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Carl Van Doren (1885–1950). The American Novel. 1921.

Page 120

essayed another novel to illustrate the evil effects of slavery, particularly upon the whites. Dred (1856), in England known as Nina Gordon, has had its critical partizans, but posterity has not sustained them. Grave faults of construction, slight knowledge of the scene (North Carolina), a less simple and compact story than in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a larger share of disquisition—these weigh the book down, and most readers carry away only fragmentary memories of the black prophet Dred’s thunderous eloquence, of Tom Gordon’s shameless abuse of his power as a master, and of Old Tiff’s grotesque and beautiful fidelity. Dred appears to have exhausted Mrs. Stowe’s anti-slavery material, though she was, of course, a partizan and a pamphleteer during the Civil War. Thereafter, being now an international figure, she let her pen respond somewhat too facilely to the many demands made upon it till her death; she wrote numerous didactic and religious essays and tales; she was attentive to the follies of fashionable New York society, in which she had had little experience; Lady Byron chose her to publish the scandal by which the poet’s wife defended herself against the dead poet.

In another department of her work, however, Mrs. Stowe stood on surer ground, and her novels of New England life do well what there was later a whole school of New England story-writers to do after her. Weak in structure and sentimental she remained. Her heroines wrestle with problems of conscience happily alien to all but a few New England and Nonconformist British bosoms; her bold seducers, like Ellery Davenport in Oldtown Folks (1869) and Aaron Burr in The Minister’s Wooing

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