Uncle Tom's Cabin III

Eva begs her father to give Tom his freedom, and he agrees to do it. He knows his child is dying. After her death, he tells Tom that he will set him free, but he is a dilatory man. He writes to the Shelbys, but then before he can go ahead with the legal business, he gets involved in a brawl in a cafe. He tries to stop two men fighting and gets stabbed. He dies, and Marie decides to sell up the house and her slaves and go back to her father's house. Ophelia agrees to talk to her, about setting Tom free, as St Clare had intended, but she tells Tom she does not think she will be able to influence the selfish woman. Marie is harsh with her slaves and goes ahead with selling them, refusing to consider making Tom free. This time he is sold down South to a Yankee man called Simon Legree. He owns a farm and he thinks that as Tom seems honest and good at managing a farm, he will make use of his skills. But Tom refuses to be harsh with his fellow slaves and Legree develops a hatred of him. St Clare's letter goes to the Shelby family, but Mr Shelby has suddenly been taken ill and dies. Mrs Shelby and her son George are busy with Mr Shelby's death and the legal business of taking over the farm and the letter gets neglected. When it is read, George says he will go down south and try and find his old friend. But by the time this happens, Tom has been sold and is in the ownership of Legree and can't be found. In the meantime, Eliza and her son have travelled to Canada and been reunited with her husband George Harris. Tom is worked very hard on Legree's farm, as are all the slaves. He tries to help the weaker ones and continues to read his bible and pray. Legree has a couple of slaves who are his overseers and he uses them to join in his drinking bouts and to punish the rest of the slaves. A new girl slave has come to the farm with Tom and Legree wants her for his mistress but she refuses. Cassy, an older woman who was Legree's mistress tells her and Tom that she will help her to get away. Legree becomes increasingly mad..... when the 2 women disappear.

Uncle Tom's Cabin II

Ophelia is a typical New Englander, hard working, efficient, and good hearted. She does not approve of slavery, but when St Clare takes her home, and greets his slaves, he realises that she does not really like black people. She is shocked that he and Eva kiss and shake hands with the rest of the household. Tom settles into his new home, and is there especially to look after Eva. He is not happy though and wishes he could go back to Kentucky, to his wife and children. Back at the Shelby household, Mrs Shelby tries to persuade her husband to try and find Tom and buy him back and he says he can't afford it. Chloe, Tom's wife, is a very good cook, and she suggests that Mrs Shelby should hire her out to a confectioner in another town, and they can use the money she earns to buy Tom. Mrs Shelby knows it will take a long time before Chloe can earn enough money but she agrees. Tom tries to write a letter to Chloe but he can't write properly so Mr St Clare offers to write for him. Eva's health begins to decline. She is consumptive. She is only a little child, but she suffers from seeing the way that black people are treated.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin opens in a farm in Kentucky, where Tom is a slave who is married with several children. Mrs Shelby the mistress of the farm, hates slavery... but her husband owns several slaves. He finds himself in financial trouble and decides that he has to sell some of his slaves. Tom is a sensible man and a good farm manager, and there is a young woman who has a small child, Harry... and Shelby sells them to a slave dealer. Mrs Shelby is horrified and tells Tom that as soon as they can, they will buy him back. Tom is a Christian and is resigned to whatever happens to him. But Eliza, the mother of the little boy, tells him that she cannot let her son be sold down South, and she is going to run away. Her husband, an intelligent man called George, has a cruel master and he has talked of running away to Canada. Tom tells his wife that he supports Eliza escaping, as it is natural for a mother to want to save her children. She flees with Harry, and manages to cross an ice bound river and make her way to a Quaker settlement. The Quakers dont believe in slavery so they are willing to hide her and help her to go North. Tom is taken away on a journey down the river, to New Orleans. On the boat, there is a little girl called Eva, who is travelling with her father and her father's cousin Ophelia, from the North. Eva takes a fancy to Tom, and asks her father to buy him. Mr St Clare does not like slavery but he is an indolent man and has never made the effort to free his slaves. His wife Marie, is a cold silly selfish woman and she is hard on her slaves. St Clare tries to mitigate her harshness and he agrees to buy Tom. He has become worried about his house and his daughter. Marie does nothing about the house and is lazy. He is concerned that Eva who is in delicate health, needs a mother figure, so he has brought his cousin Ophelia from New England to manage his house.

Uncle Tom's Cabin By Harriet Beecher Stowe

Just been re reading this book about slavery in the USA, before the Civil War. Mrs Stowe was a member of a very religious family who were active in helping slaves. She was accused of getting things wrong about the South but she proved in the Key To Uncle Tom's Cabin that the brutalities of slavery depicted were absolutely true. Will write some more later....

The Kitten Lady

I like to mention Hannah Shaw, known on the Internet as The Kitten Lady. She rescues all sorts of animals and teaches people how to look after them. But her main focus is on kittens because they are so vulnerable. She teaches classes on kitten care, and writes children's books about animals. She runs a charity, the Orphan Kitten club, which helps to rescue kittens who are born outside or abandoned or ill treated. She can be found on social media, with videos about her various little cats. She sponsors Trap, Neuter Return, where people trap outdoor cats, have them spayed and then return them to their home areas. She also takes in kittens who have health problems and dedicates herself to trying to help them to get better or at least to improve. She has 2 adult cats who came in as fosters, one (Chou Chou) had a severe cleft palate and could not eat so she tube fed him till he was big enough to have surgery. The other, Ferguson, had a kidney disease but he has lived now for 5 years and is in reasonably good health.

Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym was a well known writer - she was born in 1913 and died in 1980. As she grew older her novels did not do so well. They were deemed old fashioned and she had difficulty getting published. She did not publish anything from the early 60s until 1977, but she continued to write. She got a degree at Oxford in English, in the 1930s. She visited Germany quite often, then and was intially attracted by the novelty of Nazism. She fell in love with a young Nazi, but she afterwards realised that fascism was evil and recanted her sympathy. However, her family became uneasy at her frequent visits to Germany as it was becoming clear that Hitler had to be stopped and that in due course, Britain would be at war with the German state. She joined the Womens naval service during the war, and worked at censoring letters. After the war, she took a post in the International African Institution and became an editor of their scholarly magazine about Africa and anthropology. She worked there till her retirement. She never married or had children, but she had several affairs. Her relationships with men seemed to go wrong...and in her fiction, she tends to portray men as arrogant and selfish. Her lovers tended to be unkind to her after a while and the affairs fizzled out. She lived with her sister Hilary in Queen's Park, London. In 1977, she was mentioned by 2 writers, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin as a very under rated writer. This sparked off new interest in her works and she published a new novel Quartet in Autumn. In the 1970's, she developed breast cancer and then stomach cancer. She died in 1980. Her works are now quite popular, and she was one of the first writers to create sympathetic gay characters.

Elizabeth Goudge 1900-84

Elizabeth Goudge was a prolific novelist, of the 20th century. She wrote children's books, romances, historical novels, and religious works. She was born in Wells, Somerset, a cathedral city where her father worked in the Theological college. Her mother was from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. One of her earlier books was set in Guernsey. She wrote several books set in Wells, using a fictional name for the city. She was an Anglican, and religion is shown in many of her stories. After her father's death she looked after her mother. She found it stressful, combining housekeeping with writing. She never married, and moved to Oxfordshire in later years, living with her sister. She died there in 1984. I hope to write more about her works in a later blog.