Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sampson Low: Transatlantic Sociability and International Copyright

A talk by Dr Katie McGettigan, Royal Holloway, University of London

In July 1860, the American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a transatlantic best-seller, wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell with a proposition. Their shared London publisher, Sampson Low, had intimated to Stowe that Gaskell “seemed favourably inclined to entertain a project for a sort of partnership with me in a work on Italy”.  Stowe suggested that co-authoring the book would mean that it could be copyrighted in both Britain and the United States, and the two women could share the profits. A co-authored Stowe-Gaskell work never emerged, but the letter provides a starting point for exploring the difficulties these novelists had in securing international copyright, and how Gaskell and Stowe – like other women writers – used social ties and sympathy (a key word in Stowe’s letter to Gaskell) to navigate literary business. This talk will focus on Gaskell’s and Stowe’s parallel experiences in the Anglo-American literary marketplace, their friendship, and the triangulation of their relationship through Low: a crucial and understudied figure in nineteenth-century literary culture, whom both women found, by turns, indispensable and frustrating in their pursuit of transatlantic authorship

London meetings take place at Francis Holland School, 39 Graham Terrace SW1W 8JF (Tube: Sloane Square). Doors open from 12.45 and you are welcome to join us for lunch (not provided – bring a packed lunch) before the talk.  talks begin at 2.00pm

Tea/coffee and refreshments will be provided after the talk. Places are £10.00, payable in cash on the day. Booking is not necessary, although it would help our planning if you could let us know that you hope to come. Contact Jenny Keaveney 07791 309784 –