By Caroline E. Rush (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1852) Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Library. |
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| According to an article in the 21 January 1853 Charleston Mercury, Caroline Rush was "a widow
in destitute circumstances" who wrote to earn money for "the support and education of her fatherless children."
"Uniting the offices of publisher and bookseller in her own person," the article continued, she was in Charleston
to secure subscribers for this book, her fourth. According to her own words in the book, Rush was a Philadelphian who "spent three winters in the South." Her goal in the novel is to convince her Northern readers that the sympathy they lavish on Uncle Tom and Stowe's other slave characters should be saved for the (white) victims of urban poverty in the North. To this end, she tells the story of Frank and Gazella Harley and their nine children, a prosperous and happy family until drink and bad investments lead to Frank's bankruptcy and death. Abuse, starvation, illness and many more deaths follow when Gazella is forced to try supporting her children as a seamstress. The only children who succeed are the two who move south to live on a Mississippi plantation. Rush attacks Stowe and her "fiction" directly throughout her account of what she calls "the Slavery that exists in the North." |
By Caroline E. Rush (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1852) Wright American Fiction Project, Indiana University Library. |
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