Stowe was best known during her lifetime as the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book outsold in the nineteenth century only by the Bible. For much of the twentieth century, though still having strong name recognition, she virtually disappeared from literary studies and academic publishing. When the recovery of Stowe began in the 1970s, it was framed around Uncle Tom's Cabin. Therefore, a history of reception for that text provides a synopsis of Stowe's own shifting place in literary culture.

Early on, “reception” often took the form of appropriation. Given the still loosely developed conceptions of intellectual property and the limited legal authority of copyright in the mid-nineteenth century, Stowe had no control over Uncle Tom's Cabin's rapid absorption into the emerging mass market of commercial culture. For studying Stowe's career today, one benefit of that scenario is that we can draw on the numerous textual products created in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin as an indicator of how (and how eagerly) audiences interpreted the text.

Stowe's book quickly inspired a wide range of material culture items capitalizing on the novel's popularity. One dimension of this process literally domesticated the text and its characters. Fans could drink and eat from Uncle Tom-inspired dishes; decorate their homes with wallpaper and knick-knacks depicting scenes from the novel; play with Tom, Eva, and Topsy toys; and perform parlor songs linked to the novel's plot and themes.