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The NewSouth Edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Alan Gribben

Mark Twain originally envisioned a cohesiveness between his most celebrated novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Nevertheless, ever since the mid-twentieth century these two works have customarily been separated by publishers, libraries, and bookstores, with Tom Sawyer relegated to “Juvenile” or “Young Adult” catalogs and Huckleberry Finn elevated to “Adult” lists, as though they have almost no relationship to each other. Severance of the two books has proceeded in spite of evidence that Twain wrote the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn soon after completing the manuscript for Tom Sawyer, and the fact that Huckleberry Finn announces in the sequel’s very first sentence, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.’” Moreover, characters and settings are shared by both novels.

Twain even attempted to ensure that sample copies of Tom Sawyer were carried by his “canvassers” who fanned out through neighborhoods and farmlands to take book orders for Twain’s forthcoming Huckleberry Finn. (For nearly thirty years Mark Twain’s works were sold only through these “subscription” agents and could not be obtained in retail bookstores, a lucrative but somewhat disreputable practice for an author of his stature.) Twain recommended to his publisher that customers purchasing both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn be given a reduced price on the set. However, since Twain had left the press that brought out Tom Sawyer in 1876—and was rebelliously publishing Huckleberry Finn under the imprint of his own company—tangled negotiations with his previous firm prevented this joint sale of the volumes from materializing. Problems inherent in Twain’s serial stages of plot development meant that the sequel to Tom Sawyer did not issue in the United States until 1885. By that time even his most loyal readers had trouble thinking of the books as forming a seamless story, with the result that customers usually elected to order Huckleberry Finn in a green cover rather than the available blue cloth that would have matched the cover of the earlier Tom Sawyer.

Language and the NewSouth Edition

In addition to this artificial and regrettable dividing of Twain’s paired stories, two racial slurs have increasingly presented a problem for teachers, students, and general readers. Twain, it should be remembered, was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s; accordingly he employed in his novel a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves, and tagged the villain with a deprecating racial label for Native Americans. Although the adult narrator of Tom Sawyer is himself careful to use the then-respectful terms “colored” and “negro” in Chapter 1, the boys refer to slaves eight times with the bigoted n-word (and it also makes one other appearance). In the 1870s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of either African American or Native American readers. These population groups were too occupied with trying, in the one case, to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of segregation policies, and in the other case to survive disease epidemics and the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters who had decimated their ways of life, to bother about objectionable vocabulary choices in popular books.

When Samuel L. Clemens (who would adopt the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863) was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, his views on slavery were in keeping with those of his fellow villagers. His father, significantly, had owned as many slaves as he could afford. In a letter written when he was seventeen, Sam Clemens alluded to Northern people attempting to free slaves as “infernal abolitionists” (August 23, 1853). But as an adult, after he had traveled widely and read more, he courted and married (in 1870) a woman whose New York State family had vehemently opposed slavery long before the Civil War. Twain ultimately made an unreserved turnabout from his younger attitudes, so much so that in 1874 he wrote a profoundly touching account of how the slave system had cruelly split up African American families—“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” A similar impulse led Twain to portray Huckleberry Finn in the follow-up to Tom Sawyer as (in Twain’s summation in one of his notebooks) a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”—that is to say, someone reared amid such pervasive prejudice that he had a hard time seeing through its premises.

We should try to recognize Twain’s incentive as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults can nonetheless repulse modern-day readers. Twain’s two books do not deserve ever to join that list of literary “classics” he once humorously defined as books “which people praise and don’t read,” yet their long-lofty status has come under question in recent decades. In this connection, it seems relevant to remember that Twain habitually read aloud his day’s writings to an audience gathered on the porch of his summer retreat overlooking Elmira, New York, watching and listening for reactions to each manuscript page. He likewise took cues about adjusting his tone from lecture platform appearances, which provided him with direct responses to his diction. As a notoriously commercial writer who watched for every opportunity to enlarge the mass market for his works, he would presumably have been quick to adapt his diction if he could have prophesied how today’s audiences recoil at racial slurs in a culturally altered country.

