Huck and Tom Among the Illustrators

Long-standing perceptions for these characters begin with the novels themselves, aided, in part, by the books’ illustrations. True Williams, the original illustrator for Tom Sawyer, significantly contributed to the perceptions of the characters. As Beverly R. David relates in chapter 5 of Mark Twain and His Illustrators, Williams’s fastidiousness as an artist created highly accurate depictions of children from the time. Consequently, his original depictions of Tom and Huck match both Clemens’s textual descriptions and authentic 1850s attire for children. Tom Sawyer’s original frontispiece features mischievous Tom, wearing his Sunday best but remaining barefoot to symbolize his rebellion from minor rules and expectations—while still keeping that challenge within clear bounds. David suggests that initial image of Tom might seem too “precious” for modern readers, but there is no denying that it sets the tone and launches Tom’s story. He is drawn barefoot throughout the rest of the novel but is otherwise clad in very typical dress for a boy of the era, including regularly being hatted. Tom is shown wearing a rounded version of a felt hat with a narrow brim, which David reports was especially popular among boys of the time, a trend seen in many illustrations of the character since.

Meanwhile, Williams depicted Huck with textual accuracy, placing him in an over-sized coat, matching Huck’s initial description as “always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men” with “a vast ruin” of a hat. Although Edward W. Kemble’s illustrations for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provide more enduring and persistent images of Huck, Williams’s original Tom Sawyer illustrations offer a noteworthy and influential introduction to the character. Williams distinguishes Tom and Huck from each other through their clothes and by making Huck appear slightly older than Tom. Although the text suggests the boys are the same age—though without specifying either’s age—Williams’s art suggests that the harder-living Huck is Tom’s slight senior, further distinguishing the boys. This move by Williams in the earliest artistic depiction of the boys created a trend revisited both on Hollywood soundstages and on future illustrators’ drawing tables, presenting Huck as the older boy.

Despite distinctions made with age and wardrobe, the boys are still treated as very typical nineteenth-century youths, offered as representatives of polar ends of the young male spectrum. True Williams lifted and modified images he had already drawn for Mark Twain’s Sketches, New & Old (1875) in Tom Sawyer. For example, his engraving for the opening of the novel’s fourth chapter, showing Tom climbing a tree, is clearly adapted from his depiction of Jim in “The Story of the Bad Little Boy.” Williams also adapted the image of Jacob Blevins he drew for “The Story of a Good Little Boy” in Sketches to create the image of “Huck Transformed” that opens chapter 35 of Tom Sawyer.

This division of Huck and Tom along behavioral lines, with one “bad” and the other “good,” has long been associated with them, as they have come to represent opposite examples of young boys. Tom is shown as the misbehaving, but good, little boy, and Huck is depicted as the bad influence and delinquent child. Later renderings and adaptations have continued to promote this dichotomous view, and the idea that the two boys should be seen as opposites or contrasts of boyhood has persisted. Illustrators since Williams have taken his lead in promoting this broad view of the two. The original art produced by Williams, which repurposed earlier illustrations of youth, reveals that the artist saw the children as matching broad ideas and general perceptions of young boys. Tom and Huck serve as sort of literary “everyboys,” representing the wide array of children who might read the novels.

Huck and Tom as Nostalgic Americana

The idea that Huck and Tom appeal to audiences young and young-at-heart can be seen in the continuing and extended lives of these characters throughout retellings and adaptations. For example, Ric Averill’s play Tom Sawyer (2008) is an adaptation of the first two-thirds of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, stopping with the courthouse sequence and emphasizing a “boys will be boys” view of the adventures for both Huck and Tom. Director Jeffrey Emmerich’s note for the College of the Albemarle’s 2016 production of this play asks, “What little boy doesn’t have a bit of Tom Sawyer in him?” Emmerich further relates that he grew up thinking of Tom as his best friend and idol and that “I’m guessing [Mark Twain] WAS Tom Sawyer.” He tells the audience, “Everyone is going to relate to one character or another in today’s play.” While the idea that at least one character in the entire play might spark a connection for any and every audience member is an oversimplification of the text’s appeal, the suggestion that each child represents some piece of Mark Twain’s characters within himself or herself does emphasize the long-standing view that Tom and Huck serve as ersatz representatives of all children and of American childhood. Tom and Huck become symbols for a nostalgic view of childhood and of earlier American life.

