Topsy is a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the 1852 American novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe that turned many readers against slavery. She is a young enslaved Black girl, treated cruelly, sharp and funny, who has never been told anything about where she came from. When an adult asks her who made her, she answers that nobody ever made her — "I 'spect I grow'd", meaning "I think I just grew". That line became famous, and from it English got the phrase "like Topsy" or "grew like Topsy", used about something that got bigger and bigger on its own with nobody planning it: a department, a city, a pile of paperwork. Two honest warnings. First, the phrase is dated; younger speakers usually will not know it, and it is fading out of use partly because the book's picture of Black characters is now seen as a hurtful stereotype — Topsy's name is bound up with that history, so it is a phrase to recognise in older books rather than one to use yourself. Second, in the story Topsy's point is sad, not cheerful: a child who does not know she has a mother or a birthday. The "grew and grew" reading came later and slightly misses what she was saying.