At home with Harriet Beecher Stowe

My British phone is only intermittently willing to give American directions when plugged into the hire car's GPS.  That's actually less helpful than refusing altogether if you are counting on it to get you somewhere on time. 

Our tour of the Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut must have already started while I was still standing on a street corner scribbling down directions from a kind stranger on a piece of paper. Then a roadblock meant her directions couldn't be followed anyway so we abandoned the car in front of a row of shops and ran the final few blocks, turning up stressed and sweaty. 

"Hello, are you Charles?" was the greeting from a friendly man with a lanyard round his neck. 

"Yes, sorry we're late."

"I'm Tom". His lanyard called him Thomas and I assumed he knew my name because we were the only people booked on the tour who hadn't turned up. But he went on. 

"We know each other. I'm Tom Lee."

Good God! Tom Lee! Last seen by me in London about thirty years ago when he was performing as a storyteller - entertaining people in pubs and arts centres with Grimms fairy tales and doing it brilliantly.

And now here he was, fittingly, telling stories about one of America's greatest story-tellers. Not only was it an amazing coincidence, but it was lucky we turned up today as it was his last day in the job.

We sat down and caught up on the salient points of the past thirty years and then Tom took us and a select group of other visitors, on his last tour of Harriet Beecher Stowe's house. 

He was good - well-informed, spontaneous and completely free of that sing-song tone that bored tour guides use. His presentation had no recitations of 'fascinating facts', used to reveal that people in the past were human like us, but still deserved to be looked down on because of their funny, primitive ways.

No, Tom put Stowe in the context of American history. Religion, especially the Calvinism of her father, Lyman Beecher, was central to life in her time. All her brothers became ministers. Along with the rest of society in the first half of the nineteenth century, she grew less doctrinaire as she grew older and the influence of her stern father faded. But she never lost her sense of a cause that was worth fighting for and she felt chosen by God to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's father

Tom explained the immediate emotional drive behind the novel. As a young adult, Stowe had been living in Cincinnati. Her father had moved his family there to take up a position in a theological college and to 'save' the West from misguided religions such as Irish Catholicism that were in danger of dominating the new territories. From there, she witnessed a slave auction in which a mother was separated from her child. Harriet could only fully appreciate the mother's agony, Tom said, when she lost her own eighteen month old son to illness. All her energies were turned to abolition.

Uncle Tom came out in 1851, years before Stowe moved to the house on Forest Street, Hartford. In fact the house we were being shown was relatively modest - comfortable rather than grand - and represented a downsizing for Mr and Mrs Stowe. Harriet was 62 when they moved in and although she would live in it for more than twenty years, all her best and most profitable work had been done. The big house which she had built with the fortune she had earned from Uncle Tom had had to be sold as its upkeep proved too much even for America's most successful writer.

So this was the little dining-room where the Stowes and two of their unmarried daughters who lived with them would eat. 

The house has been beautifully preserved - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, reconstructed. All the books on the shelves are the exact editions that the Stowes had, Tom explained, but their books are kept in a vault in the Stowe archives elsewhere, along with 200,000 original documents. But there is plenty that is original in the house, such as Harriet's reading glasses, lying by her bed. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Calvin Stowe

Outside the house there was an intriguing relationship to explore with Harriet and Calvin's next door neighbour on Forest Street. Strangely, he was America's next most successful writer - next both chronologically and commercially. They weren't best friends, but they got on well enough. He was Mark Twain - and we're visiting his house tomorrow.