The projection of Mark Twain’s most visible fictional characters as representative for all children occurs among both youth and adult readers. As Robert McParland notes in Mark Twain’s Audience (2014), many adults read novels like Huckleberry Finn and are encouraged to recall their own childhoods while following Huck and Jim down the Mississippi, imagining themselves in Huck’s bare footsteps. Both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn elicit childhood associations for their readers, creating nostalgic views not only of their own childhoods but of American culture in general. McParland cites ads from such newspapers as the New York Tribune from the early decades of the twentieth century that looked back on the novels and their characters as emblems of boyhood and innocence. The dark and grisly aspects of the books and of their characters’ lives gave way to a sanitized vision of the two boys as symbols of youthful fun and simpler, rustic life. Huck and Tom eventually both come to be presented as cheery boys whose idyllic existence comes from a nostalgia for an America of the imagination. McParland points out that many twentieth-century immigrants to America cited that their images of America were informed through their reading of both Huckleberry Finn and Roughing It (1872). These works provided the immigrants with a literary construction of the nineteenth-century United States, one that shaped and defined their impressions and expectations for America.

The use of Clemens’s fiction to shape an oversimplified and fictionalized version of American culture, one in which Huck and Tom sit front and center, normally by a fence needing white-washing or on a raft, has permeated popular culture both directly tied to Clemens’s work and through elements that are only tangentially connected. Visitors to Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland can explore attractions called “Tom Sawyer Island,” artificial landmasses surrounded by the man-made “Rivers of America” at these related theme parks. First opened in 1956 at Disneyland in California, the attraction contains caves and structures, such as “Tom & Huck’s Treehouse,” that reference the famous characters without requiring or imparting knowledge of the literary texts. They instead offer diversions tied obliquely to the books but more fully to a vision of America as part of an “Adventureland.” In 2007, the original California Disneyland attraction merged Tom and Huck with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and became “Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island,” further separating the characters from the novels but reinforcing their importance as icons both of Americana and family-friendly adventure.

In 1980, Kenner Toy Company released the first male doll in its Strawberry Shortcake line, “Huckleberry Pie.” Dressed in patched denim clothes and wearing a straw hat that evoked E. W. Kemble’s original illustrations of the literary character, this toy-line character was presented as easygoing and laid back (with a southern drawl when presented in cartoon form), spending his leisure time fishing. This nod to Huck Finn provided many children, particularly of Generation X, their first pseudo-introduction to Twain’s protagonist; however, the toymakers made a point of stating that their character was not mischievous, showing an assumption about Huck as simply a rambunctious child.

The next presentation of these famous characters in toy form took a more direct connection to the source material while still revealing the perception of these characters as belonging to the nation. In 1983, the Effanbee toy company premiered the “Mark Twain Collection” of dolls as part of a “Great Moments in Literature” series. Effanbee had produced dolls of Howdy Doody, Charlie McCarthy, and many Disney characters over its history, but by the 1970s was primarily creating realistically proportioned collectors’ dolls of famous figures. These included luminaries and icons of Old Hollywood, such as John Wayne, Groucho Marx, and Humphrey Bogart, and American presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Into this mix of celebrities and historical figures, Effanbee launched a new line, with dolls produced over three years of Mark Twain, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher. While the Mark Twain doll presented the famous image of the author in his white suit, the dolls based on the three fictional characters evoked the most famous illustrations, with Tom and Becky recalling True Williams’s work and Huck giving three dimensions to Kemble’s art. Although the move to “Great Moments in Literature” would suggest a shift to fictional subjects for the company, Effanbee’s catalog continued its primary focus on real-life examples of Americana and icons of American popular culture, except for this trio from Mark Twain’s literary output. By placing and casting the characters alongside their creator, the doll makers reinforce the notions that Tom, Becky, and Huck represent American culture and serve as icons alongside the author. These dolls, then, further promote the notion that the novels can be read as pseudo-autobiography by Clemens, with an association of him as “America’s author” and his most famed creations as archetypal examples of American youth.

Huck, Tom, and Imbedded Biography

The original preface for Tom Sawyer states, “Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred.” This statement inspires the ongoing idea that Mark Twain’s own youth is imbedded in the fictional childhoods for Tom, Becky, and Huck. Some readers then presume that Mark Twain’s actual youthful experiences are retold as part of the fictional lives of his creations. That presumption has, in turn, been expanded upon significantly over the years, with a variety of examples where lines between the author’s personal history and his literary art blur. The (auto)biographical view of Clemens’s works as having all grown from his personal experiences and the idea Huck and Tom represent America merge in Hannibal, Missouri, the author’s hometown and the basis for St. Petersburg in the books. Billing Hannibal as “America’s Hometown,” the city’s tourism industry is driven by notions that Tom and Huck are examples of traditional American children and that they grew out of Clemens’s own childhood. The idea that the author’s childhood is simply transferred into the texts of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is presented directly through the tourist offerings of historic buildings that reveal what connections can be, might be, and have been determined. The reinforcement of these connections is underscored by many businesses in the town, “Pudd’ N Head’s Antiques” and “Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor,” along with the “Mark Twain Dinette” and “Mark Twain Brewing Company,” all of which seek to link Mark Twain, his creations, and American nostalgia. The presentation of Hannibal exemplifies the desire to place Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Samuel Clemens as a trio of friends, as fiction and nonfiction merge.