The Editor’s Story

Through a succession of first-hand experiences, this editor gradually reached the conclusion that an optional epithet-free edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is needed today. For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always found myself unable to utter the racist put-downs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I invariably substituted the word “slave” for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to find this expedient to be preferable, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed. Indeed, numerous communities have dropped Tom Sawyer along with Huckleberry Finn as required readings in public schools owing to their offensive racial language or have quietly moved the title to voluntary reading lists. The American Library Association lists these novels among the most frequently challenged pre-twentieth-century readings.

Over the years I have taken note of valiant and judicious defenses of the prevalence of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (where it appears 215 times) as proposed by eminent writers, editors, and scholars, including those of Michael Patrick Hearn, Nat Hentoff, Randall Kennedy, and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua. Nonetheless, Langston Hughes made a forceful, lasting argument for omitting this incendiary word from all literature, however well-intentioned an author. “Ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy, it doesn’t matter,” explained Hughes. African Americans, Hughes wrote, “do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic. . . . They still do not like it” (268-269).

My personal turning-point on the journey toward this present NewSouth Edition was a lecture tour I undertook after writing the introduction for a National Endowment for the Arts-funded “Big Read” edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer designed to interest younger readers in older American literature. As I spoke about the novel to reading groups of adults and teenagers in small towns and larger cities, I followed my customary habit of substituting the word “slave” when reading the characters’ dialogue aloud. In several towns I was taken aside after my talk by earnest middle and high school teachers who lamented the fact that they no longer felt justified in assigning either of Twain’s boy books because of the hurtful n-word. Here was further proof that this single debasing label is overwhelming every other consideration about Tom Sawyer as well as Huckleberry Finn, whereas what these novels have to offer readers hardly depends upon one indefensible designation. As vital components of the American identity and heritage, they should maintain their important places in classrooms and libraries.

Word Exchanges

My understanding about this situation crystallized into a definite resolve. Unquestionably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be enjoyed just as deeply and authentically if readers are not obliged to confront the n-word on various pages. Consequently in this edition I have elected to translate the nine usages of the n-word to read “slave” instead, since the term “slave” is closest in meaning and implication. Although the text loses some of the derisive spin that the n-word carries, that price seems small compared to the revolting effect that the more offensive word has on readers these days. Moreover, slavery is recognized globally as an affront to humanity.

I had come to believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers might welcome the option of an alternate edition of Twain’s novel that spares the reader all contact with a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol. Despite occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to appropriate it and well-meaning but usually futile (from my own experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against it by using Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as springboards to discuss its etymology and cultural history, the n-word remains inarguably the most inflammatory word in the English language. The synonym “slave” seems to express adequately the cultural racism that Twain sought to convey.

This word—“slave”—also usefully reminds readers of the historical fact that ten percent of the Missouri population in 1850 consisted of African American slaves. By 1860, four million of the twelve million people living in the Southern states were slaves who owned neither their bodies nor their labor.

The racially derogatory nickname for the murderer in Tom Sawyer is more problematical. In Twain’s telling, the river village knows most residents by their ethnicity. Its severe schoolmaster has a Scottish title (“dominie”), the villain disguises himself as a “Spaniard,” a boy of “German parentage” recites a prodigious number of Bible verses, Huck Finn summons “the Welchman” to help the Widow Douglas, and so forth. Within this context the skulking villain’s mixed ethnic identity seems crucial in comprehending why he feels alienated from the other St. Petersburg townspeople, and why this marginalized figure might be tempted to strike out at one or more of the villagers who look down on him. Twain may have been capitalizing on the popular “Indian” stock character on the American stage; in melodramas like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana the surviving remnants of Native American tribes had been portrayed as implacably vengeful and bloodthirsty if angered. The offspring of an interracial relationship, Twain’s character has been stranded by the receding Western frontier. He resembles an actual mixed-race alcoholic with whom Sam Clemens was familiar as a boy in Hannibal and whom Twain’s Autobiography would recall.

