According to George Buller, who prepared a bibliography of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Houghton & Mifflin's authorized "New Edition" (1878), "Aunt Mary" was Mary Low, the daughter of one of the novel's many British publishers. Stowe herself wrote a new introduction for the book and clearly approved its republication in the United States, but very little has been learned about how that was arranged, or how well the book did with American readers.

  "Aunt Mary's" version is slightly less than half as long as Stowe's. Except for the new beginning (see CHAPTER 1), it adds no words to Stowe's text, but instead simply excises words, phrases, paragraphs, episodes and even chapters. British spellings are adopted, and retained in the American text. Many of the contractions Stowe puts into the mouths of her upper class white characters are replaced with the full phrase -- "don't," for instance, typically becomes "do not" when Marie St. Clare is speaking. There are other minor changes, but the most substantive omissions concern the novel's references to race and interracial sexuality. "Quadroon," for example, never appears in the Peep, nor does "The Quadroon's Story" -- Cassy's account of her tragic relationships with white male masters. Cassy, in fact, never appears in the novel at all, and there is no mention of Emmeline's presence at Legree's plantation. Presumably the agenda behind such changes is to make the novel more appropriate for children, though we know that the original Uncle Tom's Cabin was read aloud to many children by their parents.

A Peep into Uncle Tom's Cabin, by "Aunt Mary"; With an Address from Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, To the Children of England and America.
(London: Sampson Low & Son, 1853; Boston: Jewett and Co, 1853).