In Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Reading Revolution, Barbara Hochman provides a thought-provoking, meticulously researched, elegantly written account of the changes in the reception – the transformation in “the cultural meaning” (1) – of Uncle Tom's Cabin over six decades.

While a great deal has, of course, been written on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel (Hochman logically starts with the serialization of the work in the National Era in 1851–52), contemporary theories of reader reception inform Hochman's analysis and allow her to shed new light on what she aptly calls a study of “reading in context” (xi). Hochman deftly interweaves a close study of the text and its paratext (especially the illustrations), with an examination of the historical context and societal changes, most notably in respect to shifts in reading practices, as well as alterations – the “Reading Revolution” – in how Americans perceived literacy, fiction, childhood, and race.

The work is located in the relatively new but growing field of the history of reading. Over the seven chapters and epilogue, Hochman traces evidence of reading in the text itself (what Roger Chartier calls the “protocol of reading” provided by the writer), in the paratext of successive editions, and also in actual readers' testimonies.

Chapter 1 investigates the fiction published in the National Era before the serialization of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Hochman demonstrates how Stowe successfully challenged the conventions of the time, and of the abolitionist press, to force readers' identification with the slave characters. In chapter 2, Hochman looks at Stowe's revision of images of literate slaves. At a time when slave literacy was often equated with autonomy and potential violence, Stowe reinterprets it as evidence of the possibility of black subjectivity and spiritual depth. Hochman convincingly argues in chapter 3 that depicting black literacy in a positive light also allows Stowe to disarm resistance to fiction itself. Chapter 4 examines Stowe's handling of children in the novel and also includes a discussion of the 1853 adaptation of the novel for children. Hochman argues that Stowe's description of Harry and Topsy, by encouraging identification, destabilizes – at least temporarily – the color paradigm for young readers. In chapter 5, Hochman explores the contradictory responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. In the 1880s and 1890s, Stowe's first novel was increasingly associated with plantation literature. At a time when whites were anxious to reassure themselves that African Americans were happy to occupy menial positions, Uncle Tom conveniently became equated with black loyalty and subservience. The work had by then become a classic and introductions and reviews deflected its radical charge by ensconcing it safely in the past, or used it as a reminder of how far the country had moved forward since the days of slavery. While the novel's characters had entered everyday language, they had also been, as Hochman notes, “loosed from their moorings” (159). Yet evidence of reading by “marginalized” or “unintended” readers (160) reveals that for some at least the book retained its radical power. Chapter 6 contrasts Hammatt Billings's illustrations for the 1852 and 1853 editions of the novel brought out by John P. Jewett with the illustrations designed by E. W. Kemble for an edition issued by Houghton, Mifflin in 1892, and the illustrations of an 1898 edition produced by Appleton. While Billings's illustrations seem in perfect harmony with Stowe's strategies, Kemble reinterprets the novel in a very different way, systematically avoiding all visual signs of black literacy and all hint of meaningful relations between black and white characters. Kemble's illustrations firmly inscribe the slave as “other.” The illustrations chosen for the Appleton edition “direct attention away from plot and characters” (200). A 1901 adaptation for children (Young Folks' Uncle Tom's Cabin, the topic of chapter 7) provides evidence of changes in the way children and children's literature were viewed, while offering a similar reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin. While Hochman is careful to point out that readers – whether children or adults – do not necessarily follow the guidelines set in text and paratext, turn-of-the-century editions for children such as the one scrutinized in chapter 7 clearly discourage identification with the black characters and encourage racist assumptions. The epilogue offers a fascinating insight into the uses some African Americans made of Stowe's novel between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s; that is, during the period of legal segregation. Hochman shows that Uncle Tom's Cabin often served as a source of information for those who wanted to learn about the slave past of their forefathers.

Grounded in theories of reception, reading history, and image analysis, among others, and drawing on a wealth of primary materials, Hochman's book will be of interest to specialists of book history and of reading, writing and publishing, but also to anyone interested in nineteenth-century America.