The desire to see imbedded biography, and the blending of fiction and nonfiction, in Mark Twain’s works runs throughout the popular culture iterations of the author. For example, the final scene of the 1944 biopic The Adventures of Mark Twain features the aged Mark Twain disappearing over the horizon with his most famous creations. Will Vinton’s Claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) shows the author and his famed trio of child protagonists teaming up in an aerial adventure. As Clyde V. Haupt points out in Huckleberry Finn on Film (1994), many adaptations of that novel project onto the protagonist an abolitionist philosophy. An episode of Fantasy Island, “The Angel’s Triangle/Natchez Bound” (1982), features a young Sam Clemens on a steamboat meeting a stowaway boy named Huck Finn helping a runaway slave named Jim. Clemens is then inspired to write future works and to take part in a life of abolitionism based on his encounters with the young boy. The budding author sees in the orphan a seeming reflection of his own idealism.

Huck and Tom Among the Readers

Readers have long seen apparent reflections of their own ideals and thoughts in these famous characters. McParland’s review of letters and oral commentaries from the nineteenth century reveals, not surprisingly, that boys in particular enjoyed reading the adventures for both Tom and Huck, with them often seeing their own images in Twain’s characters. However, McParland also notes where readers separated the two characters, placing them in two categories. While Tom was seen as a familiar character who resisted social controls and conventions, the recalcitrant Huck was seen as a practitioner of social rebellion. While Tom pushes against boundaries, he stays within societal expectations, but his friend challenges social norms and the boundaries of civilization. Tom functions and misbehaves within society, while Huck is the pariah fighting constrictions from a society that does not accept him.

The quintessential Tom Sawyer of readers’ memories appears in Clemens’s original novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, introduced and presented by an anonymous third-person narrator. The Tom of the sequel stories, including Huckleberry Finn, which are all narrated by Huck, shifts as a character. In the initial volume, Tom fulfills the tradition in nineteenth-century American fiction of being a “good bad boy,” seen also in such books as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857). Tom pulls pranks (albeit minor ones, without serious consequences) and skips school; outsmarts other children; and, in general, exasperates adults. However, Tom’s misbehavior is often tied to noble acts, such as lying in order to save Becky from punishment.

In contrast, Huckleberry Finn is also a “bad boy,” but one whose origins as son of the town drunk mark him as an outcast who literally lives outside the town and metaphorically lives outside society and its norms. Tom, meanwhile, rests comfortably within these norms. While Huck is read, perhaps especially by the prudish middle class, as the “bad apple” who will ruin the other children, Tom is simply a “bad kid,” seen as naughty and perhaps cheeky but returning to and supporting the norm in the long run. However, as presented through Huck’s eyes, Tom becomes emblematic of the stagnancy of those norms in society. He is only willing to help Huck rescue Jim from captivity because he knows Jim is already lawfully free, and, in turn, he makes both Huck and Jim into pawns in his series of imaginative, but cruel, games. Huck, in contrast, is willing to risk being caught breaking the law and in committing, in his understanding, a damnable sin by helping Jim escape from captivity.

Mark Twain demonstrates for Tom Sawyer what Judith Yaross Lee has called a “wandering affection,” with the original character, the version beloved by so many readers, giving way to a “self-centered tyrant” whose elaborate and structured play marks him as a clear member of the St. Petersburg society. The Tom Sawyer presented in the sequel novels—seen and presented by Huck—is a child of the town who remains part of that town’s system. That Tom Sawyer in particular is a clear part of the world and its conventions, accepting of society’s ills as established guidelines and further rules to follow (“Sawyer, Tom” 656-657). As Everett Carter noted, compared to Tom, Huckleberry Finn is seen as a sort of patron saint for nineteenth-century counterculture (“Finn, Huckleberry” 288-289). Huck rejects societal expectations. Even though his understanding of consequences is incorrect, he knows he is challenging the norms and values of middle-class American society.

