The book is about the titular character, and is set in a town in 1840s Missouri. While I have been a Southerner, I have never have been a mischievous little boy. Therefore, I find Tom Sawyer’s daily life a little difficult to relate to. But that’s what books are for: they let you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Or bare feet, as the case may be.
Even if you’ve never read a word of the book, or watched a movie adaptation, you probably already know about Tom’s cleverness in getting his pals to paint a fence on his behalf. But did you know that Tom witnesses a murder? And goes on a holiday from civilization on an island in a river? And finds stolen treasure in a cave with miles of tunnels? There’s plenty of entertainment in the plot.
The themes relate to honor and honesty, about doing the right thing when it matters, and not worrying too much about phony social rules as long as you take care of the people you care about.
Meanwhile, throughout the novel, Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens, if you prefer), offers, in deadpan style, a number of sharp observations of human nature. See below for some examples.
Humor in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
“[After being punished by his aunt for breaking a sugar bowl he didn’t break:] A log raft in the river invited him, and he seated himself on its outer edge and contemplated the dreary vastness of the stream, wishing, the while, that he could only be drowned, all at once and unconsciously, without undergoing the uncomfortable routine devised by nature.”
“She was a subscriber for all the ‘Health’ periodicals and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the ‘rot’ they contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and what frame of mind to keep one’s self in, and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before.”
» Health fads have since been similarly mocked by College Humor.
“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. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient today; it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious.”
I was a teacher. I can attest that the cycle of insincerity continues. If I never again read another smarmy story about returning a lost wallet, it will be too soon!
When and Why I Read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Time to read some Mark Twain.
Genre: American literature
Date started / date finished: 18-Mar-25 to 20-Mar-25
Length: 248 pages
ISBN: B072F1WKW1
Originally published in: 1876/2017
Amazon link: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
