University of Strathclyde

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CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

1. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ed John Seelye (Penguin, 1986). American children's literature? (NB Little Women)

2. Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910).
2.1 'moved to Hannibal [north of St Louis, Missouri] in 1839 and spent his youth on the river [Mississippi] and exploring the surrounding area. ... Twain published the nostalgic remembrance of his boyhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in 1876 and thereby emerged as a writer of children's books. Departures from the previously idealised literary view of childhood, Tom Sawyer and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), present a realistic view of the antebellum [pre-war] South. His other successful children's books were published during this decade: The Prince and the Pauper in 1882 and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889' (Children's Books in English, pp.721-22).
2.2 Ernest Hemmingway: 'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn' (quoted in Children's Books in English, p.722).
2.3 Huckleberry Finn? 'Perhaps its greatness as children's literature and its contribution to the genre lie precisely in its ability to transcend the arbitrary boundaries between texts; it is intended for all audiences, for all times, and for all generations' (Children's Books in English, p.10); Huckleberry Finn 'must be, in the depth of experience that it posits in its reader, outside the scope of this book' (Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, p.239).
2.4 Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896).

3. American Bad Boys.
3.1 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy (1868) '[Tom Bailey] established the genre of the "bad boy" as lovable scamp. There were many books that took up the theme, including John Habberton's The Worst Boy in Town (1880) and George Wilbur Peck's Peck's Bad Boy and his Pa (1883). ... But Tom Sawyer was to be the most famous bad boy of all' (Children's Literature, pp.238-9); also see Seelye, p.xiii.
3.2 'Like Mark Twain's Tom, [Tom] Bailey is a boy whose "badness" is mostly a matter of misdirected energies and inventiveness, a tradition dating all the way back to Ben Franklin's account of his own boyhood in his Autobiography' (Seelye, p.xiv). [1771-90, pub. in full in 1868]
3.3 'The boys of Aldrich and Mark Twain ..."bad" boys who are really good at heart' (Seelye, pp.xiv-xv).
3.4 'Initial negative reactions came from those who considered Tom's actions and language too improper for their children to read, whereas recent criticism tends to focus on Tom's questionable maturation and his capitulation to St Petersburg society as he ultimately becomes the "good bad" boy' (Children's Books in English, p.10).

4. Intertextuality
4.1. Tom Sawyer 'one of the most "literary" of Mark Twain's works, informed to the point of plagiarism by the novels of other writers. Yet ... it ... enlists the works of others in order to undercut the conventions those earlier stories established' (Seelye, p.xi).
4.2 Rags-to-riches, 'male Cinderella' novels of Horatio Alger (1832-99), all with similar plot: 'young boy ... manages, through industry, a positive outlook and good fortune, to rise above his squalid origin and become a successful capitalist' (Children's Books in English, p.19).
4.3 'In many of Alger's novels ... "striking it rich" California style' (Seeyle, pp.xv-xvii).
4.4 Edgar Allen Poe, 'The Gold Bug' (1843): three characters discover treasure buried by the pirate Captain Kidd by deciphering encoded directions on a found parchment; Stevenson's Treasure Island published in 1883, seven years after Tom Sawyer.
4.5 'Dime novels' (Seelye, p.xviii); Tom has a 'dime-novel imagination' (p.xxii).
4.6 Injun Joe largely comes from 'the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, most particularly The Last of the Mohicans' (Seelye, p.xix); 'behind Joe's lingering death lie a number of equally horrible and ironically fitting fates in the novels of Scott and Cooper' (p.xxii).
4.7 'The typical hero of a Scott novel ... celebrated by the "real" world' (pp.xxii-xxiii).
4.8 Tom apes 'the lovesick Romeo' (p.vi); 'even under duress [he] cannot commit the simplest bit of sacred Scripture to memory, [but he] has easily memorized the adventures of Robin Hood so he can "play by the book". ... [H]e is not much of a student at school. But out in the forest, on the island, or, eventually in the cave, Tom excels at everything he does, inventing his own games derived from his favorite books – which do not include the Bible. His scripture is the story of Robin Hood and like romances' (p.xiv).
4.9 Robin Hood: gradually elaborated story; late C15 verse narratives; C17/C18 ballads and chapbooks; Joseph Ritson's collection of Robin Hood stories (1795) source for several C19 novels, including Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) and Pierce Egan's Robin Hood and Little John: Or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest (1840).

