For a long time, after the early popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (both with ordinary readers and with critics) had passed and the book was out of critical fashion, its structure was said to be either haphazard or nonexistent. Because Stowe had, in a sense, composed as she went along, with the original publication in serial form, it was thought that she had given little thought to its formal structure. More recently, critics have recognized several elements of the book's structure. For example, its geographical movements, from the Shelby farm in Kentucky northward and southward, are seen to be thematically important; and its interruptions of one of the major plots with one or more chapters following the other plot are seen to follow a pattern (which one writer, Elaine Showalter, likens to that of a patchwork quilt; see the Critical Essays).
In the section just summarized, both geographical movement and plot interruption figure as important elements. The contrast between settings and situations is especially ironic, for Chapter 37 begins with a wounded man lying in bed, being tended by a woman, the same situation with which the previous chapter ended. But whereas in one case the scene is the dark, hot gin-house on Legree's hellish plantation, where Tom has been left to suffer by all but Cassy, in the other it is a cheerful, bright, relatively cool Midwestern farmhouse where Loker's assurance of recovery is due to the Christian kindness not only of the Quakers but also of the escaped slaves whom he had attempted to capture.
