Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (37 page)

Mr. Samuel Clemens has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new book,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as yet known to fiction. The town where Tom Sawyer was born and brought up is some such idle shabby Mississippi River town as Mr. Clemens has so well described in his piloting reminiscences, but Tom belongs to the better sort of people in it, and has been bred to fear God and dread the Sunday-school according to the strictest rite of the faiths that have characterized all the respectability of the West. His subjection in these respects does not so deeply affect his inherent tendencies but that he makes himself a beloved burden to the poor, tender-hearted old aunt who brings him up with his orphan brother and sister, and struggles vainly with his manifold sins, actual and imaginary. The limitations of his transgressions are nicely and artistically traced. He is mischievous, but not vicious; he is ready for almost any depredation that involves the danger and honor of adventure, but profanity he knows may provoke a thunderbolt upon the heart of the blasphemer, and he almost never swears; he resorts to any stratagem to keep out of school, but he is not a downright liar, except upon terms of after shame and remorse that make his falsehood bitter to him. He is cruel, as all children are, but chiefly because he is ignorant; he is not mean, but there are very definite bounds to his generosity; and his courage is the Indian sort, full of prudence and mindful of retreat as one of the conditions of prolonged hostilities. In a word, he is a boy, and merely and exactly an ordinary boy on the moral side. What makes him delightful to the reader is that on the imaginative side he is very much more, and though every boy has wild and fantastic dreams, this boy cannot rest till he has somehow realized them. Till he has actually run off with two other boys in the character of a buccaneer and lived for a week on an island in the Mississippi, he has lived in vain; and this passage is but the prelude to more thrilling adventures, in which he finds hidden treasures, traces the bandits to their cave, and is himself lost in its recesses. The local material and the incidents with which his career is worked up are excellent, and throughout there is scrupulous regard for the boy’s point of view in reference to his surroundings and himself, which shows how rapidly Mr. Clemens has grown as an artist. We do not remember anything in which this propriety is violated, and its preservation adds immensely to the grown-up reader’s satisfaction in the amusing and exciting story. There is a boy’s love-affair, but it is never treated otherwise than as a boy’s love-affair. When the half-breed has murdered the young doctor, Tom and his friend, Huckleberry Finn, are really in their boyish terror and superstition, going to let the poor old town-drunkard be hanged for the crime, till the terror of that becomes unendurable. The story is a wonderful study of the boy-mind, which inhabits a world quite distinct from that in which he is bodily present with his elders, and in this lies its great charm and its universality, for boy-nature, however human nature varies, is the same everywhere.

The tale is very dramatically wrought, and the subordinate characters are treated with the same graphic force that sets Tom alive before us. The worthless vagabond, Huck Finn, is entirely delightful throughout, and in his promised reform his identity is respected: he will lead a decent life in order that he may one day be thought worthy to become a member of that gang of robbers which Tom is to organize. Tom’s aunt is excellent, with her kind heart’s sorrow and secret pride in Tom; and so is his sister Mary, one of those good girls who are born to usefulness and charity and forbearance and unvarying rectitude. Many village people and local notables are introduced in well-conceived character; the whole little town lives in the reader’s sense, with its religiousness, its lawlessness, its droll social distinctions, its civilization qualified by its slave-holding, and its traditions of the wilder West which has passed away. The picture will be instructive to those who have fancied the whole Southwest a sort of vast Pike County, and have not conceived of a sober and serious and orderly contrast to the sort of life that has come to represent the Southwest in literature.

—The Atlantic Monthly
(May 1876)

 

This tale of boy-life on the other side of the Atlantic will amuse many readers, old as well as young. There is a certain freshness and novelty about it, a practically romantic character, so to speak, which will make it very attractive. Desert islands and the like are all very well to read about, but boys know that they are not likely to come in their way; but an island in the Mississippi where they can really play Robinson Cru soe, catch fish to eat, and in a way, actually live like real runaways, looks true. Altogether, Tom Sawyer’s lot was cast in a region not so tamed down by conventionalities, as is that in which English boys are doomed to live. Hence he had rare opportunities, and saw rare sights, actual tragedies, which our tamer life is content to read about in books.

