Here, Tom would discover that his most enchanted objects of childhood memory had become disenchanted. Becky Thatcher, surely the “Adored Unknown,” would have become a “faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.”

In other words, Becky, and presumably every other aspect of village life that Tom had once valued, would be shown up for the disappointing things they really are. Or, from another perspective, this disenchantment of a once enchanted world would show how small-town American rural life inevitably stifled the human potential for growth and change. It appears that the Tom Sawyer of this version of the novel would have been one of Twain’s classic outsider figures, like Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, whose status as an outsider is used to expose the failures of an established cultural order.

But we’ll never know precisely how Twain would have handled this return to St. Petersburg and what precise purposes of social criticism he would have made of it, because this is the book he didn’t write. The one he did write ended with Tom locked forever in childhood—a childhood that has lived timelessly in the American imagination for the past century and a quarter. Many readers have noted that Twain never discloses Tom’s exact age, thus leaving him always in a state bordering late childhood and early adolescence, but never advancing beyond that point. The novel, as we have it, thus stands in stark contrast to Twain’s early outline, where his hero voyages stage by stage (through an actual chronology of aging) on the river of life.

Whatever changed Mark Twain’s mind remains mysterious. But it seems clear that sometime between the fall of 1874 and the spring of 1875 he decided to conclude the novel with Tom’s childhood. (In the autumn of 1875, he confirmed the matter by writing to Howells, “I have finished the story and didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood.”)9 Even so, he continued to understand this story of a boy’s life as fundamentally a vehicle for adult satire. As noted earlier, Twain had sent the recently completed manuscript to Howells during the summer of 1875, insisting that the book “is written only for adults.” Howells, after reading the manuscript, told Twain that he felt that the novel’s satirical elements were too dominant, and he had some advice: “I think you should treat it explicitly as a boy’s story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do; and if you should put it forth as a study of boy character from the grown-up point of view, you’d give the wrong key to it.”10

Howells, as America’s preeminent man of letters, had great influence on Twain, and his counsel—as well as that of Twain’s wife, Olivia, who agreed with Howells about making this a children’s book—must have weighed heavily on the author. Yet, while Twain made some changes toward greater propriety in the language of certain passages, he does not appear to have extensively revised the novel beyond this point. When published the following year, it continued to betray a striking division between satire and romance. This division can be described along an axis that forms between the scene of the boys frolicking on the shore at Jackson’s Island, and the devastating cultural critique of “‘Examination’ day” in chapter 21. Most chapters of the book contain both elements, in a sometimes uneasy relation to one another.

Twain’s divided purposes, and uncertainty about his audience, are reflected in the novel’s preface, where he attempted to reconcile its disparate elements and perspectives: “Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.”

In underestimating in his preface the satirical force of the novel, Twain attempted to soften the sharp division of elements that the book actually exhibits. (The preface thus represents a concession to Howells, at least in the way that Twain initially addresses his readers.) This division has led some critics to fault The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for its apparent lack of narrative coherence. Part social critique, part boyhood reverie, the novel in this view never quite seems to know what it is or what it wants to say. Formally, according to this view, the division expresses itself in a randomness of selection and a highly episodic character. These qualities are certainly present in the first part of the novel (especially the first eight chapters), which contains some of the work’s most famous set pieces, including the fence whitewashing scene in chapter 2. Most of these early chapters seem to have been developed by Twain from previously written sketches, and the sketch, of course, is the form in which earlier he had honed his skills as a humorist, a lecturer, and a journalist.

What Mark Twain had not learned, up to this point in his career, was how to sustain a plot—that is, how to organize his material into a coherent narrative—and he may well have understood the writing of Tom Sawyer as just this kind of challenge. To the degree that the novel does ultimately hold together (I myself believe it does, for reasons I will offer shortly), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer represents a significant turning point, and an artistic advance, in the writer’s career. It prepared the way not only for his great work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he was already conceiving as he concluded Tom Sawyer, but for all his longer works of fiction—including A Connecticut Yankee and The Tragedy of Pudd‘nhead Wilson (1894). And while the ordering of a plot would never become one of Twain’s strengths, his writing of Tom Sawyer showed him that he was ready to move beyond the sketch, and that he was now capable of working in a more capacious and textured genre.

 

How, then, might this uneven and anecdotal novel—so dependent on specific childhood memories of the author, and so given to pointed critiques of social custom—be said to hold together as a narrative performance? The chief vehicle for unity is Tom Sawyer himself. To say that Tom dominates this book is an understatement; he is the central figure in every possible meaning of the phrase. Tom is both the principal actor and the stage-manager of the novel, and the theatrical metaphor applies in several respects.

The form of the novel as a series of individualized, and often self-contained, scenes has its counterpart in Tom’s own theatricality. Life is a drama to him, and he has peopled it with figures and adventures from romantic literature and legend. That he often has the references wrong only adds to the fun, and does not make his imagination any less literary. Tom does everything “by the book” (p. 58), which is to say that he gives a literary overlay to virtually every activity in which he engages—from his romance with Becky to his direction of games such as Robin Hood.

The games, in particular, reveal how important to the fictional world of this novel are language and speech.