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Between 1851 and the centenary of Stowe’s birth in 1911, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted in diverse ways by editors, publishers, marketers, and even readers. And the novel’s illustrations proved as enduring – and influential – as the text itself, if not more so.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared at a defining moment in the expansion of Western visual culture, a time when cheap forms of pictorial illustration, from wood engraving to the most elaborate colour printing, began to circulate widely. Advancements in printmaking in the mid-nineteenth century gave birth to a culture of images. Lithographs, in particular, were created to be enjoyed, framed, and hung on the walls of homes. They functioned as a ‘low’ and ‘common’ form of visual culture, purely for aesthetic enjoyment but also wide circulation.

For the first time, printmakers and photographers were able to offer relatively inexpensive pictures of people and places, which consumers could then proudly display on living-room walls or store privately in cases or folios. Lithographic illustrations, which flourished from the mid-nineteenth century onward, became a faster, and ultimately inexpensive, method of reproduction as compared to engravings and etchings, which were often finished with watercolours.

Marcus Wood, a professor of English and Diaspora Studies at the University of Sussex, argues that illustrators of Uncle Tom’s Cabin entered a graphic world well accustomed to images of Black bodies. Images of enslaved bodies had circulated in Western visual culture for centuries, such as prints of ‘Saartjie’ or Sarah Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ who was exhibited in Europe, first in London and then Paris, from 1810 to 1815, as a curiosity because of her breasts, buttocks, and hyper-trophied labia. The Black body as ‘Other’ became a site of fascination for whites; images functioned as ‘proof’ of a supposed Black inferiority. Wood suggests that the choice of illustrators for Stowe’s text highlights the tensions and contradictions between anti-slavery sentiment and the rapidly evolving forms of scientific racism. The latter relied heavily on representations that equated racial inferiority with bodily difference (e.g., skin colour, hair texture, head shape, lip size, and sexual organs), and had impacted much of the Western world’s assimilation of the book via images and texts.¹

‘Little Eva reading the Bible to Uncle Tom in the arbor.’ Illustration by Hammatt Billings (1818–1874) from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In the U.S., the Boston-based publisher John P. Jewett hired Hammatt Billings (1818–74) to do six full-page illustrations for the first printing of the novel in 1852. Given the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Jewett then commissioned Billings for more than one hundred additional illustrations to go along with new versions of the first six for an 1852 Christmas gift book.² His most famous illustration, ‘Little Eva reading the Bible to Uncle Tom in the arbor,’ appeared on page sixty-three of the first edition. In this image, Tom and Eva sit together on a bench surrounded by flowers. Eva holds Tom’s hand while reading the Bible to him. In some Western art, flowers are symbolic of virginity and the Virgin Mary; this illustration would have affirmed Eva’s purity to American readers. By his proximity to Eva, Tom would have become virtuous in their eyes.

Meanwhile, George Cruikshank (1792–1878) – best known for illustrating the work of Charles Dickens – was hired by U.K. publisher John Cassell to create twenty-seven whole-page wood engravings for the British edition of the novel. In Cruikshank’s illustration, ‘Tom and Eva in the Arbor,’ on page 233 of the British edition, he increased the distance between Eva and Tom ever so slightly and removed Eva’s hand from Tom’s knee. Rather than being seated immediately next to Tom, Eva is perched on a bench next to him, a Bible on her lap and her feet supported by a little stool. While Eva gazes at Tom, his eyes are cast outward toward the arbour, which, in Cruikshank’s English garden setting, with tiled floor and peaked roof, was less wild than Billings’s nature backdrop. In this scene, the figure of Tom, in relation to Eva, is presented with feminine, not masculine, characteristics. Victorian readers would have registered Tom as an ‘ideal Victorian heroine.’³

Illustration of Tom and Eva by Hammatt Billings for the 1853 deluxe edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Representations of Tom with his Bible and runaway George Harris reading challenged the notion that African Americans were capable only of being enslaved. Images were pivotal to Tom-mania; it simply would not have happened without the illustrations, which circulated as evidence of racial difference. Just as the novel appeared at a defining moment of the nineteenth century, so too did the illustrations.