—July 15, 1876

 

A perusal of “Tom Sawyer” is as fair a test as one could suggest of anybody’s appreciation of the humorous. The drollery is often grotesque and extravagant, and there is at least as much in the queer Americanizing of the language as in the ideas it expresses. Practical people who pride themselves on strong common sense will have no patience with such vulgar trifling. But those who are alive to the pleasure of relaxing from serious thought and grave occupation will catch themselves smiling over every page and exploding outright over some of the choicer passages.

—August 28, 1976

Tom Sawyer, it is almost needless to remark, is an American, and his adventures are such as could only happen in a country where nature and novelists conduct their operations on a portentous scale. Mr. Twain is as daring as his hero. He heaps incident upon incident and impossibility upon impossibility with an assurance which is irresistible. We almost believe in Tom Sawyer while reading about him, and are ready to agree with some of his companions, who affirmed that, “he would be President yet if he escaped hanging.”

—October 28, 1876

 

It is exactly such a clever book as
Tom Sawyer
which is sure to leave its stamp on younger minds. We like, then, the true boyish fun of Tom and Huck, and have a foible for the mischief these children engage in. We have not the least objection that rough boys be the heroes of a story-book. Restless spirits of energy only require judicious training in order to bring them into proper use. “If your son wants to be a pirate,” says Mr. Emerson somewhere, “send him to sea. The boy may make a good sailor, a mate, maybe a Captain.” Without advocating the utter suppression of that wild disposition which is natural in many a fine lad, we think our American boys require no extra promptings. Both East and West our little people are getting to be men and women before their time. In the books to be placed, then, into children’s hands for purposes of recreation, we have a preference for those of a milder type than
Tom Sawyer.
Excitements derived from reading should be administered with a certain degree of circumspection. A sprinkling of salt in mental food is both natural and wholesome; any cravings for the contents of the castoras, the cayenne and the mustard, by children, should not be gratified. With less, then, of Injun Joe and “revenge,” and “slitting women’s ears,” and the shadow of the gallows, which throws an unnecessarily sinister tinge over the story, (if the book really is intended for boys and girls,) we should have liked
Tom Sawyer
better.

 

—January 13, 1877

 

Mark Twain smiles constantly at the absurd in Tom’s character, but he does not laugh Tom into insignificance or lecture him into the semblance of a puppet. Boys of Tom’s age can follow his fortunes without discomfort or boredom. At the same time, there are overtones which most juvenile fiction entirely lacks and which continue to delight those adults who Mark Twain said, upon finishing his story, alone would ever read it. At the moment he must have felt that the poetry and satire of
Tom Sawyer
outranked the narrative, and he was right. They have proved the permanent, at least the preservative, elements of a classic.

—
The American Novel
(1921)

1. During the composition of
Tom Sawyer,
Twain was apparently conflicted about whether he was writing a novel for children or for adults. What signs of this conflict do you see in the novel? Would you give a copy of
Tom Sawyer
to a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old?

2. What are the kinds of dramatic situations in
Tom Sawyer
that characteristically produce humor, and how is that humor related to Twain’s larger purposes for the novel? Analyze one scene that you find especially funny.

3. Think about the female figures in
Tom Sawyer
—including Becky Thatcher, Aunt Polly, the Widow Douglas, and Sereny Harper. How would you characterize their individual and collective roles in the novel?

4. In his introduction, H. Daniel Peck describes an opposition in
Tom Sawyer
between adulthood, civilization, and work, on the one hand, and childhood, nature, and play, on the other. Is Twain affirming the latter over the former? Is reconciliation between the two possible?

5. Is there a moral to the episode about whitewashing the fence? If so, what is the moral? How do you know? Could the moral be described as immoral?

6. Does the community of St. Petersburg, as Twain describes it in the novel, have a class system? If so, how is it organized and whose interests does it serve? What is its relation to democratic social values?

7. Carl Van Doren says that at the end Mark Twain “must have felt that the poetry and satire of
Tom Sawyer
outranked the narrative, and he was right.” Is Van Doren correct? Can these elements be separated?

8. In the years following the publication of
Tom Sawyer,
Twain’s works expressed an increasingly pessimistic view of human nature. Do you see hints of this view in
Tom Sawyer?
If so, which scenes in particular come to mind?

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