ABSTRACT
Houghton, Mifflin had been rightly concerned about the expiration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s copyright. As soon as the novel entered the public domain, it was snapped up and issued in an amazing number of editions, most of them inexpensive and with little paratextual material other than the author’s preface. The publishing history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, especially in the last decade of the nineteenth century, paints a picture of the inexpensive book market in the United States at that time, both in respect to the profusion of cheap collections, series, and “libraries” in which the novel appeared, and in terms of the paltry quality of many of the products. The sheer number of editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reveals that Stowe’s novel was a highly marketable commodity. In contrast to the inexpensive editions-popular in the sense that they targeted what Jewett would have called “the masses”—a whole array of more costly, often lavishly-illustrated editions were prompted by Stowe’s death in 1896. Like Stowe’s complete works brought out by Houghton, Mifflin, the “memorial editions” carried learned introductions and other paratextual accompaniment. The “popular” and “memorial” types of edition had little in common, save that in both cases similar editions were issued under different publisher imprints, with only the cover, title page and occasional illustration(s) marking the distinction. What these editions looked like, how they were marketed to the public, and what they revealed of the critical status of Stowe’s first novel, are the topics of this chapter.
