Abstract

Today it is a given that a popular blockbuster movie like “Star Wars” will have numerous, licensed incarnations ranging from clothing and china to action figures. The spin-offs from a popular movie may seem to be a modern creation. In the mid-nineteenth century, a best-selling novel created a similar frenzy in various nonliterary commodities. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would get adapted into a popular play, which then inspired various other Uncle Tom novelties or “Tomitudes,” starting with high quality Limoges Tom-themed vases, wallpaper (depicting scenes from the novel), and English-made figurines often pairing Uncle Tom with Little Eva in brotherly embrace. The latter objects were not only a good example of how a popular work of fiction would later get transformed into cheap, mass-produced commodities, but they were also projections of how the culture that absorbed Stowe’s provocative work later idealized a postslavery world in America after the Civil War.