Circulating in Commonplaces: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Celebrity Status in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article questions the supposed pervasive celebrity of the American author Harriet Beecher Stowe in Europe in the nineteenth century, and investigates her authorial status in the Netherlands in the mid-1850s. To what extent could she be considered a celebrity in the Netherlands in this period? The article pays attention both to the institutional and to the ideological situation, which can either facilitate or hinder the development of a so-called “celebrity society,” and shows that textual representations of Stowe did indeed circulate, but that this circulation did not take on the massive scale that seems necessary for a celebrity status. Whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin was, by Dutch standards, an incredible success, journalists were only marginally aware of the authorial figure of Stowe herself. This was in part a result of the lack of a professional literary and journalistic infrastructure in the Netherlands. From an ideological point of view, the phenomenon of literary celebrity was a controversial one in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, hampering the emergence of a celebrity society. Together, these findings help us to consider the existence of a possible “transatlantic” Stowe cult in a different light: in the peripheral Netherlands, such a cult did not emerge easily.

Keywords

• celebrity authorship
• transatlanticism
• history of institutions
• media history
• literary reception
• Harriet Beecher Stowe