Such considerations did not occur to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Not only does she use language (for example, negro — and sometimes negress — with a small n) that was polite in her time but is not in ours, and not only do her characters, even some of the sympathetic ones, say nigger all too frequently, but Stowe in her role as narrator often takes time out to tell her readers what black people are like: They are home-loving rather than adventurous, for example; they have admirable but highly exotic taste in clothing and décor; and, of course, they generally have simple, childish hearts. The fact that Stowe does not repeat, and obviously does not believe, the more repellent stereotypes, and the fact that her African and African-American characters often behave in ways quite counter to her explanations, will not save her from being sneered at by modern readers. Nor will the fact that she meant well; but we must offer that as one defense of her political incorrectness, another being that she lived in a less enlightened time, a third being that an examination of the errors she fell into might help lead us to recognize and correct our own.
Fashions in racial thinking and speaking are not the only ones that have changed since 1852. A third problem with Uncle Tom's Cabin for the modern reader is its sentimentality, which we may use as a sort of blanket term for the novel's literary style. In several ways, Stowe's book follows the models of Charles Dickens, with its two main plots, its several imbedded narratives, its grotesque and comic characters, its pairs of happy and unhappy lovers. Perhaps because Stowe (again like Dickens, often) not only published but also wrote the book in installments, the plots tend to wander and to be tied up eventually by a set of scarcely believable coincidences. The descriptions tend to be long: readers had more patience in 1852 than we do and less available visual entertainment. Above all, Stowe interjects her narrator's voice, speaking directly to the reader, far more often than we might like. To a student of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin is, if anything, much less tedious than might be expected. But readers not used to these conventions should try to bear with them, suspend disbelief in some instances, and finally relax and enjoy Stowe's dry, often understated, ironic wit.