Within the first novel, Tom remains a model for children as the fun child who might stray slightly but who is proven the hero in the end. In the later stories, however, he is more controlling and pedantic. Huck, on the other hand, becomes the model for a slightly older audience and adult readers, in particular, as he develops and demonstrates his conscience and reveals himself to be an independent thinker, free of society’s constraints. While critics have a temptation to contrast, or at least balance, Huck’s pragmatism with Tom’s romanticism, those qualities primarily are highlighted because of oversimplified or limited takes on the characters, particularly those formed by only remembering the pair from each of their original novels. The more appropriate contrast, should such a division be necessary, would be to counter Tom’s conventionality and restraint with Huck’s idealism and independence. Where Tom narrows within the system, Huck breaks free of it.

Huck and Tom and Tom and Edward

The seeming duality for Huck and Tom can be seen in other works by Clemens as well. Many of the author’s works feature doubles or pairs, with Tom and Huck his most famous duo. Even within Huckleberry Finn, the reader encounters the noteworthy scoundrels known as the Duke and the King (or Dauphin), with Huck and Jim serving as the primary narrative duo, while the re-entry of Tom Sawyer in the novel’s final third reestablishes Tom and Huck as Twain’s primary pair of characters. Besides Tom and Huck, the most noteworthy literary pair in the Mark Twain canon are probably the titular protagonists of The Prince and the Pauper (1881), the author’s noted novel about two sixteenth-century English boys, written and published between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Prince Edward Tudor and the pauper Tom Canty represent many of the qualities seen in Tom and Huck. The two Toms, Sawyer and Canty, are both resourceful and clever, escaping the world’s difficulties through reading and surviving through their reliance on their wits. Both Tom Canty and Huckleberry Finn have abusive fathers. Both Edward Tudor and Tom Sawyer are youthful representatives of society. Once away from the castle, Edward is forced to navigate a world unknown to him with the help of just one supportive adult (Miles Hendon). Edward’s immediate and required independence, as well as his loss of his biological father while then finding a father-figure to journey alongside him, anticipates Huck’s journey, both narratively and metaphorically, in the later novel.

Just as Tom Sawyer shows its protagonist moving towards maturity, Prince and the Pauper and Huckleberry Finn detail paths for youthful characters to mature. All three novels place children at their centers and show them mature through trials and tribulations as they inhabit worlds in which seemingly few adults are available to help them. Clemens uses his young lead characters to provide a commentary on their worlds and the world of the reader. Prince and the Pauper, like Huckleberry Finn, is a novel that sounds a call for social justice and makes that call through its young heroes. However, while it and Tom Sawyer also share a third-person, omniscient narrator, Huckleberry Finn famously tells its story in Huck’s distinctive first-person voice. The result of the first-person narration is a strong connection between readers and their storyteller. Where Tom Sawyer, Tom Canty, and Edward Tudor all demonstrate maturation, and where the newly crowned King Edward does bring elements of social change to England through his throne at the conclusion of Prince and the Pauper, these characters are observed by readers through the distance of the third-person narrative structure. The effect of having Huck narrate his novel creates a bond from fictional character to real-life reader. Huck’s struggles with his conscience make him a complex and multifaceted figure; where Edward is able to bring change through royal decree, Huck, the societal outcast and a boy, does not have any power. He cannot bring any change other than to his own mindset. The sense that, though he lacks power, he acts anyway resonates with readers.

Conclusion

In R. Kent Rasmussen’s Dear Mark Twain: Letters From His Readers, Mark Twain’s contemporary readers confirm that the fully realized character of Huck had strong appeal. In 1888, a thirteen-year-old boy, Herbert Philbrick, wrote directly to Huck Finn, having been so enchanted by the character that he felt him real. He praised Huck (as well as Jim and Tom), showing how well he connected to him. Mark Twain also had correspondence affirm how easily readers could connect with the young Huck. Enid Snipe, another young fan of Clemens’s books, wrote to the author in the last decade of his life, saying, “Huck is the best—Huck was more human.” Huck’s complexity and multidimensionality create a perception of the protagonist as being more human than other characters in the work and in the different Tom and Huck stories, as he appeals to characters precisely because he brings out the challenges of humanity.

The history of the two novels and the ways they have been presented have contributed to reader perceptions of both Huck and Tom. Both novels might be read first by children who later rediscover the books as adults. However, as McParland notes in Mark Twain’s Audience, from very early on, Tom Sawyer was presented as a children’s book far more often than Huckleberry Finn, with the latter novel given canonical status in all of American literature. While the first book is treated as a classic of children’s literature, it is not named as often as an adult work. With the books divided for their supposed/assumed audiences, the protagonists, in turn, are split among readers. The perception of Tom—as a child who might misbehave but who is, in general, good—becomes linked to readers’ nostalgic memories of the book, read in their own childhoods. The perception of Huck—as a social rebel who follows his conscience more than society’s expectations—is linked then to readers’ associations of reading the novel as they themselves mature, and they thus connect Huck with their own perceptions of their personal self-discovery and maturation.

