The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain


INTRODUCTION

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain’s “other” book, the one, it is said, that prepared the way for his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in which the hero of that work was born as a secondary figure. There is much truth in this formulation. Huck Finn is indeed Twain’s masterpiece, perhaps his only great novel. In directly engaging slavery, it far surpasses the moral depth of Tom Sawyer, and its brilliant first-person narration as well as its journey structure elevate it stylisti cally above the somewhat fragmentary and anecdotal Tom Sawyer. Yet it is important to understand Tom Sawyer in its own terms, and not just as a run-up to Huck Finn. It was, after all, Mark Twain’s best-selling novel during much of the twentieth century; and it has always had a vast international following. People who have never actually read the novel know its memorable episodes, such as the fence whitewashing scene, and its characters—Tom foremost among them—who have entered into national folklore. The appeal of Tom Sawyer is enduring, and it will be our purpose here to try to locate some of the sources of that appeal.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain’s first novel (the first he authored by himself),1 but it is hardly the work of an apprentice writer. By the time this book was published in 1876, Samuel L. Clemens was already well known by his pen name Mark Twain, which he had adopted in 1863 while working as a reporter in Nevada. At the time of the novel’s publication, he was in his early forties and beginning to live in an architect-designed home in Hartford, Connecticut. He had been married to his wife, Olivia, for six years, and two of his three daughters had been born.2
Up to this point, Twain had been known as a journalist, humorist, and social critic. His story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” first published in 1865, had made him famous, and the lecture tours he had given in the United States and England in these years had been well received. His books The Innocents Abroad (1869), which satirizes an American sightseeing tour of the Middle East that he covered for a newspaper, and Roughing It (1872), an account of the far west based on his own experiences there, were great successes. Both works were first published in subscription form, and they quickly advanced Twain’s reputation as a popular writer. His publication in 1873 of The Gilded Age, a book coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner dramatizing the excesses of the post-Civil War period, confirmed his place as a leading social critic.
Indeed, the America reflected in The Gilded Age—an America of greed, corruption, and materialism—may have driven Twain back imaginatively to what seemed to him a simpler time—to “those old simple days” (p. 199), as he refers to them in the concluding chapter of Tom Sawyer. The first significant sign of such a return in his publications was his nostalgic essay “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which appeared in 1875.3 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published the following year, belongs to this return to antebellum America, and to the scene of Twain’s growing up—Hannibal, Missouri. That the author was able to draw upon his deepest reserves of childhood imagination in this work certainly accounts for much of its appeal. A decade after its publication, he referred to the novel as a “hymn” to a forgotten era,4 and while this characterization oversimplifies The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it also points to key aspects of its composition and literary character.
In the novel, Twain renames Hannibal as St. Petersburg, thus suggesting, as John C. Gerber has said, St. Peter’s place, or heaven.5 But heaven, as Twain depicts it, is a real place. Many of the sites and topographical features are identifiable. Cardiff Hill, so important in the novel as a setting for children’s games such as Robin Hood, is Holliday’s Hill of Hannibal. Jackson’s Island, the scene of the boys’ life as “pirates,” is recognizable as Glasscock’s Island. And McDougal’s Cave, so central to the closing movement of the novel, has a real-life reference in McDowell’s cave. Human structures, like Aunt Polly’s house, as well as the schoolhouse and the church, were similarly modeled after identifiable buildings in Hannibal.
The autobiographical origins of the novel are also evident in the characters. In the preface, Twain says that “Huck Finn is drawn from life” (in part from a childhood friend named Tom Blankenship), and “Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew.” Schoolmates John Briggs and Will Bowen probably were two of the three boys after whom Tom was modeled, and a good bet for the third is young Sam Clemens himself. Many of Tom’s qualities resemble Twain’s descriptions of his young self, and several of Tom’s experiences—such as being forced by Aunt Polly to take the Painkiller and sitz baths—reflect the author’s own. Aunt Polly herself has several characteristics that link her to Sam Clemens’s mother, Jane Clemens. And scholars have found Hannibal counterparts for many of the other characters, including Becky Thatcher, Joe Harper, and Ben Rogers, as well as the widow Douglas and the town’s minister, schoolteacher, and doctor.
