The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is one of America’s most celebrated and revered authors. While typically thought of as a humorist, Twain was also deeply concerned with social issues, class inequality, the hypocrisy of governments and religion, and humanity’s capacity for cruelty. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain writes about St. Petersburg and Tom as if he knew both of them. Twain grew up along the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri, and much of his writing reflects this sensibility, from his values to his adroit use of various dialects.

Twain wrote constantly, which was made easier by his keen powers of observation. He recorded nearly everything he saw, both for his own amusement and for possible use in future pieces of writing. Twain was a great lover of tall tales. His travelogues, Roughing It and The Innocents Abroad, describe, respectively, his journey west during the American expansion and his tour abroad in various European countries. Everywhere he went, he found children embellishing the stories they told. However, this inspiration wasn’t limited to his youthful characters. His adult characters are just as given to exaggeration and tall tales.

Twain favored a deadpan sense of humor that would often befuddle early readers unaccustomed to satire. Consider his casual authorial intrusion when he comments on the manners of the choir:

The choir always tittered and whispered all through service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country (40).

It was difficult for him to pass up a chance for gentle mockery, combined with social commentary. It’s not easy to convey how anomalous Twain was among 19th-century writers. Some of his social commentary was masked as humor because the things he witnessed were so absurd that they almost qualified as satire without being purposefully so.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer takes place in the 1840s, prior to the American Civil War, which provides a glimpse into its themes and perspectives. The fictional city of St. Petersburg, Missouri, provides a snapshot that could serve as a composite of any small American town during that era. The citizens of St. Petersburg go to church, work their jobs, fall short of their ideals, raise their children, and participate in the grotesque inequality that divided people of color from their white counterparts prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. The citizens of St. Petersburg also give Twain a chance to practice two of his strongest weapons: his righteous indignation and his hatred of injustice.

Few things have the potential to age as poorly as humor, but much of Twain’s writing—at least, the writing that he intended to be comical—is as comical as it was when it was originally published. However, some of Twain’s writing has not aged as well. Because he wrote in an era when people of color and Indigenous Americans were deemed to be lesser than white Americans, Twain’s casual use of racial epithets falls heavily and insensitively on modern ears. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, this appears in the character of “Injun Joe,” as well as casual slurs used to describe people of color, particularly Black people. Twain was far from a bigot, however, and was an early supporter of Emancipation. He thought slavery was an objective evil and a blight on American society, and he wrote prolifically on the disgraces of racism.