Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Alan Gribben

of Tom Sawyer was equally purposeful. In Twain’s telling, the river village knows most residents by their ethnicity. Its severe schoolmaster has a Scottish title (“dominie”), the villain disguises himself as a “Spaniard,” a boy of “German parentage” recites a prodigious number of Bible verses, Huck Finn summons “the Welchman” to help the Widow Douglas, and so forth. Within this context the skulking villain’s mixed ethnic identity seems crucial in comprehending why he feels alienated from the other St. Petersburg townspeople, and why this marginalized figure might be tempted to strike out at one or more of the villagers who look down on him. Twain may have been capitalizing on the popular “Indian” stock character on the American stage; in melodramas like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana the surviving remnants of Native American tribes had been portrayed as implacably vengeful and bloodthirsty if angered. The offspring of an interracial relationship, Twain’s character has been stranded by the receding Western frontier. He resembles an actual mixed-race alcoholic with whom Sam Clemens was familiar as a boy in Hannibal and whom Twain’s Autobiography would recall. There are sixty-eight repetitions of the outcast Joe’s name in Tom Sawyer preceded by an antiquated racial sobriquet, the most insulting form of “Indian.” (Of course, the very name “Indian” itself commemorates a misnomer, perpetuated by erring explorers and cartographers eager for a new trade route to India.) Twain’s ethnic innuendo does provide a motivation for Injun Joe’s animosity toward the town’s residents, and perhaps this is why there are also eight slighting references in Tom Sawyer to Joe’s “half-breed” status.

      Reasons to Read Tom Sawyer Before Huckleberry Finn

      For a hundred years The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) sold more copies than any of Twain’s other writings, and it has never once been out of print. Gradually this novel has become synonymous with our national literary reputation, even though midway through the twentieth century English professors imposed an implacable division between Tom Sawyer, with its limited village environs, and Huckleberry Finn, which features an eventful journey by raft in search of freedom. Part of the explanation for why Tom Sawyer nonetheless still holds a prominent place in the annals of American literature is that it contributed a fresh, flexible narrative voice to the art of novel-writing, replacing the stilted, artificial syntax of British fiction and the convoluted prose of American writers who emulated those cumbersome sentence structures. Twain had perfected this colloquial tone of addressing an audience in his preceding travel books and now applied that same relaxed, ingratiating style to his first solo novel. Chapter 7, for instance, deftly describes Tom Sawyer’s ennui in the schoolroom:

      The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his ideas wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It seemed to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was utterly dead. There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days. The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in the flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance; a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other living thing was visible but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom’s heart ached to be free or else to have something of interest to do to pass the dreary time.

      This was also the book in which Twain developed his ability to narrate moments of effective suspense, as in Chapter 26 when Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are trapped in a deserted dwelling after two outlaws enter and discover the boys’ treasure-hunting tools. Tom and Huck watch anxiously through knotholes in the planking of the attic floor as the men plot a crime and—in the act of burying their own loot—accidentally uncover the treasure of an infamous land pirate, John Murrell. The boys’ jubilation at witnessing this immense discovery soon turns to fear as Injun 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 shivers 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—Injun Joe’s!”

      Realism Overtakes Romanticism

      The Adventures of 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 paints humble buildings and natural, uninflated 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 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 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 The Adventures 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