But these reference points in the local history of Hannibal are just the surface aspects of the novel’s autobiographical dimension. In 1890 Twain reported to his friend Brander Matthews that the writing of Tom Sawyer had been accompanied for him by a series of vivid memories from his youth in rural Missouri. These memories, Twain said, became a force in the composition of the novel as he “harvested” them, and brought them into his developing narrative.6 Indeed, the highly episodic character of the novel suggests a stringing together of remembrances. Some of the book’s most evocative scenes clearly draw their power from childhood, which Twain filters through a vision of youth and nature reminiscent of Rousseau or even Wordsworth. For example, chapter 16, set on Jackson’s Island, begins with Tom, Joe, and Huck in a scene of summer reverie:
After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each other’s faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other with averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms, and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time (p. 97).
Twain’s whole career, up to this point, had been characterized by his ability to turn scenes of romantic sensibility abruptly into burlesque. He follows this pattern at many points in Tom Sawyer, but not here. Instead, he allows the moment to stand, unqualified and undiminished. There is perhaps no better instance in the novel of its sources in childhood reverie. The episode testifies to the fact that Mark Twain discovered childhood, during the writing of Tom Sawyer, as a particularly rich source of imaginative power. This power informs not just his “children‘s” books, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but all his works—such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)—that depend on a perspective of innocence in their central characters.
Yet, while we recognize a fundamental source of the novel’s power in Twain’s remembrance and recreation of childhood—and can find much of young Sam Clemens in Tom Sawyer—one of the most interesting things about the book’s composition is how long the author remained uncertain of its proper audience. (This uncertainty is especially notable when we consider that Tom Sawyer has long been regarded a classic of children’s literature.) As late as the summer of 1875, when Twain was completing a full draft of the manuscript, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, “It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.”7
If Twain was, even at this late stage, imagining Tom Sawyer as a book for adults, then what kind of book did he have in mind? The answer is in the novel itself—in those scenes, especially, where the credulity, ignorance, hypocrisy, and class consciousness of the people of St. Petersburg are exposed. These scenes, were they to be excerpted and isolated from the narrative, would read as pure satire or social critique. In other words, they would have much in common with Twain’s earlier works such as The Innocents Abroad and The Gilded Age.
Mark Twain’s agent for exposing the shortcomings, and shortsight edness, of St. Petersburg’s adult population is of course Tom, who consistently subverts the social order. His release during the church service of the pinch-bug whose bite sends the poodle “sailing up the aisle” (p. 39) is a literal disruption of that order, and his hilarious (to the reader) volunteering of David and Goliath as the first two disciples makes a mockery of Bible study. Tom disorders the society of St. Petersburg most dramatically by craftily organizing the public ridicule of one of its most austere members. The “severe” schoolmaster—whose wig is lifted from him, exposing his “gilded” head, in chapter 21—comes in for an uproarious put-down. This chapter is a good example of the way in which Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain are twinned protagonists, for here the narrator joins Tom in the fun. He cannot resist an extended autho rial send-up of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentality, as expressed in the declamatory “compositions” performed by St. Petersburg’s young people on Examination Evening:
A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of “fine language”; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification (p. 126).
One can sense Samuel Clemens himself “squirming” over “the glaring insincerity of these sermons” (p. 126), and, as if to vent himself of their influence, he concludes this chapter by quoting verbatim several “compositions” taken from an actual volume of nineteenth-century sentimental literature.
In this satiric (adult) strain of the book’s presentation, Tom Sawyer becomes the vehicle not only of childhood reverie and play, but also the vehicle of biting social criticism—and not just of Hannibal, Missouri, but of the whole of American rural life that it represents. In this sense, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be understood as a predecessor of early-twentieth-century works, such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), that depict the narrowness of life in the provinces. Perhaps Anderson, who was indebted to Twain for his cultivation of American vernacular language, is the better example, because Anderson’s vision of small-town life is not solely critical. Winesburg, like Tom Sawyer, exhibits the author’s affection for the lost world that it recounts. But Winesburg is, in tone and structure, a far more unified literary presentation than is Tom Sawyer, and this fact returns us to the issue of Mark Twain’s divided agenda.
