Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Alan Gribben

pirate, John Murrell. The boys’ jubilation at witnessing this immense discovery soon turns to fear as Indian Joe wonders, “Who could have brought those tools here? Do you reckon they can be upstairs?” When Joe turns and starts toward the stairway, the boys cringe in terror. That episode prefigures an incident in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) in which young Jim Hawkins falls asleep in an apple barrel and overhears Long John Silver recruiting pirates to seize the ship and find Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Jim Hawkins freezes in trepidation when Silver asks one of the sailors to fetch him an apple out of the barrel where Jim is hiding. Chapter 31 of Twain’s novel contains an equally suspenseful scene when Tom, lost in a dark cave, welcomes the sight of “a human hand, holding a candle, [which] appeared from behind a rock,” whereupon “Tom lifted up a shout,” only to see the hand “followed by the body it belonged to—Indian Joe’s!”

      Realism Overtakes Romanticism

      Tom Sawyer departed from literary conventions by jabbing at British romantic writers and clichéd children’s books, notifying readers that the age of literary Realism had arrived in the United States. The narrator evokes a period only three decades previous to the 1870s, not the far romantic past; delineates ordinary undistinguished characters of middle and lower-class standing rather than highborn heroes; and utilizes natural and unexaggerated buildings and landscapes. Twain was having fun at the expense of older English romantic authors by showing Tom sobbingly grieve over his love interest, Becky Thatcher, and ludicrously misconstrue nearly all of his revered literary “authorities.” Twain would develop this humorous tactic more fully in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Tom Sawyer misguidedly quotes his outmoded Romantic books relentlessly and, in Chapter 13, a sinking steamboat is named Walter Scott after the deceased but still esteemed author of Ivanhoe, Redgauntlet, Kenilworth, and other historical novels.

      These parodies did not prevent vestiges of Romanticism from clinging to Twain’s Tom Sawyer in the form of disguises, graveyards, corpse-stealing, buried treasure, a haunted house, and a candle-lit chase through a cave. Indeed, elements of Romanticism and Realism clearly vie throughout the story. Twain’s novel helpfully illustrates the overlapping of two literary periods, despite his amusing satires directed at the school of writing from which he was diverging.

      Tom Sawyer Reevaluated

      One enormous advantage enjoyed by Tom Sawyer is that it has largely been left alone by academic commentators, and therefore proves less intimidating to read and teach than 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.

      At the time that Twain’s novel about boys first appeared, 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 literature. 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 a total of nine 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 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