An engraving of the abolitionist authour Harriet Beecher Stowe. Head and shoulders, full face with loose curling hair on either side of face. Proof without inscription, facsimile of signature below. Vignette. On India paper. After a portrait by George Richmond, made during Stowe’s visit to London in 1853. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) was an American author and vocal critic of the transatlantic slave trade. Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. However, due to the book’s unparalled commercial success and popularity, the story of Uncle Tom became detatched from Stowe's original political intention. The novel was satirised in music halls and 'minstrel' shows across the United States, where white actors would don 'blackface' to caricature the main character of Uncle Tom as an excessively subservient Black man. The term 'Uncle Tom' has since become a slur in North America, and for many African Americans in the United States, the book has a damaged reputation, far removed from Stowe's intentions.