This divided agenda is reflected in Twain’s plans for composition. On the very first page of the manuscript of the novel, he had made the following notation:
I, Boyhood & youth; 2 y & early manh; 3 the Battle of Life in many lands; 4 (age 37 to [40?],) return & meet grown babies & toothless old drivelers who were the grandees of his boyhood. The Adored Unknown a [illegible] faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.8
Scholars can tell from the manuscript’s internal evidence that Twain made this note early in the novel’s composition—possibly at the very beginning of that composition, and certainly before it had advanced beyond the fifth chapter. From the start, then, Twain had imagined “growing” Tom into adulthood, having him travel abroad and return, in his forties (Twain’s own age when he was composing the novel), to St. Petersburg. Here, Tom would discover that his most enchanted objects of childhood memory had become disenchanted. Becky Thatcher, surely the “Adored Unknown,” would have become a “faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.”
In other words, Becky, and presumably every other aspect of village life that Tom had once valued, would be shown up for the disappointing things they really are. Or, from another perspective, this disenchantment of a once enchanted world would show how small-town American rural life inevitably stifled the human potential for growth and change. It appears that the Tom Sawyer of this version of the novel would have been one of Twain’s classic outsider figures, like Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, whose status as an outsider is used to expose the failures of an established cultural order.
But we’ll never know precisely how Twain would have handled this return to St. Petersburg and what precise purposes of social criticism he would have made of it, because this is the book he didn’t write. The one he did write ended with Tom locked forever in childhood—a childhood that has lived timelessly in the American imagination for the past century and a quarter. Many readers have noted that Twain never discloses Tom’s exact age, thus leaving him always in a state bordering late childhood and early adolescence, but never advancing beyond that point. The novel, as we have it, thus stands in stark contrast to Twain’s early outline, where his hero voyages stage by stage (through an actual chronology of aging) on the river of life.
Whatever changed Mark Twain’s mind remains mysterious. But it seems clear that sometime between the fall of 1874 and the spring of 1875 he decided to conclude the novel with Tom’s childhood. (In the autumn of 1875, he confirmed the matter by writing to Howells, “I have finished the story and didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood.”)9 Even so, he continued to understand this story of a boy’s life as fundamentally a vehicle for adult satire. As noted earlier, Twain had sent the recently completed manuscript to Howells during the summer of 1875, insisting that the book “is written only for adults.” Howells, after reading the manuscript, told Twain that he felt that the novel’s satirical elements were too dominant, and he had some advice: “I think you should treat it explicitly as a boy’s story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do; and if you should put it forth as a study of boy character from the grown-up point of view, you’d give the wrong key to it.”10
Howells, as America’s preeminent man of letters, had great influence on Twain, and his counsel—as well as that of Twain’s wife, Olivia, who agreed with Howells about making this a children’s book—must have weighed heavily on the author. Yet, while Twain made some changes toward greater propriety in the language of certain passages, he does not appear to have extensively revised the novel beyond this point. When published the following year, it continued to betray a striking division between satire and romance. This division can be described along an axis that forms between the scene of the boys frolicking on the shore at Jackson’s Island, and the devastating cultural critique of “‘Examination’ day” in chapter 21. Most chapters of the book contain both elements, in a sometimes uneasy relation to one another.
Twain’s divided purposes, and uncertainty about his audience, are reflected in the novel’s preface, where he attempted to reconcile its disparate elements and perspectives: “Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.”
In underestimating in his preface the satirical force of the novel, Twain attempted to soften the sharp division of elements that the book actually exhibits. (The preface thus represents a concession to Howells, at least in the way that Twain initially addresses his readers.) This division has led some critics to fault The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for its apparent lack of narrative coherence. Part social critique, part boyhood reverie, the novel in this view never quite seems to know what it is or what it wants to say. Formally, according to this view, the division expresses itself in a randomness of selection and a highly episodic character. These qualities are certainly present in the first part of the novel (especially the first eight chapters), which contains some of the work’s most famous set pieces, including the fence whitewashing scene in chapter 2. Most of these early chapters seem to have been developed by Twain from previously written sketches, and the sketch, of course, is the form in which earlier he had honed his skills as a humorist, a lecturer, and a journalist.
