In this post, I wrote that I was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin and I linked to this essay from the journal Humanities that argued, starting in the title, that it was "The First Great American Novel."
I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book for helping to bring about the Civil War and the end of slavery, but it's not a great achievement as a work of art. (There are a couple of SPOILERS ahead about major plot developments.) It was written to convince white Americans that people of color were every bit as human as white people and that the North, because of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, was as complicit as the South in the horrors of slavery. Its characters, though, are, for the most part, broad stereotypes, and Stowe regularly makes pronouncements about the characteristics of an entire race of people as if they were indisputable fact. And for a century or so, the novel has largely been viewed by African-Americans as accommodationist and its title character as a sellout to his race. Little Eva, the daughter of Uncle Tom's second master, Augustine St. Clare, is a perfect angel whom we're told will die fairly soon in a chapter called "Foreshadowings." And chapter 43, "Results," starts with the unliterary, direct-to-the-reader declaration "The rest of our story is soon told."
There are some fun bits of language here and there, and I learned a couple of new words. In the chapter in which Eva dies, called "Death," setness is used in the plural when speaking of St. Clare's highly efficient New England cousin Ophelia: "They who had shrugged their shoulders at her little peculiarities and setnesses, so unlike the carelesss freedom of southern manners, acknowledged that now she was the exact person that was wanted [for taking care of Eva on her deathbed]."
And I learned perhaps can be a noun. It's also used in the plural, in the chapter titled "An Authentic Ghost Story," in a passage about the trials of the soul an evil man like Simon Legree, Tom's third and final master and murderer, must endure:
After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful ghostly, unquiet possession, for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,—those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity! What a fool is he who locks his door to keep out spirits, who has in his own bosom a spirit he dares not meet alone,—whose voice, smothered far down, and piled over with mountains of earthliness, is yet like the forewarning trumpet of doom!