Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Alan Gribben

      The holograph manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is held by the Georgetown University Library.

Editor’s Introduction:

      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.

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