What Mark Twain had not learned, up to this point in his career, was how to sustain a plot—that is, how to organize his material into a coherent narrative—and he may well have understood the writing of Tom Sawyer as just this kind of challenge. To the degree that the novel does ultimately hold together (I myself believe it does, for reasons I will offer shortly), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer represents a significant turning point, and an artistic advance, in the writer’s career. It prepared the way not only for his great work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he was already conceiving as he concluded Tom Sawyer, but for all his longer works of fiction—including A Connecticut Yankee and The Tragedy of Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894). And while the ordering of a plot would never become one of Twain’s strengths, his writing of Tom Sawyer showed him that he was ready to move beyond the sketch, and that he was now capable of working in a more capacious and textured genre.


How, then, might this uneven and anecdotal novel—so dependent on specific childhood memories of the author, and so given to pointed critiques of social custom—be said to hold together as a narrative performance? The chief vehicle for unity is Tom Sawyer himself. To say that Tom dominates this book is an understatement; he is the central figure in every possible meaning of the phrase. Tom is both the principal actor and the stage-manager of the novel, and the theatrical metaphor applies in several respects.
The form of the novel as a series of individualized, and often self-contained, scenes has its counterpart in Tom’s own theatricality. Life is a drama to him, and he has peopled it with figures and adventures from romantic literature and legend. That he often has the references wrong only adds to the fun, and does not make his imagination any less literary. Tom does everything “by the book” (p. 58), which is to say that he gives a literary overlay to virtually every activity in which he engages—from his romance with Becky to his direction of games such as Robin Hood.
The games, in particular, reveal how important to the fictional world of this novel are language and speech. Nothing in these games can take on actual power, or legitimacy, unless the language is right; Tom is the insistent monitor of legitimacy, the novel’s gate-keeper of language. Speech casts a spell over everything (the children’s superstitions, expressed by verbal incantations at several points, are merely one aspect of that spell), and, like Ariel’s song in the The Tempest, Tom’s language charms the world he inhabits. In a broader sense, Tom lives by language, as can be seen in his various verbal encounters with the adult world. For example, his deft wordplay with Aunt Polly in extricating himself from numerous scrapes shows his brilliance at this game, the game of language. The juxtaposition implied in “wordplay” is one of the most important elements in the novel.
In all these ways, Tom’s gift for language—the way he spins a world into being and sustains it according to his “rules”—helps to hold this otherwise unruly narrative together. But it also holds Tom together. Without this distinctive aspect of his character, we would be left with an exceedingly unfocused view of him. His undeterminable age is but one aspect of the indefiniteness of his rendering by Twain. For example, Tom’s identity as an orphan is a fact begging for explanation, yet none is ever offered. And, as numerous commentators have observed, we never learn what Tom looks like; our visualization of him depends altogether on the work of generations of illustrators, who have fancied him variously in his overalls and straw hat.
If we as readers depend on Tom’s verbal gifts for our sense of his identity, he himself needs them to negotiate the social structure of St. Petersburg, because the actual power in this book is overwhelmingly on the side of the adults. Aunt Polly, in fact, is among the more benign figures in the adult world of St. Petersburg, and one needs only to glance at that world to see what a disappointing gathering of humanity it is. From the respectable Judge Thatcher, at the top of the social scale, to the town drunkard, there is little here for a child to embrace. Top to bottom, this world is characterized by hypocrisy, social pretension, false piety, and self-interest. No one is spared, except perhaps some marginal figures like “the Welshman” whose benevolent presence and actions (rescuing the widow Douglas from Injun Joe) are necessary to furthering the plot.
For Tom and his friends, the most onerous adults in St. Petersburg are those, like the schoolmaster, with institutional authority, because their power over children has been officially sanctioned by society. And characteristically they use their power against the children, as the schoolmaster’s whipping of Tom in chapter 20 illustrates. Indeed, this is a novel structured by oppositions, and the opposition of children and adults, as Twain represents it, points to a larger one, that of civilization versus nature. Spatially, the boys retreat from St. Petersburg (from home and school and church) to Jackson’s Island and Cardiff Hill, and temporally they retreat from their school year into the freedom of summer.
