Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Original Text Edition
Edited by Alan Gribben
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2012 by NewSouth Books. Introduction, notes, and texts copyright 2012 by Alan Gribben. Reproduction of any part without explicit written permission from the editor and publisher is strictly forbidden. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60306-239-8
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-240-4
The illustrations on pages 2, 35, and 39 are from the first edition of Tom Sawyer (1876).
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Contents
Editor’s Introduction: The Original Text Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Selected Relevant Print and Digital Works
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Afterword: Satirical Targets in Tom Sawyer
The holograph manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is held by the Georgetown University Library.
The Original Text Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Alan Gribben
Mark Twain envisioned a cohesiveness between his most celebrated novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Nevertheless, ever since the mid-twentieth century these two works have customarily been separated by publishers, libraries, and bookstores, with Tom Sawyer relegated to “Juvenile” or “Young Adult” catalogs and Huckleberry Finn elevated to “Adult” lists, as though they have almost no relationship to each other. Severance of the two books has proceeded in spite of evidence that Twain wrote the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn soon after completing the manuscript for Tom Sawyer, and the fact that Huckleberry Finn announces in the sequel’s very first sentence, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.’” Moreover, characters and settings are shared by both novels.
Twain even attempted to ensure that sample copies of Tom Sawyer were carried by his “canvassers” who fanned out through neighborhoods and farmlands to take book orders for Twain’s forthcoming Huckleberry Finn. (For nearly thirty years Mark Twain’s works were sold only through these “subscription” agents and could not be obtained in retail bookstores, a lucrative but somewhat disreputable practice for an author of his stature.) Twain recommended to his publisher that customers purchasing both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn be given a reduced price on the set. However, since Twain had left the press that brought out Tom Sawyer in 1876—and was rebelliously publishing Huckleberry Finn under the imprint of his own company—tangled negotiations with his previous firm prevented this joint sale of the volumes from materializing. Difficulties inherent in Twain’s serial stages of plot development meant that the sequel to Tom Sawyer did not issue in the United States until 1885. By that time even his most loyal readers had trouble thinking of the books as forming a seamless story, with the result that customers usually elected to order Huckleberry Finn in a green cover rather than the available blue cloth that would have matched the cover of the earlier Tom Sawyer.
Language in the Original Text Editions
In addition to this artificial and regrettable dividing of Twain’s paired stories, two racial slurs in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer have increasingly presented a problem for teachers, students, and general readers. Twain, it should be remembered, was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s; accordingly he employed in his novel a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves, and tagged the villain with a deprecating racial label for Native Americans. Although the adult “Mark Twain” narrator of Tom Sawyer is himself careful to use the then-respectful terms “colored” and “negro” in Chapter 1, the boys refer to slaves eight times with the bigoted n-word (and it also makes one other appearance). In the 1870s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of either African American or Native American readers regarding pejorative racial appellatives. These population groups were too occupied with trying, in the one case, to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of segregation policies, and in the other case to survive disease epidemics and the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters who had decimated their ways of life, to bother about objectionable vocabulary choices in popular books.
When Samuel L. Clemens (who would adopt the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863) was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, his views on slavery were in keeping with those of his fellow villagers. His father, significantly, had owned as many slaves as he could afford. In a letter written when he was seventeen, Sam Clemens mockingly alluded to Northern people attempting to free slaves as “infernal abolitionists” (August 23, 1853). But as an adult, after he had traveled widely and read more, he courted and married (in 1870) a woman whose New York State family had vehemently opposed slavery long before the Civil War. Twain ultimately made an unreserved turnabout from his younger attitudes, so much so that in 1874 he wrote a profoundly touching account of how the slave system had cruelly split up African American families—“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” A similar impulse would lead Twain to portray Huckleberry Finn in the follow-up to Tom Sawyer as (in Twain’s summation in one of his notebooks) a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”—that is to say, someone reared amid such pervasive prejudice that he had a hard time seeing through its premises.
We should try to recognize Twain’s incentive as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, including even abusive racial insults. Twain’s two books do not deserve ever to join that list of literary “classics” he once humorously defined as books “which people praise and don’t read.” Virtually all commentators agree that a single debasing label—the hurtful n-word—should not be allowed to overwhelm every other consideration about the merits of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What these novels have to offer readers hardly depends upon this one indefensible verbal designation. As vital components of the American identity and heritage, they should maintain their important places in classrooms and libraries.
Mark