he brought to his work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was composed largely at Quarry Farm, Olivia Clemens’s sister Susan Crane’s farm in Elmira, New York. The family spent most of their summers there during the time they lived in Hartford, and Crane had built a study for her brother-in-law high on a hill overlooking the farm and the city. Continue reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn →

Mark Twain, Samuel L. Clemens

from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Clemens’s fascination with English history developed with his visits to the country and his research for The Prince and the Pauper (1881), a tale of a royal and a commoner changing places so each could find out what he had been envying. He was fascinated by the Elizabethan period and its wholesome frankness about sex and bodily functions, which he celebrated in a short obscene work called 1601: Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. The book was concealed to all but select male friends, but is now freely readable on the Internet. Continue reading from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court →

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