Significantly, Billings’s images did not neatly reflect the story. As with theatre, there were no copyright protections for authors prior to 1865. Publishers could amend, abridge, and bowdlerize Stowe’s text. While Cassell kept the written version intact, the illustrations for the new editions reflected popular beliefs in the desexualized and idealized Black male body. In many editions, the drawings of Tom and Eva in the arbour further emasculated Tom as inferior and exalted Eva as superior. While Tom is Eva’s senior, he appears as her equal in each illustration, seated beside her or, in some cases, looking down at her as though he has as much to learn from her as she does from him.

The popularity of this scene endured for decades and, in the hands of Hollywood filmmakers, became a powerful trope for Black male passivity. In the 1930s, more than eighty years after Stowe’s novel was published, Shirley Temple’s blond ringlets paired with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson’s soft-shoe routine in their ‘buddy’ films could be seen as a cinematic repackaging of Uncle Tom and his child-patron, Little Eva.

Similar visual evocations of Tom and Eva circulated throughout much of the world during the early twentieth century. The enormous popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its related merchandise meant that, as historian Stephen Hirsch writes, Uncle Tom became ‘the most frequently sold slave in American history.’⁴ One widely circulated advertising card depicted ‘Uncle Tom & Little Eva’ with a photograph of two stage performers from a travelling Tom Show, Stetson’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company,’ one of the largest and longest-lived of the travelling Tom shows (operating from 1886 to 1931). In the image, Uncle Tom and Eva sit together on a bench. Eva, dressed in all white, holds an open book while gazing up at Uncle Tom, who is depicted as an old man with a greying beard, dressed in a black suit. Tom has one hand on Eva’s book, but his gaze and his other hand are beatifically directed upward and away from Eva.

The image of Uncle Tom with Eva on his lap or with their legs touching could have been understood as dangerous and sinister, a courting of the unmentionable. Yet these anodyne images unequivocally dismissed Tom’s embodiment as a man. Rather, Tom became Eva’s Tom, a subordinate companion to a child. In the mid-nineteenth century, Black men were often stripped of their sexual identity, symbolically neutered to appease white readers’ fears of Black masculinity. While white masculinity was equated with colonial conquest, power, control, and domination, Black masculinity was castrated in popular culture through images that were used to contain the threat of Black sexuality. The passive, emasculated, and childlike persona neutered Black masculinity into safety. In images of Tom and Eva, both Billings and Cruikshank constructed an arche-type of Black masculinity as happily contented but always inferior.

The paradox of Uncle Tom’s desexualization is that Tom is at once elevated and diminished. In the nineteenth century, many believed that white children’s innocence was in some way transferable to the people and things they encountered. This metaphorical transmission is evident, for example, when Little Eva and Uncle Tom are shown cuddling ecstatically in illustrations, as well as in dramatic stagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, games, advertisements, and household items, such as handkerchiefs.⁵ Eva and Uncle Tom’s embrace made Uncle Tom – and by extension abolition itself – seem righteous. Yet an inverse political interpretation was equally possible: in the eyes of some audiences, the white child’s embrace may have been conferring innocence upon not abolition but the institution of slavery.

Ultimately, though, the repeated pairing of Uncle Tom and Eva in text and image would have signalled to readers the potential for a post-slavery America where Blacks were happy in their inferiority, and whites – even children – held authority over them. Each illustration of the two characters together gave readers a small glimpse into how things could be once the social institution that visibly defined them – slavery – was abolished. Uncle Tom with Eva, then, became a vitally important visual trope to remind white viewers of what an idealized Black masculinity could look like: namely, compliant, elderly, asexual, and childlike. This version of Tom became the most idealized image of Black masculinity circulated in the visual culture from the 1850s onward.