Topsy shares the honors with Uncle Tom, Little Eva, and Eliza (crossing the ice) as one of the book's headline characters, always pictured on early cover illustrations, pigeon-toed and googly-eyed, with her hair sticking up in a million pigtails, next to blonde and angelic Eva — the archetypal "pickaninny" standing beside the archetypal little white girl. Her line to Ophelia, "S'pect I grow'd" (in answer to the question, "Do you know who made you?") was itself for a long time the basis of a common saying: "[G]rowed like Topsy" became a humorous way of describing how something developed without any particular intention or plan. In the book itself, Topsy is hardly a major character on a par with Tom, George, Legree, or even St. Clare, but neither is she comic relief. Like Chloe, she is a real person whom Stowe sketched expertly in a very few lines, whom we care about because, apparently, Stowe cared about her. Unlike Chloe, Topsy is someone who has been so battered by slavery that she might almost have been called, with some justification, "The Child Who was a Thing."
Topsy enters the book filthy, bruised, and scarred, dressed in a gunny sack, eight or so years old, and saved from a life as a tavern scullion by St. Clare, who sees her as a sort of gentle way of chiding Ophelia; his cousin "loves" slaves in theory but recoils from them in the flesh, and she preaches education for them without consideration of what this might entail. Let us see, St. Clare seems to think, what she will do with this very real child. And Topsy is a very real child, terribly abused but with enough resiliency to be good-natured despite her "depravity" (as Ophelia terms it; she lies, steals, gets out of tasks by throwing the materials for performing them away, leads the other children — except of course for Eva — into creative mischief), and with enough innate intelligence to be a very quick study when she wants to be. She is what our age would call a "survivor" — a little girl who will manage, with any luck at all, to land on her feet at all times.