The misreading of Huck as some sort of flipside to Tom comes from an over-reliance on seeing the characters as limited to the perceived world of Tom Sawyer. While Clemens does feature a more gentle tone in the final published Tom and Huck stories, Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), than in Huckleberry Finn, the idea that the first literary appearance of the pair is to be seen as a kind and even mild story ignores the work’s darker elements, such as the horrific fate of Injun Joe, and provides a sanitized, and in many ways blurred, view of the characters. For one thing, it ignores the fact that each novel has its own tone. However, that blurred take on the characters is, in many ways, the prevalent one. Tom is often interpreted as simply the “sivilized” Huck, serving as the model not merely for any archetypal boy but for specifically the refined version of Huck after Aunt Sally got through with him following the events of Huckleberry Finn. That type of misreading, often prevalent in juvenile approaches to the character, particularly in adaptations, stems from efforts to offer a Huckleberry Finn that is in a child-friendly—and thus sanitized—form. Two Disney cinematic offerings in the 1990s offer big-screen takes on the blurring: The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993), which erases Tom Sawyer from the narrative while grafting elements of Tom onto the film’s Huck, and Tom and Huck (1995), an adaptation of Tom Sawyer that highlights the rambunctious side of the children and elevates the two into equal narrative status. The interpretations by filmmakers reveal persistent and habitual efforts to place Tom and Huck into convenient slots as characters, often limiting potentially more complex interpretations.

In American education, when the books are taught, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is traditionally taught in upper elementary grades (to fourth or fifth graders), while Huckleberry Finn is traditionally taught to upper secondary students (most commonly in the eleventh grade). The placement of Huckleberry Finn with late adolescent readers causes those who encounter the book as an educational rite of passage to associate the character with lessons on independence and American culture. The book has a long history of being taught as a didactic novel, encouraging the need for social justice, and Huck as a character is interwoven into readings that promote Huckleberry Finn as a novel being read as a call for social rebellion and societal change. Text and protagonist are read as one and the same, and Huckleberry Finn exists for those who truly read the novel in a school setting as the rebellious youth.

Although those who read the novel are clearly producing and maintaining powerful perceptions of Huck as an agent of social rebellion, the popular culture perceptions of the characters—ones that reset to the Tom Sawyer view of rascals on adventures—persist overall. One surprising example of this legacy was found with the 1968–1969 television series The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a prime-time children’s series that combined live actors playing Huck (Michael Shea), Tom (Kevin Schultz), and Becky (Lu Ann Haslam) with animated figures as the trio fled from the villainous Injun Joe. The trio are presented as having been chased into caves outside of Hannibal—not St. Petersburg, as Mark Twain’s novels renamed Clemens’s hometown—and, in their running, having fallen through a magical portal, so that they visit a new place each episode as they seek to return to their hometown in Missouri. Each episode, then, is a crossover from the world of Mark Twain to some adventurous and often fantastic landscape, with Huck and Tom encountering leprechauns, mummies, pirates, cursed Incan and Aztec ruins, and mad scientists. Stories blend elements from The Arabian Nights and mythology, as well as linking the heroes with Aladdin, Hercules, and Don Quixote. The series continued the adventures of Tom, Becky, and Huck while also prolonging perceptions of the characters as icons of childhood adventure. Tom and Huck are not just interchangeable, but they are also taking the place of Jason against the Gorgon and Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The characters could go any place to find a good adventure, and Twain’s characters are seen as the starting point for those adventures; even when the characters are presented with limited depth, they inspire further connections to other literary and fictional worlds.

In Dear Mark Twain, a letter from Orion Clemens to his brother Samuel from 1885 features Orion relaying to his sibling the views an Iowa resident, John H. Craig, had of Huckleberry Finn. Craig reported that both Jim and Huck “are real characters” for him as a reader, and he especially praised the development of Huck, finding him “as distinctly a created character as Falstaff.” Huck stands out as a real character who can exist alongside the most noteworthy of Shakespeare’s creations. Although presentations of the character through art and adaptations suggest a limited understanding of the character, to the point that he is confused with his literary comrade Tom, and although some presentations leave readers/viewers having to determine who they reckon it is, Huckleberry Finn stands up throughout as a unique and individual character, the literary embodiment of an American idealistic spirit.

Works Cited