The Minister's Wooing

A mother's argument with Calvinism

The book's hardest chapter is Mrs. Marvyn's breakdown after James is reported drowned. She has been taught that God chooses who is saved and that almost everyone is not. Now she applies the doctrine to her son. Brides should wear mourning, she says, and the bells should toll for every wedding, because every new family is built over the pit. Stowe had lost her own eldest son to drowning less than eighteen months before the serial began.

Candace, the Marvyns' servant, is the one who reaches her. She takes Mrs. Marvyn in her arms, rocks her like a baby, and tells her to stop reasoning and look at Jesus on the cross. The Doctor's theology is fine in fair weather, she says, but sick folks must not have strong meat. The scene is the novel's answer to Mrs. Marvyn's despair, and Stowe gives the answer to Candace, not to the minister.

Candace, freedom and the slave trade

Candace's other great scene is the one in which she is freed. Asked whether she thinks slavery is right, she says she heard the Declaration of Independence read when General Washington was in Newport. If it was true, she told her husband Cato, then they were as free as anybody. She is not a creature with hoofs and horns, she says, but a reasonable being, a woman, as much a woman as anybody.

The same pages also describe her through the physical comedy of the period. Candace is introduced as a powerfully built, majestic black woman, corpulent, and her tears when she is freed are a tropical torrent. Her speech is written in heavy dialect. In the last chapter she presides over the next generation of Marvyns in gorgeous clothes and a butterfly turban. John Ruskin, writing to Stowe after the London edition, named Candace's sayings and doings as the sharpest parts of the book.

The Doctor's sermon is aimed at his own congregation. In the novel he tells the ship-owners that the slave trade has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, and that the town was built on the blood of Africans. Aaron Burr, who hears it, writes to a friend that no moral argument ever prevailed over twenty-five per cent profit. Stowe put the town's real business into a love story set in its best parlours.

What Lowell, Ruskin and Lady Byron thought

James Russell Lowell welcomed the novel as proof that Stowe was a novelist and not only a campaigner. In the piece her son's biography reprints, Lowell says he first read Uncle Tom's Cabin in Paris, after the excitement had died down. Reading it at that distance, he wrote, convinced him that her power was genius and not political sympathy. He predicted that The Minister's Wooing would be the book her reputation rested on.

John Ruskin was more mixed. He wrote that nothing could be nobler than Mary's great speech to Colonel Burr, and nothing more delightful than everything Madame de Frontignac says and does. He did not believe that any girl would revere the Doctor without laughing at him. He also thought Stowe was too disdainful of what ordinary readers call interest, the suspense that keeps people up until three in the morning.

Lady Byron, the widow of Lord Byron, read the first instalments in London in May 1859. She told Stowe they had more power than anything she had written before, and more power than Adam Bede by George Eliot, which she called the book of the season.