The editor’s decision for this edition of Tom Sawyer has been to render the sixty-eight repetitions of the outcast’s name as “Indian Joe” to assist in retiring another antiquated and insulting word (even though the very name “Indian” itself commemorates a misnomer, perpetuated by erring explorers and cartographers eager for a new trade route to India). This substitution does manage to salvage Mark Twain’s ethnic innuendoes regarding the motivation for Indian Joe’s animosity toward the town’s residents. Presumably a merely informative racial sobriquet will inflict less injury on the descendants of a native people. A total of five miscellaneous usages of the I-word have similarly been altered. For the same reasons the eight references in Tom Sawyer to “half-breed” have been converted to “half-blood,” which is less disrespectful and has even taken on a degree of panache since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005).

Reasons to Read Tom Sawyer Before Huckleberry Finn

For a hundred years The Adventures of Tom Sawyer sold more copies than any of Twain’s other writings, and it has never once been out of print. Gradually that novel has become synonymous with our national literary reputation, even though midway through the twentieth century English professors imposed an implacable division between Tom Sawyer, with its limited village environs, and Huckleberry Finn, which features an eventful journey by raft in search of freedom. Part of the explanation for why Tom Sawyer nonetheless still holds a prominent place in the annals of American literature is that it contributed a fresh, flexible narrative voice to the art of novel-writing, replacing the stilted, artificial syntax of British fiction and the convoluted prose of American writers who emulated those cumbersome sentence structures. Twain had perfected this colloquial tone of addressing an audience in his preceding travel books and now applied that same relaxed, ingratiating style to his first solo novel. Chapter 7, for instance, deftly describes Tom Sawyer’s ennui in the schoolroom:

The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his ideas wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It seemed to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was utterly dead. There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days. The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in the flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance; a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other living thing was visible but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom’s heart ached to be free or else to have something of interest to do to pass the dreary time.

This was also the book in which Twain developed his ability to narrate moments of effective suspense, as in Chapter 26 when Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are trapped in a deserted dwelling after two outlaws enter and discover the boys’ treasure-hunting tools. Tom and Huck watch anxiously through knotholes in the planking of the attic floor as the men plot a crime and—in the act of burying their own loot—accidentally uncover the treasure of an infamous land pirate, John Murrell. The boys’ jubilation at witnessing this immense discovery soon turns to fear as Indian Joe wonders, “Who could have brought those tools here? Do you reckon they can be upstairs?” When Joe turns and starts toward the stairway, the boys cringe in terror. That episode prefigures an incident in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) in which young Jim Hawkins falls asleep in an apple barrel and overhears Long John Silver recruiting pirates to seize the ship and find Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Jim Hawkins freezes in trepidation when Silver asks one of the sailors to fetch him an apple out of the barrel where Jim is hiding. Chapter 31 of Twain’s novel contains an equally suspenseful scene when Tom, lost in a dark cave, welcomes the sight of “a human hand, holding a candle, [which] appeared from behind a rock,” whereupon “Tom lifted up a shout,” only to see the hand “followed by the body it belonged to—Indian Joe’s!”

Realism Overtakes Romanticism

Tom Sawyer departed from literary conventions by jabbing at British romantic writers and clichéd children’s books, notifying readers that the age of literary Realism had arrived in the United States. The narrator evokes a period only three decades previous to the 1870s, not the far romantic past; delineates ordinary undistinguished characters of middle and lower-class standing rather than highborn heroes; and utilizes natural and unexaggerated buildings and landscapes. Twain was having fun at the expense of older English romantic authors by showing Tom sobbingly grieve over his love interest, Becky Thatcher, and ludicrously misconstrue nearly all of his revered literary “authorities.” Twain would develop this humorous tactic more fully in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Tom Sawyer misguidedly quotes his outmoded Romantic books relentlessly and, in Chapter 13, a sinking steamboat is named Walter Scott after the deceased but still esteemed author of Ivanhoe, Redgauntlet, Kenilworth, and other historical novels.

These parodies did not prevent vestiges of Romanticism from clinging to Twain’s Tom Sawyer in the form of disguises, graveyards, corpse-stealing, buried treasure, a haunted house, and a candle-lit chase through a cave. Indeed, elements of Romanticism and Realism clearly vie throughout the story. Twain’s novel helpfully illustrates the overlapping of two literary periods, despite his amusing satires directed at the school of writing from which he was diverging.