5. Tom Sawyer (how old is Tom Sawyer?)
5.1 Set in past: 'The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story; that is to say, thirty or forty years ago' (Preface); i.e., between 1836-46.
5.2 Set in coutryside: small riverside village with people, spaces and traditions that escape civilisation – Huck, superstitions of slaves, the island, the cave, the haunted houses, the 'Delectable Land' on Cardiff Hill, Tom's imagination and reading material.
5.3 Absence of parents: Tom's mother dead; no mention of father; Huck roughs it alone (father an absent drunk; no mention of mother); 'every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St Petersburg' thought Huck had 'everything that goes to make life precious' (p.46).
5.4 On-going dual of wits between Tom and Aunt Polly; she's torn between opposing attitudes towards Tom/raising children (p.8); ongoing-struggle in village between Puritan adult 'civilization' and superstitions of children, slaves, etc; novel as critique of/satire on Protestantism/Christianity and on conventional education?
5.5 Fence whitewashing episode (chapter 2): demonstrates Tom's character, abilities, world view; also reveals text's characteristic narrative strategies – alternation between close focalisation on children for child readers and generalised moral reflection between adults: 'He had discovered a great law of human action without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain' (p.19).
5.6 Chapter 3: Romeo's encounter with Juliet (p.22) – Tom conducts his relationships with girls 'by the book'; unjustly punished by Aunt Polly, Tom's dime-novel imagination envisions his own untimely death and its effects on both his aunt and the new girl – comically undercut (p.26).
5.8 School, church, women and girls (Aunt Polly, Mary, Widow Douglas) attempt to civilize boys (cf Tom Brown): Mary tries to help Tom 'get his verses' (pp.26-8), makes him wash (p.28), dresses him for Sunday school, and gets him to wear shoes: 'that's a good boy' (p.29).

6. Satire on Sunday school and church?
6.1 The Sunday-school superintendent (p.32); when Becky arrives, Tom starts 'showing off'; with arrival of county judge, everyone starts 'showing off' (pp.33-4); Tom undermines everything: gets his Bible through trade rather than memorising verses and announces names of the first two disciples were 'DAVID AND GOLIATH' (p.36).
6.2 Chapter 5: children forced to sit through sermons they can't relate to, though Tom's self-centred imagination momentarily lights up (p.40); service turns into farce through antics of poodle and beetle and suppressed hysteria of whole congregation (pp.40-42).
6.3 Immediately followed by Tom's and Huck's exchange of superstitious lore (pp.45-9) – serves as alternative to church; trading of tooth for tick (pp.49-50).

7. Tom Sawyer as 'the child that books built' - see Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built (Faber, 2002).

8. No reviews of Tom Sawyer on cool-reads; Amazon search on Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer produces over 400 items; Tom Sawyer given an overall 5 star rating:

Tom Sawyer is the first great coming of age American novel. In addition, Tom Sawyer is one of the most endearing characters in American fiction. This wonderful book deals with all the challenges that any young person faces, and resolves them in exciting and unusual ways.

I read the play of this book at school and I loved reading it. I think the way Mark Twain has made the characters personalities and actions are just super and make the characters real. I can just imagine them in my head. I think it is a good book that I enjoyed very much. I couldn't put it down! (Caroline Moir, Aberdeenshire)

Seminar on Tom Sawyer (1876)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ed John Seelye (Penguin, 1986).

Focus on chapter 8 (pp.60-65).

1. What does this chapter reveal about Tom's imagination and its sources?

2. What image of boyhood does the chapter present?

3. What role does the narrator play in the chapter? How does this affect our attitude towards Tom?

4. On the evidence of this chapter, how does Tom Sawyer compare and contrast with the other examples of children's literature that we have studied?

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