In 1851, when Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing a story depicting the cruelties of southern slavery, she did not expect it to be very long, and her hopes for having any impact on shaping antislavery opinion were modest. But what began as a short story turned into the best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, a work that became the most widely read antislavery tract of the pre-Civil War era. While the book galvanized the North's growing antipathy for slavery, southerners raged at its alleged distortion of their world, and there is little doubt that its publication played a significant part in widening the breach between the two regions.

Uncle Tom's Cabin made Stowe an international heroine of the antislavery movement, and when she went on a tour of the British Isles in 1853, she constantly encountered images of herself, such as the one here, in the windows of print shops. Stowe generally did not care for these likenesses. "I should think," she noted in a letter home, "that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them."