1906 Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine moves in with the fam ily.
1907 Twain travels to Oxford University to receive an honorary Doc tor of Letters degree.
1908 He settles in Redding, Connecticut, at Stormfield, the mansion that is his final home.
1909 Twain’s daughter Clara marries; the author dons his Oxford robe for the ceremony. His daughter Jean dies.
1910 Twain travels to Bermuda for his health. He develops heart prob lems and, upon his return to Stormfield, dies, leaving behind a cache of unpublished work.
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 especi
ally 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 enterpr
ises 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.
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