Boekverslag Harriet Beecher Stowe

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Geschreven door:	Jakob von Stolk [meer]
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Titels van Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Uncle Tom's cabin / De negerhut van oom Tom (15)

  1852

Publisher: Dent
First published: 1877
Pages: 442

Story
Uncle Tom is a negroslave who works on the cottonplantation of mister Shelby. He has a good live and mister Shelby trusts Tom completely. Mister Shelby is a man who treats his slaves very good but when he gets moneyproblems, he has to sell Tom and a boy called Harry.Everybody is sad because uncle Tom is a wellrespected man. But he is sold to a very cruel Trader, mister Haley. Mister Haley takes Tom on a boottrip where Tom meets a girl named Eva. Eva is five jears old and when here dad isn’t looking, she falls into the river. but Tom saves her and as a reward he becomes the driver of mister St. Clare, the father of Eva. Tom has a great time with Eva but it becomes clear that Eva is ill, she has a deadly deseas. After her dead mister St. Clare gets involved in an accident and dies too. Result is that Tom is being sold to a cruel man named Simon Legree. Tom has to work on a cottonplantation with other slaves in terrible circomstances.
Where he meets the lady called Cassy. When he tries to help an old women by putting his cotton in her bag, he has to beat up the women as punichement. He does not do it and the result is that he gets all the strokes.
His punichement is so heavy that he dies. Mister Shelby releases all his slaves and says that everybody has to remember uncle Tom and try to be as good as him.

Another story in book is about the mother of Harry.
When Eliza finds out that mister Shelby is going to sell Tom and Harry to mister Haley, she runs away with her child.
When mister Haley finds out, he tries to capture her but she manages to stay out of his hands.

Eliza is married an unlawful marriage with George Harris.
George is a slave of another owner and is treated horrible. He also tries to run away to Canada where slavery is forbidden but not with Eliza.

Several people help Eliza and finally she meets George again and together they escape to Canada.
At the end Cassy finds out that her daughter who was sold, married is with George Harris.
And Eliza and Cassy meet.

Characters
Tom: A big, handsome man with huge hands.He is very loyal to Shelby and about 30 (he has a little kid), he beliefs in God very strong, he has all the bad luck you can get but he never complains, he would never hurt anyone, loyal, he urges everyone to become a Christian, good type and well respected.

Haley: A heavy, rude negromerchant with no dicent manners. He is the second owner of Tom.

Simon Legree: alcoholic, superstituous.

Cassy: mulatto, has lost her belief but she refinds it, she has been through too much, she has the courage to flee, mother of Eliza Round

Sambo: negro-overseer, he hates easily, cruel, he becomes a better man as Tom is dying Flat

St Clare: weak man, careless, he doesn't know how to believe but at the end he does know it, good for his slaves, he looks upon slavery as an immoral thing. He is very lazy.

Eva: little girl, one of the wisest persons in the book, she beliefs and urges everyone to believe too

Ophelia: St Clare's cousin, is a good person because she came to help St. Claire but she doesn't know how to handle things, she isn't used to it.

Shelby: first owner of Tom, is a good person who wants to give his slaves a good life.

Madame Shelby: A very special woman. She is sensible and resonable with everything she does. She is also very religeous.

George Harris: A handsome, intelligent, welraised slave. He’s a mulat; a black mother and a white father. Discriptions of George on a pamflet when they find out that he has run away:
Jung Mulat, 1.83 meters, He has a light skin and brown hair. Is very intelligent, can read and write. Has scars on his back and shoulders and a mark on his right hand.

Eliza: The wife of George; they’re married but their marriage is not lawful.
She has a son called Harry.

Tom Locker: A two meter big, cruel man who looks like a grizzlybear.

Setting
The story takes place in the United States, in Kentucky and Ohio.
It’s mostly in the counttryside.

Title
The title is ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’ and that’s the house of Tom where all the slaves sing and pray.
The cabin is instead of a church.

Theme
The story is a protest against slavery and violation of human rights.

Style
The religion in this book is very important.
On the plantation of mister Shelby all the slaves strongly believe in God. But on the plantation of mister Legree all the hope and believing is gone because circomstances are more worse.
Backgroundinformation
Harriet Beecher was born June 14, 1811, the seventh child of a famous protestant preacher. Harriet worked as a teacher with her older sister Catharine: her earliest publication was a geography for children, issued under her sister's name in 1833. In 1836, Harriet married widower Calvin Stowe: they eventually had seven children. Stowe helped to support her family financially by writing for local and religious periodicals. During her life, she wrote poems, travel books, biographical sketches, and children's books, as well as adult novels. She met and corresponded with people as varied as Lady Byron, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and George Eliot. She died at the age of 85, in Hartford Conneticutt.
While she wrote at least ten adult novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe is predominantly known for her first, Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd. (1852). Begun as a serial for the Washington anti-slavery weekly, the National Era, it focused public interest on the issue of slavery, and was deeply controversial. In writing the book, Stowe drew on her personal experience: she was familiar with slavery, the antislavery movement, and the underground railroad because Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnatti, Ohio, where Stowe had lived, was a slave state. Following publication of the book, she became a celebrity, speaking against slavery both in America and Europe. She wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) extensively documenting the realities on which the book was based, to refute critics who tried to argue that it was inauthentic; and published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred in1856. In 1862, when she visited President Lincoln, legend claims that he greeted her as "the little lady who made this big war": the war between the states. Campaigners for other social changes, such as Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd., respected and drew upon her work.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a physical weak women, who wrote remarkeble essays since she was a ten jear old girl.
She was born as a daughter of a pastor in Connecticut on 15 juli 1811.
In the time that negrosslaves were treated as animals, she cared about them.
She informed herself about what really happened and wrote down her expericens in a deeply human story.

Opinion
I can imagine that in that time this book made a big impression and the theme is still of present interest now because in many poor countries the people struggle for human rights.
It’s a brave act of the author to write this book about a big problem because not everybody is glad to hear such comment.
It’s a very famous book and that suggests immediately that also a good book is but that isn’t true.
The discription of the characters is to naïf; you can split the characters in to groups: the bad persons and the good ones.
The bad persons are the devil themself and the good persons are angels, to good to be true.
In that time they were probably used to that kind of characters but in the present it isn’t realistic anymore.