George Orwell defined a “good bad book” as “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” His supreme example was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Orwell thought it “unintentionally ludicrous” and full of “preposterous melodramatic incidents,” but he also found it “deeply moving and essentially true.” It was, he concluded, “hard to say which quality outweighs the other.” I, too, find it hard to say, but that is because I gave up after 50 pages.

A recruiter for the abolitionist cause, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is one of the few novels that can claim to have started a war. President Abraham Lincoln is said to have greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe by saying, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” After that kind of review, asking whether Uncle Tom’s Cabin is good or bad, true or false, is beside the point. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is historically significant, like Honest Abe’s cabin. We read it to understand an era.