The very word that titles the novel, “adventures,” suggests these twinned flights into time and space, which in turn suggest Freud’s classic formulation of civilization and its discontents. Here, work is the enemy; it is, in the narrator’s words, “whatever a body is obliged to do,” and the self finds fulfillment and pleasure in the opposite of work, which is to say, “play”: “Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do” (p. 18). These phrases come from the chapter in which Tom, through deception, turns his own (onerous) work of whitewashing the fence into the pleasure of others (as well as his own profit), showing how deeply, if instinctively, he himself understands the formulation.
To accommodate a vision of retreat from the adult world of work and the confinement of institutional forms like school and church, Twain renders the world of his novel as one long summer idyll. This quality works to give Tom Sawyer a firm unity of time and place, another aspect of its scenic presentation. Unlike Huck Finn, which transports its hero relentlessly away from St. Petersburg into unknown and threatening worlds downriver, Tom Sawyer holds its characters within a tightly circumscribed field of action, never allowing that action to venture farther than a few miles from the community, which forms the moral center of the novel.
And while the community has many objectionable qualities for Tom and his friends, he is always drawn back to it. His opposition to the community, in fact, forms his relation to that community and, ironically, binds him to it. When Tom, Huck, and Joe camp on Jackson’s Island, Joe soon becomes homesick, and even Huck begins to long for the familiar “doorsteps and empty hogsheads” (p. 90) that serve as his home in St. Petersburg. Tom alone appears to hold out for a pirate’s life, yet, under the cover of darkness and unknown to Huck and Joe, he makes a return to Aunt Polly’s house, where (we learn only later) he plans to leave her a signal that he is safe. This nighttime journey can serve to symbolize Tom’s attachment to community and home, and this attachment has its climactic dramatization in the boys’ surprise appearance at their own funeral. The members of the community, so glad and relieved at the boys’ return that they don’t mind being duped, give Tom exactly the kind of tumultuous approbation he most desires. This was, the narrator tells us, “the proudest moment of [Tom‘s] life” (p. 107). As many commentators have observed, Tom’s “rebirth” in this scene is figured specifically as a rebirth into society.
Tom’s need for the community’s approbation qualifies his status as a rebel. His subversive acts must always be seen within the context of his larger identification with the established order, an identification that Judge Thatcher acknowledges when he predicts for Tom enrollment in the National Military Academy and later in “the best law school in the country” (p. 200). There is nothing in Tom’s actions that ever approaches the authentic subversiveness of Huck’s decision, in Huckleberry Finn, to go to hell for trying to steal a black man, Jim, out of slavery. Unlike Huck, Tom is fundamentally a “good” boy, which is to say a boy acculturated to society’s norms, though he acts out his goodness in “bad” ways.
There is a literary context for this kind of boy. In writing Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was participating in a recently formed genre of American fiction that sought to unsettle the old “good boy-bad boy” dichotomy of earlier moralistic literature. Twain himself had worked in this genre in sketches he had written earlier, and in 1869 Thomas Bailey Aldrich published The Story of a Bad Boy, which demonstrated the suitability of the theme for longer narratives.
Such works, which turned the “bad boy” into a kind of American hero by showing his inner goodness, laid out several paradigms of youthful behavior, and all of them make their appearance in Tom Sawyer. Along with the “bad boy,” represented by Tom, Twain gives us the “good boy” in the person of Tom’s half-brother, Sid, who relentlessly reports Tom’s misdeeds to Aunt Polly. Even more objectionable than “good boy” Sid is the “Model Boy of the village” (p. 10), Willie Mufferson, who took “as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass”: “The boys all hated him, he was so good” (p. 35). A variation on the Model Boy is Alfred Temple, “that St. Louis smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is aristocracy” (p. 114), whose presence in the novel serves to sharpen Twain’s exploration of class issues, and of tensions between urban and rural life. Country boy Tom vying with the “St. Louis smarty” for Becky’s affections will bring to mind for some readers the novels of Jane Austen and other English novels of manners.
On one level, the narrative proceeds by gradually revealing Tom’s inner goodness. The early chapters are organized by a series of his capers, which illustrate just how “bad” he can be. But later in the novel we learn about his “harassed conscience” (p. 139), which leads him courageously to testify at Muff Potter’s trial. And near the book’s conclusion we witness the sensitivity he shows toward Becky’s feelings when the two of them are lost in the cave. This episode illustrates not only Tom’s compassion and courage, but also his respectability; he and Becky in these scenes have about them the aspect of a middle-class couple.
