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 word “adventures” in its title would set the pace. The memorable back-from-the-dead scene in the church when Tom and his friends show up victoriously at their own funeral is only one instance of the practical joking and other heedless antics that dominate the novel. Twain very likely was counting on the desire of his adult audience to leave behind the recent Civil War suffering and the deaths of 625,000 soldiers and retreat into nostalgic memories of a prelapsarian world. His Preface expressed a wish “to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked.”
The scenes in Tom Sawyer in which the boys camp on Jackson’s Island—fishing, swimming, cooking turtle eggs—bring to mind a best-seller that appeared in 2006, The Dangerous Book for Boys, a guidebook that described how to tan an animal skin, build a tree house, tell directions if lost, and master dozens of other backyard and outdoor skills. Certain reviewers carped that the book exposed boys to possible injuries, but the public, perhaps perceiving the book as an antidote to the burgeoning Play Station culture, propelled it to bestseller lists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Seen in this light, was not The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with all of its outdoor perils, in essence the prototypical Dangerous Book for Boys?
It is worth observing that Mark Twain once declared his novel to be a “hymn to boyhood.” As many commentators have noted, Twain’s choice of “St. Petersburg” (then the capital of Russia) as the name of the town for his setting subtly wraps the heavenly connotations associated with St. Peter around a town that offered a boy’s vision of paradisiacal diversions. Perhaps, then, there is relevance in the fact that young Sam Clemens can be said to have lost his own boyhood in the years after his father died prematurely in 1847, leaving the Clemens family insolvent. Sam Clemens was subsequently taken out of school by his older brother Orion and put to work for long hours in a print shop. That was the abrupt termination of his boyhood frolics. He could watch through the window as other boys passed by carrying fishing poles or with their hair wet from swimming.
British author Charles Dickens harbored that same sense of deprivation when his father’s debts compelled Dickens’s parents to withdraw him from school and set him to work in a dank, smelly bootblack factory in an industrial sector at the edge of the Thames River. Both authors would become famously identified with their fictions about orphaned boys who seek the joys of childhood and yet must endure the encroachments of the adult world. In this connection one cannot help but recall Mark Twain’s delight in his wife’s nickname for him: “Youth.” All in all, it would seem that more deference is due to Tom Sawyer, the departure point that Twain intended as the optimum introduction to his enduring story of a boy and a slave afloat on a river raft.
Textual Emendations
With the exception of the changes in racial denotations, the text of this novel otherwise follows the wording of the first American edition. Issues about questionable punctuation were resolved by consulting a facsimile of Twain’s manuscript. The editor has silently modernized certain eccentricities of nineteenth-century punctuation and spelling, and has given American spellings preference over British spellings. Obvious typographical errors introduced by the printers and inconsistent spellings have been corrected. Mark Twain occasionally added footnotes to his own books; these are here placed within the text and indicated by { } brackets.
Alternative Editions
It goes without saying that textual purists object strenuously to these editorial alterations of an author’s final manuscript, especially regarding key racial denominators. (For confirmation of this reaction, see the editor’s essay, “Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer Go Back to School,” Independent Publisher 29, v [May 2011] as well as CBS’s “60 Minutes” segment devoted to the NewSouth Edition that aired on March 20, 2011.) However, the fact of the matter is that literally dozens of other editions (including several published by NewSouth Books) are available for those readers who prefer Twain’s original phrasing. Those standard editions will always exist. Even better, a facsimile of Twain’s holograph (i.e., handwritten) manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been published in a two-volume edition (1982).
This NewSouth Edition of Tom Sawyer is emphatically not intended for academic scholars. Those individuals should consult instead the authoritative edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1980) that has been issued in The Works of Mark Twain series by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley.
Dr. Alan Gribben co-founded the Mark Twain Circle of America, compiled Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, and recently co-edited Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader. Gribben has written numerous essays about Mark Twain’s life and image. He teaches on the English faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery and edits the Mark Twain Journal.
Selected Relevant Print and Digital Works
Blair, Walter. Mark Twain & Huck Finn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
Bray, Robert. “Tom Sawyer Once and For All,” Review 3 (1981): 75–93.
Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. “Ebonics, Jim, and New Approaches to Understanding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” in Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom. Ed. James S. Leonard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 164–181.
____________. “Huck Finn: Icon or Idol—Yet a Necessary Read,” Mark Twain Annual 3 (2005): 37–40.
___________. The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Companion to Mark Twain. Eds. Peter Messsent and Louis J. Budd. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Critical Essays on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Ed. Gary Scharnhorst. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
Csicsila, Joseph. Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Dempsey, Terrell. Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Fetterley, Judith. “Disenchantment: Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn,” PMLA 87 (January 1972): 69–74.
____________. “The Sanctioned Rebel,” Studies in the Novel 3 (Fall 1971): 293–304.
Fulton, Joe B. The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Gribben,
