Circulating in Commonplaces: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Celebrity Status in the Netherlands

Abstract

In 2015 and 2016, the journals Critical Survey and Comparative American Studies each published a special issue on nineteenth-century transatlantic celebrity, each journal taking its cue from the 2014 University of Portsmouth conference Celebrity Encounters: Transatlantic Fame in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America. Whereas the conference title suggested a scope limited to exchanges between Britain and the US, the titles of the journal issues explicitly promise a comparison between American and European celebrity: Celebrity Encounters: Famous Americans in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Transatlantic Celebrity: European Fame in Nineteenth-Century America , respectively (emphasis LH). The introductions to both issues also mention this supposed European perspective, but all twelve actual articles compare the US to Britain only, creating an erroneous impression of ubiquitous celebrity while focusing on a single European nation. 2 This academic mono-fixation is far from unique. 1 Studies of transatlantic cultural encounters often neglect the non-Anglophone parts of Europe, which results in generally flattering interpretations of the role of American writers as celebrities in the nineteenthcentury European book market. It is clear, after all, that Britain is far from representative when it comes to the institutional and ideological literary situations in Europe as a whole: in the 1850s, the UK had the most commercialized and professionalized literary field in the world. Fred Inglis describes that this has been the case since the mid-seventeen hundreds, when England began producing commodities like books, clothes, and paintings on a hitherto unseen scale (Inglis 39-40). The first bestselling authors in the US date from around a century later; examples include Susan Warner (The Wide, Wide World, 1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (The Song of Hiawatha, 1855). American literature therefore did not become "mass phenomenon" until the 1850s (Dowling 1-2), and we might assume that bestselling Circulating in Commonplaces: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Celebrity Status in the ...