London: "Christian Age" Office, 1877.
Price: $1,500.00
Hardcover. English edition, stated "Fifty-Fifth Thousand" (first English edition was 1876, published in wrappers), published well after Henson's original narrative in 1849. Preface by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Edited by John Lobb. xii, 231pp. Frontispiece portrait. Publisher's beveled red cloth decorated in black and gilt. All edges gilt. Moderate rubbing and wear at the extremities, a couple of signatures very slightly sprung, very good.
Henson was an enslaved Maryland-born man who was purported to be the model for "Uncle Tom." Born into slavery in Charles County, Maryland, Henson was sold to Isaac Riley, who later appointed him superintendent of the farm at an unusually young age because of Henson's intelligence and physical strength. At 22 he married a slave woman and fathered 12 children. Also while enslaved, he was allowed to become a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. When Henson attempted to buy his freedom, Riley turned on him and threatened to sell him into the Deep South, thus prompting Henson to flee north with his wife and children in the summer of 1830. They eventually settled in Dresden (Ontario, Canada), where Henson continued his ministry and became a leading figure in the Afro-Canadian community. He served as Captain of the Afro-Canadian volunteers in the Canadian Rebellions of 1837-1838; and he often traveled back into the United States to help other slaves escape to Canada. In 1842 he founded the British American Institute, intended as a refuge for escaped slaves.
Henson’s autobiography, as noted in the preface, was dictated to an unnamed writer, though “The substance of it … the facts, the reflections, and very often the words, are his; and little more than the structure of the sentences belongs to another." *Sabin* identifies the writer as Samuel Atkins Eliot. Henson’s narrative was later reprinted in 1858 as: *Truth Stranger Than Fiction* and again in 1879 as: *Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction*. Both of the later editions include a foreword by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and it was commonly believed that Henson's life story was the basis for the character of Uncle Tom in her novel. Though Stowe herself, in *The Key To Uncle Tom’s Cabin* (1853), refers to Henson's narrative as proof that individuals such as those whom she created in her novel existed in real life, recent scholarship suggests that Henson’s book was one among several slave narratives that both inspired and influenced Stowe’s depiction of Uncle Tom.
Item #458903
