The first London edition appeared in May, 1852, and by the end of the year over one million copies had been sold, as opposed to one hundred and fifty thousand in the United States.

But if one distinguished writer is to be believed, this great British interest in the book was due more to English antipathy to America than to antipathy to slavery[27].

This writer was Nassau W.Senior, who, in 1857, published a reprint of his article on "American Slavery" in the 206th number of the _Edinburgh Review_, reintroducing in his book extreme language denunciatory of slavery that had been cut out by the editor of the _Review_[28].

Senior had been stirred to write by the brutal attack upon Charles Sumner in the United States Senate after his speech of May 19-20, 1856, evidence, again, that each incident of the slavery quarrel in America excited British attention.
Senior, like Thomas Gladstone, painted the North as all anti-slavery, the South as all pro-slavery.

Similar impressions of British understanding (or misunderstanding) are received from the citations of the British provincial press, so favoured by Garrison in his _Liberator_[29].