Trivet

This earthenware transfer-printed trivet depicts images of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe surrounded by characters from her abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The trivet was made in England for the American market just after the book’s publication.

Here, the titular character, Uncle Tom, is shown with chained, clasped hands beside his wife and child and other characters from the novel in adoration of Stowe, who is cast as a white “savior.” The depiction emphasizes that the abolitionist cause in the nineteenth century was corrupted by views that Black Americans were inferior to whites in the movement for their freedom.