Virtual Visitor Questions: Novel Writing

Stay tuned for additional posts answering questions posed by the participants of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House Community Connection Facebook group. CLICK HERE to join the group and submit your own questions to our volunteer team! Today's question is answered by docent and board member Frederick Warren.

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Question: How did Harriet Beecher Stowe learn to write a novel?

Growing up in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet became an avid reader. As the child of a Congregational minister she was steeped in the Bible. Though her father Lyman’s faith frowned on fiction, the Beecher family was introduced to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and to Lord Byron’s poetry by Harriet’s uncle Samuel Foote, a sea captain fluent in French and Spanish, and the ban on novels was lifted. Harriet remembered discovering her father Lyman’s copy of Arabian Nights and being “transported to foreign lands.”

Litchfield was a cultural center, boasting the first stand-alone law school in the U.S. and the country’s first important early school for women, Sarah Pierce’s Female Academy. Harriet entered there at the age of eight, four years earlier than the normal starting age. There she read classics of English literature from Milton, Dryden, and Fielding. She began writing weekly compositions at the age of nine, leading her father to observe that “Harriet is a great genius…She is as odd as she is intelligent and studious…”

Just as important as her schooling in Harriet’s learning to write were the domestic literary efforts within the Beecher family. People entertained themselves with readings of essays and poems, and Harriet remembered her eldest sister Catharine often writing for the family. People also wrote letters, a skill that was taught at school, and they were often read aloud in the parlor. And formal literary clubs that met in people’s homes were popular. Harriet honed her powers of observation of character and her story-telling ability in this fashion. She then completed her formal education at Catharine’s academy for women in Hartford, where she began her journalism career by editing issues of the school newspaper.

Harriet served her literary apprenticeship in Cincinnati, beginning in 1833 by writing a Primary Geography for Children for Catharine’s Western Female Institute in downtown Cincinnati. The book’s success, due to its personal voice and evocative descriptions, led to her invitation to join the Semi-Colon Club, a literary society that was sponsored by the very same uncle Samuel Foote who has so influenced her as a child.  The members would contribute stories, essays, and sketches. Soon Harriet’s character sketch “Uncle Lot” had won the Western Monthly Magazine’s prize competition and was the first of many to be published. By 1843 she had published her first collection of such pieces, The Mayflower: Or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims.  She was well on the way to finding her literary voice that we know from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
 
Note: The source material for this brief essay is Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life by Joan Hedrick (Oxford University Press 1994) and Crusader in Crinoline: the Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe by Forrest Wilson (J. B. Lippincott 1941).
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About the author:
Frederick Warren is a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House, as well as a tour guide for the Friends of Music Hall. He is a retired estimator for a book printing and binding firm in Cincinnati.