Instead, he allows the moment to stand, unqualified and undiminished. There is perhaps no better instance in the novel of its sources in childhood reverie. The episode testifies to the fact that Mark Twain discovered childhood, during the writing of Tom Sawyer, as a particularly rich source of imaginative power. This power informs not just his “children‘s” books, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but all his works—such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)—that depend on a perspective of innocence in their central characters.

Yet, while we recognize a fundamental source of the novel’s power in Twain’s remembrance and recreation of childhood—and can find much of young Sam Clemens in Tom Sawyer—one of the most interesting things about the book’s composition is how long the author remained uncertain of its proper audience. (This uncertainty is especially notable when we consider that Tom Sawyer has long been regarded a classic of children’s literature.) As late as the summer of 1875, when Twain was completing a full draft of the manuscript, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, “It is not a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.”7

If Twain was, even at this late stage, imagining Tom Sawyer as a book for adults, then what kind of book did he have in mind? The answer is in the novel itself—in those scenes, especially, where the credulity, ignorance, hypocrisy, and class consciousness of the people of St. Petersburg are exposed. These scenes, were they to be excerpted and isolated from the narrative, would read as pure satire or social critique. In other words, they would have much in common with Twain’s earlier works such as The Innocents Abroad and The Gilded Age.

Mark Twain’s agent for exposing the shortcomings, and shortsight edness, of St. Petersburg’s adult population is of course Tom, who consistently subverts the social order. His release during the church service of the pinch-bug whose bite sends the poodle “sailing up the aisle” (p. 39) is a literal disruption of that order, and his hilarious (to the reader) volunteering of David and Goliath as the first two disciples makes a mockery of Bible study. Tom disorders the society of St. Petersburg most dramatically by craftily organizing the public ridicule of one of its most austere members. The “severe” schoolmaster—whose wig is lifted from him, exposing his “gilded” head, in chapter 21—comes in for an uproarious put-down. This chapter is a good example of the way in which Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain are twinned protagonists, for here the narrator joins Tom in the fun. He cannot resist an extended autho rial send-up of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentality, as expressed in the declamatory “compositions” performed by St. Petersburg’s young people on Examination Evening:

A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of “fine language”; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification (p. 126).

One can sense Samuel Clemens himself “squirming” over “the glaring insincerity of these sermons” (p. 126), and, as if to vent himself of their influence, he concludes this chapter by quoting verbatim several “compositions” taken from an actual volume of nineteenth-century sentimental literature.

In this satiric (adult) strain of the book’s presentation, Tom Sawyer becomes the vehicle not only of childhood reverie and play, but also the vehicle of biting social criticism—and not just of Hannibal, Missouri, but of the whole of American rural life that it represents. In this sense, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be understood as a predecessor of early-twentieth-century works, such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), that depict the narrowness of life in the provinces. Perhaps Anderson, who was indebted to Twain for his cultivation of American vernacular language, is the better example, because Anderson’s vision of small-town life is not solely critical. Winesburg, like Tom Sawyer, exhibits the author’s affection for the lost world that it recounts. But Winesburg is, in tone and structure, a far more unified literary presentation than is Tom Sawyer, and this fact returns us to the issue of Mark Twain’s divided agenda.

This divided agenda is reflected in Twain’s plans for composition. On the very first page of the manuscript of the novel, he had made the following notation:

I, Boyhood & youth; 2 y & early manh; 3 the Battle of Life in many lands; 4 (age 37 to [40?],) return & meet grown babies & toothless old drivelers who were the grandees of his boyhood. The Adored Unknown a [illegible] faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.8

Scholars can tell from the manuscript’s internal evidence that Twain made this note early in the novel’s composition—possibly at the very beginning of that composition, and certainly before it had advanced beyond the fifth chapter. From the start, then, Twain had imagined “growing” Tom into adulthood, having him travel abroad and return, in his forties (Twain’s own age when he was composing the novel), to St. Petersburg.