ABSTRACT
Stowe was obviously interested in the fate of her first novel, yet her letter to Moses D. Phillips makes clear that she was more concerned with seeing her works published in a uniform set. The allusions to Hawthorne and to the right timing for the set point to two reasons why Stowe favored such a publication: 1) a uniform edition would
the author died in 1864. See Michael Winship, “Hawthorne and the ‘Scribbling Women’”: 7. Stowe may have been thinking of the brown cloth cover in which Hawthorne’s works were bound, and which was the standard binding for many books published by Ticknor and Fields: see Jeffrey D. Groves, “Judging Literary Books by Their Covers: House Styles, Ticknor and Fields, and Literary Promotion,” in Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles (eds), Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (Amherst, University of Massachusetts
grant her works additional prestige; and 2) a collected edition made sound financial sense, especially if it came out during the holiday season. As Simon Gatrell has noted, authors find collected editions attractive on three grounds, namely fame, money, and the opportunity it gives them to revise earlier works.4 Uncle Tom’s Cabin had not been reprinted since 1853, and a collected edition would see the book in print again, while a new paratext might hopefully allow the novel to reach a new audience.
