Harriet Beecher Stowe’s other novel – Dred on the London stage

Abstract

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two major anti-slavery novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred: a tale of the great dismal swamp, were both adapted, with varying degrees of success, for the English stage. The former was a major and fairly long-lasting ‘hit’; the latter, while briefly popular, was by no means as long-lived a success. And, while Uncle Tom is still familiar to, if not widely read by, the novel-reading public, Dred is virtually unknown, except to students and scholars. This article examines some of the ways that these novels were adapted for the nineteenth-century stage, what this reveals about the way that dramatists interpreted their fundamental messages and how, despite Dred’s more politically radical orientation, the dramatisations largely blunted this through a resort to the stereotypes of blackface minstrelsy.