Annotated Uncle Toms Cabin [Hardcover]

John Updike reviews this new edition in the Nov 6 New Yorker, which is available online and well worth looking up. With 100 pages to go, Updike tired of the "irritable sniping from the sidelines" and switched to the standard Library of America edition.

A few months ago I reviewed the Penguin edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin here in Amazon. I suggested that if you decide to read the novel, skip the Introduction until you are done reading, because it gives away several plot points that you are better off encountering for yourself directly.

The same applies to this new annotated edition I think. The novel is not so difficult that you can't simply read it through on your own. I suggest doing that first, in a standard edition, then going through this edition. Otherwise you are having only a mediated experience of the work. In other words, let the work stand or fall on its own merits first, before exposing yourself to the opinions of others about it.

Having read the standard edition earlier I then read this annotated edition "inside out". That is, I read the introductory chapters and the annotations themselves straight through and used Stowe's text as the reference. This is a better approach I think than trying to read the text for the first time with the annotations nearby, where they do intrude and interrupt the flow of the story.

When reading the annotations this way though you do notice the inconsistency in voice that Updike mentions. Most are carefully neutral but you get an occasional first-person remark like "I confess my eyes glazed over" (gee that's helpful), then "again, our eyes glaze over" or "I recall Baldwin's...". Or "I am close to turning the page." then "...bore us silly", in the same annotation. As if the two editors read, and experienced eye-glaze, in unison? Since there seems to be two distinct voices at play it would have been useful for each annotation to have been initialed by its author, Gates or Robbins. I started trying to guess which editor wrote which annotation--I suspect Robbins provided the majority of the historical background while Gates did the Baldwins, the "I"s, and the trendier ones ("To the modern reader, Adolph is unmistakably 'metrosexual'"). This disparity in tone is also obvious between Gates' public interview (Boston Globe, Nov 12) in which he too-casually terms the work racist, and the less judgmental and more nuanced approach of the majority of the annotations themselves.

Getting past that though the annotations contain a wealth of useful background. The Biblical references, the distinctions among the slaves, the nuances of hypocrisy, the literary conventions, the sheer mechanics of the business, the conventional wisdom of the time about the races, all are excellent and thorough.

So, if you are going to read Uncle Tom's Cabin, do so first, then get this edition. It's an indispensable addition to the work.

For so long I thought of Uncle Tom's Cabin as of great historical significance but of little literary value. Now, at age 50, I'm finding out that Harriet Beecher Stowe has written a wonderful book. I laughed so at the burlesque she writes, a la Shakespeare, when Mr. Haley orders his slaves to prepare the horses so that they can all search for Eliza. Unfortunately, the editors' notes missed a golden opportunity to comment on Beecher's skills. Instead, of course, they are quick to point out the stereotypes Beecher harks to. I do appreciate, however, that they note the themes of family and hearth. All in all, despite various disagreements I have with the columnal critics, I loved the format and the opportunity to compare artists' renderings in the historical illustrations. What a wonderful experience to discover this novel! How remarkable Harriet Stowe's accomplishment.

This is a moving, important, and captivating novel that easily stands on its own. The annotations, while helpful when expounding upon literal and historical references, are otherwise largely uninformative. As a previous reviewer noted, the tone is often quite personal and immaterial ( "my eyes glazed over" etc.) One passage being referred to as being eye-glazingly boring and superfluous was in fact quite brilliant and necessary for insight into one of the more complex and fully realized characters in the novel ( Augustine St. Clare). I don't feel the editors' job is to instruct the reader when to be disinterested. The editors also have a tendency to give away key plot points throughout, which did not endear them to this reader. They also fixate on odd themes that seem overindulgent, such as what they consider to be Shelby's oral fixations, which seem to me to be nothing more than the daily pastimes of a southern gentleman of leisure, i.e. eating and smoking. They can go out of their way to belabor points such as these.
The tone of some of the comments are also startlingly informal, as in "George is a little too talky here." Talky???????? That wouldn't even pass in an eighth grade English paper. Not to mention that George, at this point in the novel, is under great duress and making an impassioned stand for his belief and his survival. Talky. Harumph.
So skip the notes, but by all means devour the story. It is worth it.