This chapter is in the form of a literary sketch, a short, mostly descriptive narrative, popular in Stowe's time and a form in which she often worked. The ironies implicit in the chapter may not be immediately apparent, for reasons related to differences in audience. In Chapter 4, we have a picture that would have seemed on the surface (in 1852) to show the slave, Tom, as a respected man with a comfortable and picturesque home, well-treated by his master's family, secure among his own wife, children, and friends, leading them all in heartfelt Christian worship. Those early readers who wanted to believe slavery was a good or at least an acceptable thing would have been able to relax and smile at this chapter. Such readers, however, were being set up: Stowe is again employing situational irony, for the narrator and the reader both know what has transpired in the first chapter. They know this happy home is about to be destroyed, and she makes that irony explicit in the short final scene of the chapter.
Unfortunately for the author's rhetorical plan, readers today are not likely to be lulled into relaxation by this depiction of happiness in the slave quarters. To be sure, not every 1852 reader would have been smiling either; no doubt many of them cringed as we do at Chloe's jovial flattery of young "Mas'r George" and at that young man's tossing of food at his contemporaries, the sons of his host and hostess, as those two "woolly-headed" youths roll happily on the floor. But the very ugliness of the stereotypes may keep us from seeing what is really going on in the chapter.