Tom Sawyer Reevaluated

One enormous advantage enjoyed by Tom Sawyer is that it has largely been left alone by academic commentators, and therefore proves less intimidating to read and teach than Huckleberry Finn, which today lies buried under a thickening (though frequently brilliant) avalanche of scholarly studies. Not more than a few dozen academic articles and only a couple of individual monographs have been devoted to Tom Sawyer over the past century. The book has largely been ignored by university professors because it has been categorized as a children’s book and thus (at best) a dress rehearsal enabling Mark Twain’s imagination to ready itself for a masterly sequel.

At the time that Twain’s novel about boys first appeared, the line between juvenile and adult fiction was far from definite. Adults and young people often shared their reading materials. The spectacular success of the Harry Potter series with broad audiences reminds us of that formerly blurry distinction between juvenile and adult literature. For over a decade, bookstores and movie theaters teemed with crowds of children, teenagers, and parents each night that a new Harry Potter installment was released. Similarly, more than a century and a quarter earlier, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories in 1865 and 1872 were hardly restricted to young readers. It is worth noting that the charges on which Tom Sawyer is often arraigned (undue simplicity, overly obvious themes) have been applied as well to Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), most memorably by Flannery O’Connor but also recurrently by other commentators as well.

Slavery and Freedom in Tom Sawyer

A courageous feature of Tom Sawyer is that it fleetingly but valuably reminds us of an oppressive era of racism and slavery, though the subject is not treated nearly so pervasively and forcefully as in Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer contains several references to slavery, a brief appearance by a young African American slave named Jim (evidently Aunt Polly’s slave, and not to be confused with the adult Jim who will later accompany Huck), and casual talk by the boys about folk beliefs they learned from slaves. If these allusions to an inhumane institution (accompanied by a total of nine instances of the n-word) rankle us by marring the picturesque village scenes, we should ask ourselves this question: Would we rather have a novel written about the American South of the 1840s that entirely avoids the existence of slavery? Many writers of the post-Civil War period were scrupulously omitting all traces of slavery and African Americans from their books; others were starting to idealize the plantation system and portray slavery, now abolished, as having been more dependent on domestic loyalty than latent brutality. Twain, however, elected to make slavery an integral part of his stories, and in the sequel to Tom Sawyer he would render its functioning as far from idyllic.

All the same, neither slavery nor liberation were intended to be at the core of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as they would be of its successor, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (note that for the latter book Twain dropped the definite article “The” from its title page, perhaps to better fit Huck’s vernacular narrative). Tom Sawyer is about escape, too, but basically an escape from the restraints and responsibilities of adulthood. Tom and his gang simply want to hang onto their boyhood, like the eternal boys in James Barrie’s play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904). Adults in Tom Sawyer check your clothing to see if you have been swimming, sentence you to oppressive chores like fence-painting, and try to keep you from graveyard-visiting and treasure-hunting. True, these same adults might also mourn your presumed loss by drowning with an elaborate funeral and come looking for you in a cave when you are missing. However, Tom and his pals are determined to resist the incursions of adult burdens as long as possible and to prolong their precious, untroubled, free and easy days through every available strategy.

Tom Sawyer and Nostalgia for Vanished Boyhoods

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the book by which Mark Twain at last found his way back to the boyhood village he had so long overlooked as a source of literary material, the discovery of which would make him internationally famous. As a travel writer he had ransacked Europe, the Holy Land, Nevada, California, and Hawaii for subjects about which to write. In 1875 he had belatedly gotten around to writing a series of recollections about his Mississippi River piloting days. With Tom Sawyer he finally moved back even further in his memories to recapture his Hannibal upbringing.

The very idea that a boy’s thought-processes and actions were worthy of recording in a novel was itself still an innovation in the nineteenth century, despite Charles Dickens’s steps in this direction. Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), an English writer and reformer, is credited with launching the investigations of boyish minds with Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), largely based on Hughes’s remembrances of loyalties and cruelties at Rugby School. It seems probable that Twain’s memories of early day Hannibal were jogged by the now-forgotten Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s semi-autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), the first true “boy book” in the United States, whose sentimental incidents were told somewhat archly. Aldrich’s Tom Bailey and his chums slip out of their homes at night, coalesce 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.