Sawyer Reevaluated
One enormous advantage enjoyed by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is that it has largely been left alone by academic commentators, and therefore proves less intimidating to read and teach than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which today lies buried under a thickening (though frequently brilliant) avalanche of scholarly studies. Not more than a few dozen academic articles and only a couple of individual monographs have been devoted to Tom Sawyer over the past century. The book has largely been ignored by university professors because it has been categorized as a children’s book and thus (at best) a dress rehearsal enabling Mark Twain’s imagination to ready itself for a masterly sequel.
However, when the novel first appeared in the nineteenth century the line between juvenile and adult fiction was far from definite. Adults and young people often shared their reading materials. The spectacular success of the Harry Potter series with broad audiences reminds us of that formerly blurry distinction between juvenile and adult fiction. For over a decade, bookstores and movie theaters teemed with crowds of children, teenagers, and parents each night that a new Harry Potter installment was released. Similarly, more than a century and a quarter earlier, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories in 1865 and 1872 were hardly restricted to young readers. It is worth noting that the charges on which Tom Sawyer is often arraigned (undue simplicity, overly obvious themes) have been applied as well to Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), most memorably by Flannery O’Connor but also recurrently by other commentators as well.
Slavery and Freedom in Tom Sawyer
A courageous feature of Tom Sawyer is that it fleetingly but valuably reminds us of an oppressive era of racism and slavery, though the subject is not treated nearly so pervasively and forcefully as in Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer contains several references to slavery, a brief appearance by a young African American slave named Jim (evidently Aunt Polly’s slave, and not to be confused with the adult Jim who will later accompany Huck), and casual talk by the boys about folk beliefs they learned from slaves. If these allusions to an inhumane institution (accompanied by instances of the n-word) rankle us by marring the picturesque village scenes, we should ask ourselves this question: Would we rather have a novel written about the American South of the 1840s that entirely avoids the existence of slavery? Many writers of the post-Civil War period were scrupulously omitting all traces of slavery and African Americans from their books; others were starting to idealize the antebellum plantation system and portray slavery, now abolished, as having been more dependent on domestic loyalty than latent brutality. Twain, however, elected to make slavery an integral part of his stories, and in the sequel to Tom Sawyer he would render its functioning as far from idyllic.
All the same, neither slavery nor liberation were intended to be at the core of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as they would be of its successor, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (note that for the latter book Twain dropped the definite article “The” from its title page, perhaps to better fit Huck’s vernacular narrative). Tom Sawyer is about escape, too, but basically an escape from the restraints and responsibilities of adulthood. Tom and his gang simply want to hang onto their boyhood, like the eternal boys in James Barrie’s play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904). Adults in Tom Sawyer check your clothing to see if you have been swimming, sentence you to oppressive chores like fence-painting, and try to keep you from graveyard-visiting and treasure-hunting. True, these same adults might also mourn your presumed loss by drowning with an elaborate funeral and come looking for you in a cave when you are missing. However, Tom and his pals are determined to resist the incursions of adult burdens as long as possible and to prolong their precious, untroubled, free and easy days through every available strategy.
Tom Sawyer and Nostalgia for Vanished Boyhoods
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the book by which Mark Twain at last found his way back to the boyhood village he had so long overlooked as a source of literary material, the discovery of which would make him internationally famous. As a travel writer he had ransacked Europe, the Holy Land, Nevada, California, and Hawaii for subjects about which to write. In 1875 he had belatedly gotten around to writing a series of recollections about his Mississippi River piloting days. With Tom Sawyer he finally moved back even further in his memories to recapture his Hannibal upbringing.
The very idea that a boy’s thought-processes and actions were worthy of recording in a novel was itself still an innovation in the nineteenth century, despite Charles Dickens’s steps in this direction. Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), an English writer and reformer, is credited with launching the investigations of boyish minds with Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), largely based on Hughes’s remembrances of loyalties and cruelties at Rugby School. It seems probable that Twain’s memories of early day Hannibal were jogged by the now-forgotten Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s semi-autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), the first true “boy book” in the United States, whose sentimental incidents were told somewhat archly. Aldrich’s Tom Bailey and his chums slip out of their homes at night, coalesce into a small gang, and play pranks on the upright citizens of their New England town. Twain scoffed at Aldrich’s Bad Boy on December 27, 1869, writing to the woman he would soon marry, Olivia Langdon, “ I could not admire the volume much.” Nevertheless in 1872 he began to experiment with the possibility of composing a work about his own Missouri boyhood. He aborted that effort, of which only a fragment known as “Boy’s Manuscript” survives, but in 1874 he got the novel underway that would rival and long outlast Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s creation, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which had a protagonist named “Tom,” just like Aldrich’s book). Other male writers such as William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Booth Tarkington would follow in Twain’s wake by evoking the fun and the terrors of boyhood, but only Harold Frederic’s evocative tales and Stephen Crane’s poignant Whilomville Stories (1900) deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Twain’s works.
The lengthy popularity of Tom Sawyer owes much to its high-spirited protagonist’s rule-breaking imagination and risk-taking energy. Twain’s book did not confine itself to real events; the word “adventures” in its title would set the pace. The memorable back-from-the-dead scene in the church when Tom and his friends show up victoriously at their own funeral is only one instance of the practical joking and other heedless antics that dominate the novel. Twain very likely was counting on the desire of his adult audience to leave behind the recent Civil War suffering and the deaths of 625,000 soldiers and retreat into nostalgic memories of a prelapsarian world. His Preface expressed a wish “to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked.”
The scenes in Tom Sawyer in which the boys camp on Jackson’s Island—fishing, swimming, cooking turtle eggs—bring to mind a best-seller that appeared in 2006, The Dangerous Book for Boys, a guidebook that described how to tan an animal skin, build a tree house, tell directions if lost, and master dozens of other backyard and outdoor skills. Certain reviewers carped that the book exposed boys to possible injuries, but the public, perhaps perceiving the book as an antidote to the burgeoning Play Station culture, propelled it to bestseller lists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Seen in this light, was not The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with all of its outdoor perils, in essence the prototypical Dangerous Book for Boys?
It is worth observing that Mark Twain once declared his novel to be a “hymn to boyhood.” As many commentators have noted, Twain’s choice of “St. Petersburg” (then the capital of Russia) as the name of the town for his setting subtly wraps the heavenly connotations associated with St. Peter around a town that offered a boy’s vision of paradisiacal diversions. Perhaps, then, there is relevance in the fact that young Sam Clemens can be said to have lost his own boyhood in the years after his father died prematurely in 1847, leaving the Clemens family insolvent. Sam Clemens was subsequently taken out of school by his older brother Orion and put to work for long hours in a print shop. That was the abrupt termination of his boyhood frolics. He could watch through the window as other boys passed by carrying fishing poles or with their hair wet from swimming.
British author Charles Dickens harbored that same sense of deprivation when his father’s debts compelled Dickens’s parents to withdraw him from school and set him to work in a dank, smelly bootblack factory in an industrial sector at the edge of the Thames River. Both authors would become famously