While Twain did not invent American fiction of the good-bad boy (it has its still deeper background in European picaresque fiction, and in the novels of Dickens), he used it for his own distinctive purposes of social criticism. For these purposes, in the context of this novel, he needed a figure who systematically challenges the established order even as he firmly belongs to it. This role places Tom in a somewhat unusual position among Twain’s heroes. He is not an outsider figure in the radical way that Huck most certainly is in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the way that Hank Morgan is in A Connecticut Yankee. Nor does he really resemble Twain’s classic outsider, the man that corrupted Hadleyburg, in Twain’s story of that title (1899). Unlike all of these figures, Tom is equally an outsider and an insider. He is the only character in the novel, for example, who consistently negotiates the divide between the worlds of children and adults, and is the only one who speaks to both sides.
At the end of the novel, Tom begins to move more fully toward the adult world, though never quite into it. As we have noted, the compassion he shows toward Becky when the two of them are lost in the cave exhibits a degree of maturity that we had not seen in him before. And his coming into wealth through his and Huck’s discovery of the treasure automatically elevates his social standing. Most telling, perhaps, is the closing scene, in which Tom persuades Huck (through trickery) to return to the home of the widow Douglas and to live under her civilizing influence. Tom’s heart is, in his own words, “close to home” (p. 191).
That Tom is ultimately a conciliating figure has partly to do with the form of the novel. As we have said, before the writing of Tom Sawyer Twain’s most characteristic form had been the sketch, which required neither full and convincing characterizations nor an extended plot. In its informality and highly vernacular qualities, the sketch (with its origins in southwestern humor and the tall tale) offered Twain a large measure of freedom. It encouraged his most unruly impulses and his boldest humor. Beyond the punch line, or the outrageous turn of events, nothing had to be followed up or made coherent. The novel, on the other hand, necessitated the coordination of character and plot, and the coordination of one subplot with another.
Tom Sawyer is flawed in this respect (the five or so subplots relate to one another only imperfectly), and Twain knew that this was true. At one point in the composition of the work, he wrote to Howells, “There is no plot to the thing.”11 But overall this was the fullest narrative that Twain had ever written, and ultimately it does hold together. In relation to his character Tom Sawyer, whose presence gives the novel its coherence, this fullness of narrative meant the obligation to “plot” an actual life and its continuity, and to render some form of convincing development. And while this development, contrary to Twain’s initial plan, ended with Tom still in childhood, that childhood itself demonstrates a certain measure of growth.
In a sketch Tom Sawyer might well have been less respectable than he ultimately turns out to be. His impish, and impious, qualities would, in this other narrative context, have been given free reign. The whole point would have been the way some pivotal action of Tom’s had driven a tall tale to its climax. In the more capacious narrative space of a novel, however, one action is necessarily followed by another, and together they form an aggregate that adds up to something like “character.” In this way, Tom’s “badness” is contained and redeemed by the narrative form itself.
Without the novel’s longer development, Tom’s extraordinary capacity for self-absorption—his “vicious vanity” (p. 112)—might well remain for us his defining characteristic. Aunt Polly is not wrong when she calls attention to Tom’s supreme “selfishness” (p. 116). And, as readers, we are frequently witnesses to his maudlin self- pity. Furthermore, we know what a habitual and self-interested liar he is. Tom lies so steadily and successfully, and in so many different human situations, that his relation to the reader risks destabilization. In the moment, we never quite know whether he is telling the truth or not.
But as the plot unfolds, we are able to sort this matter out (through a series of revelations), and in doing so we learn that, for the most part, Tom’s deceptions have been harmless or even motivated by good intentions; they fall into the category of what Aunt Polly calls the “blessed, blessed lie” (p. 117). Judge Thatcher, after all, declares that Tom’s taking the blame for Becky’s transgression at school is “a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie” (p. 200). Even so, there is no escaping the fact that Tom often exhibits an instinctive aversion to the truth, and that he takes enormous pleasure in his lies—a function, in part, of his romantic imagination and his gift at wordplay. (His role as a kind of fabulist suggests another area of kinship with his creator Mark Twain.) But, again, the novel itself, in its larger rationalization and ordering of Tom’s actions, creates a benign context for his lies.
