Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly. 1st Edition, Early Printing

This is a two-volume illustrated set of the novel by Harriett Beecher Stowe. It is one of the most influential books in American history.

The story first appeared in serial form in the weekly Washington, D.C. newspaper, "The National Era", in 1851. It was published as a book in 1852 in Boston (John P. Jewett & Company) and in Cleveland (Jewett, Proctor & Worthington), with an initial printing of 5,000 copies. It became an immediate best seller, and sold 300,000 copies within the first year, while twenty-thousand copies were printed in just the second week of publication. This Two-Volume First Edition is from the early printing marked "sixtieth thousand". The printer's name is listed on the reverse of the title page as "Stereotyped by Hobart & Robbins, New England Type and Stereotype Foundry, Boston. Printed by Geo. Rand & Co, No. 3 Cornhill." The six original engraved illustrations by the Boston architect and artist Hammett Billings (1818-1874) are present, as are the title-page vignettes.

Stowe was an abolitionist and author. She and her husband supported the Underground Railroad, and harbored some fugitive African-Americans in their own home. She was close friends with Mark Twain, her neighbor in Connecticut. She wrote this book while living in Maine in response to the U.S. Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which prohibited anyone in the United States, including the free states and territories, to help enslaved African-Americans to escape north or into Canada. It was an emotionally-written story intended to illustrate the damaging effect of slavery on individuals and their families, and on all aspects of American society and politics. The antidote to slavery, according to Stowe, was Christian love.

These two volumes are an important historical artifact of the American Civil War, and on the institution of slavery in American History. Their condition is fair but sound, and the six illustrations and all the original contents are intact.