Sarah Meer's Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, & Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s, a recent (2005) and comprehensive investigation of what a London newspaper called "Tom-mania." Her focus in the text in some ways matches our own in this course, examining in detail the ways in which Uncle Tom's Cabin was rewritten and reread in the decade or so following its publication. Meer, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, uses the British origin of the phrase "Tom-mania" to argue for renewed critical attention to the novel's British audiences and Britain's significant role in the reception and transmission of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Meer's contention that UTC functioned culturally and politically in Britain as a "textual representation" of the United States opens up new ground for considering UTC as a transatlantic phenomenon.

Meer argues that on both sides of the Atlantic, UTC and its reinterpretations harnessed generic ambiguity from minstrelsy in the service of political ambiguity and ideological appropriation. Genre, geography, popularity and ambiguity - how they interact with one another, and what they can illuminate about "Tom-mania" - constitute her core concerns. With eight chapters and an epilogue, she covers and uncovers an exhaustive archive of historical, cultural, political and literary material. Offering a comprehensive summary of Meer's analysis would prove too lengthy for our format, so I will instead give a brief overview of each chapter.

In Chapter 1, Meer traces blackface and minstrelsy as performative constructs in the text, arguing that Topsy and Miss Ophelia's relationship mimics that of the end man and interlocutor, while adapting the labor commentary inherent to that generic format to a domestic economy. She uses contemporary descriptions of the novel to assert that it "borrowed some of the performative ambiguities of minstrelsy" and developed them to allay cultural anxieties (46). By appropriating the structure of the "double act" and the ambiguous representations of blackface, Stowe both ensured popular appeal and engendered the possibility that her text could be used to reify racist positions. This chapter also examines American versus British audiences for blackface, and their differing reactions to the cross-class and cross-racial identifications it evoked.

In Chapter 2, she furthers her examination of minstrelsy and blackface, exploring how UTC was "converted" into the format of the minstrel show and concentrating on the ambiguities co-opted for proslavery and anti-slavery minstrel performances. She also traces the concentration of proslavery minstrel performances of Uncle Tom around the issue of fugitive slaves. She devotes particular attention to the New York Uncle Tom performances of the period, along with Sanford's Happy Uncle Tom; Or Life Among the Happy in Philadelphia.

Chapter 3 continues this examination of the fugitive slave in relation to audience responses to UTC. Arguing that the fugitive slave was the focus of a majority of the anti-Tom novels, which she calls "copycat critics," Meer makes particular use of reviews and material from publishers in this chapter. She argues that while minstrel adaptations retained the political ambiguity of Stowe's text, the anti-Tom novel effaced ambiguity in the service of propaganda. Shifting from ambiguity to irony, she emphasizes that while obsessed with fugitives, the anti-Toms' primary argument was that slaves did not run away. Along with her discussion of blackface in the anti-Tom novels, Meer fascinatingly also analyzes dances and movement as methods of propaganda in the text, alongside southern advertisements for runaways, slave narratives and the historical context of the Dred Scott case.

Chapter 4 shifts her analysis of minstrelsy from blackface to melodrama and reform drama, by looking first at the Uncle Tom plays in New York City and tracing them along a mid-nineteenth century circuit of transatlantic copyright violation. Meer writes that theatrical adaptations of UTC mixed minstrelsy with melodrama and moral drama. Using newspaper reviews and personal accounts of the plays themselves, Meer identifies a pronounced shift in audience culture in the 1840s, and shows how generic conventions determined the political significance of the audiences' reception of the plays.

Chapter 5 focuses on British dramatizations of UTC, which Meer argues were even more "voracious" than U.S. versions (133). Onstage in Britain, UTC became a vehicle for popular British moral/religious attitudes toward slavery and political attitudes toward the United States. Between 1852 and 1855, over twenty different stage adaptations went up in London, and Meer documents and analyzes them. She also demonstrates the lack of transatlantic exchange in the dramatic interpretations by showing the political "unpalatability" of the British versions, some of which advocated anti-American sentiment and/or violence in the service of slave revolts, for American audiences. She also shows that while Conway and Aiken appealed to a multi-class audience, the audiences and productions of London Tom shows were divided by class, implying that Stowe's cross-class appeal, so praised in the U.S., presented a problem for British audiences.

Chapter 6 closely traces the international implications of UTC as an international phenomenon, showing how American audiences became acquainted with and reacted to Stowe's overseas success and celebrity. She gives a historical and cultural analysis of Stowe's 1853 visit to Britain, contextualizing the Stafford House Address, Penny Offering campaign, and Mary Webb's readings of The Christian Slave. Meer's unpacking of Webb's reading at the Duchess of Sutherland's home is particularly revealing in its nuanced treatment of class, race and gender.

Chapter 7 gets to the heart of the book by evaluating the transatlantic implications of Tom mania. Meer argues that readers' understanding of UTC as a transatlantic text "produced self-consciously transatlantic literature" that provoked "nationalist" anxieties in Britain and the United States, both in their literary relations (she cites Trollope's Domestic Manners and Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation) and in transatlantic debates over slavery (197). She also traces intersections between treatments of the antislavery movement against and alongside industrial and social reform movements.

Chapter 8 analyzes Dred as Stowe's own re-reading of UTC; Meer makes the point that while Stowe reacts to UTC in The Christian Slave and Sunny Memories, Dred marks her return to the genre of the novel, as well as her turning of anti-Tom novelistic tropes to her advantage. Meer writes that Dred, as a contribution to and quarrel with Tom mania, offered a more boldly radical politics, as well as a "ventriloquizing" of proslavery whites, "just as they had invented black figures to parrot their condemnation" of Stowe's work in Uncle Tom's Cabin (251).

The epilogue offers both summary and a look forward to the implications of the 1850s phenomenon of Tom-mania and its impact on later decades of representations of Uncle Tom. The book also includes ten pages of black and white reproductions of cartoons, such as Daumier's "Actualites" in which Paris bluestockings decide to write an "Aunt Tom's Cabin" for their own cause, as well as illustrations, instructions for home productions, portraits of popular actors, playbills and assorted "Tom-mania products."

Even while taking issue with much of the prior literary, historical and cultural treatments of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Meer relies on both an encyclopedic knowledge of criticism (from Eric Sundquist to Eric Lott to Marcus Wood) and an overwhelming roster of primary sources to argue for looking at Uncle Tom "mania" from a new perspective, or a reinterpretation of interpretation. To underscore her argument for a new perspective, Meer grounds her generic analyses of minstrelsy, reform drama, moral drama and other forms with thorough documentation from primary sources and a reliance on contemporaneous reviews and other artifacts of print culture. Her bibliography of primary sources alone takes up eleven pages. Much of Meer's work will feel repetitive to those of us who have already begun to understand and interrogate the popularity of Stowe's novel, but her book admirably documents cultural history while advocating for new literary critical conversations about the 1850s. "It is beyond the scope of this study to do so, but it would be worth tracking Uncle Tom's life after emancipation," Meer asserts in the epilogue to her text. I found this quotation particularly apt for our purposes. Though a labor-intensive read, Uncle Tom Mania offers an invaluable resource for literary or cultural studies approaches to American, British or transatlantic investigations of Uncle Tom's Cabin.