Just as the form of the novel can be said to validate Tom’s character, it also validated Mark Twain’s role as a man of letters. The first full-scale novel he had completed, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (though it was not enthusiastically received when first published in 1876) brought him into the company of writers like his friend William Dean Howells. In this work, Twain demonstrated his capacity to weave the longer tapestries of fiction, and to elaborate them with his richest materials of memory, humor, and social criticism. Though an immature and experimental work, flawed by divided purposes, Tom Sawyer nevertheless contains all the elements of the writer’s genius. Generations of readers have been content to ignore the flaws, and have given over their imaginations to Mark Twain’s “hymn” to childhood.


H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College, where he has served as Director of the American Culture Program and the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of Thoreau‘s Morning Work (1990) and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (1977), both published by Yale University Press. Professor Peck is the editor of the The Green American Tradition (1989) and New Essays on “The Last of the Mohicans” (1993), as well as the Penguin Classics editions A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851 and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He is also editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cooper’s The Deerslayer. A past chairman of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Professor Peck is a contributor to the Columbia Literary History of the United States and the Heath Anthology of American Literature. He has been the recipient of two senior research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. For the National Endowment, he has directed two Summer Institutes for College and University Faculty, and a national conference on “American Studies and the Undergraduate Humanities Curriculum.” Recently he was a fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was working on a developing study of landscape in American literary and visual art. Professor Peck lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with his wife Patricia B. Wallace.


Acknowledgments. Professor Peck’s research assistant, Matthew Saks, who graduated from Vassar College in 2003 as recipient of the Alice D. Snyder Prize for overall excellence in English, assisted in developing the explanatory notes for this volume; he also helped Professor Peck think through the issues raised in the introduction. Patricia B. Wallace, Professor of English at Vassar College, provided an illuminating and extremely helpful reading of the introduction.
Notes to the Introduction
1 Twain had earlier coauthored, with Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (1873), a fictional social critique of the post-Civil War era in America.
2 Twain’s Hartford home, which he moved into in 1874 when the structure was still unfinished, was designed by Edward T. Potter. Twain and his family lived in this house from this point until 1891. His marriage to Olivia Langdon, of Elmira, New York, took place in 1870, and his daughters Susy and Clara were born, respectively, in 1872 and 1874.
3 This work was later included in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883).
4 In a letter of 1887, Twain wrote, “Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air” (Mark Twain’s Letters, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), p. 477.
5 “Foreword” to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. xiii. This authoritative scholarly edition of the novel contains important information about its composition, and has explanatory notes that were useful in developing the notes for this volume.
6 The word “harvested” is Matthews‘s, but it appears to describe accurately the process that Twain was recounting to him. See Brander Matthews, The Tocsin of Revolt and Other Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1922), p. 265. In 1870, just after Twain’s marriage, he had an exchange of letters with a childhood friend, Will Bowen, to whom he wrote: “The fountains of my great deep are broken up & I have rained reminiscences for four & twenty hours.” Many of these “reminiscences,” as Charles A. Norton has pointed out, can be found reconfigured as episodes of Tom Sawyer, and they clearly were a generative force in the novel’s composition. See Charles A. Norton, Writing “Tom Sawyer”: The Adventures of a Classic (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983), pp. 49-51.
7 Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872-1910, 2 vols., edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 1, p. 91.
8 The manuscript of the novel is preserved in the Riggs Memorial Library of Georgetown University. A facsimile version, published in 1982, is accompanied by an illuminating introduction by Paul Baender: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: A Facsimile of the Author’s Holograph Manuscript (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America), 1982.
9 Mark Twain’s Letters, pp. 258-259.
10 Mark Twain-Howells Letters, vol. 1, p. 110.
11 Twain wrote this letter in June 1876. See Mark Twain-Howells Letters, vol. 1, pp. 87-88.



PREFACE

Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.
The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West1 at the period of this story—that is to say, thirty or forty years ago.
Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.
THE AUTHOR

Hartford, 1876