Tom Sawyer Illustrations

Mark Twain

Tom Sawyer

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"

"Mark Twain" has dropped the humorous exaggerationsof his "Jumping Frog" and "Innocents Abroad" in hisfresh and racy story of Tom Sawyer. "Although,"writes the popular American humoristin his preface, "my book is intended mainly forthe entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not beshunned by men and women on that account; forpart of my plan has been to try to write pleasantly, to remindadults of what they once were themselves, andof how they felt and thought and talked, and what queerenterprises they sometimes engaged in." So veryhuman is "Tom Sawyer" in its faithful delineation of boy-lifethat it cannot fail to realize the hope of "MarkTwain," and amuse everyone who in the words of the song,"would" he "were a boy again." All the love ofmischief, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, foolhardy pranksand acts of bravery that make Tom Sawyer standout as a veritable portrait from the life are set down by Mr.Clemens with unfailing fidelity to nature; andthat element of adventure so dear to boys is supplied in a manner to satisfy the appetite for the strangest sensationalfare. It is the faithful portrayal of boy-life, however--not the midnight murder in a churchyard of which TomSawyer and Huck Finn are eye-witnesses, nor the piratical venture of Tom and his mates, nor even the wanderingsof Tom and his sweetheart whilst lost in the cave--that makes this book so welcome.

Illustrating Tom Sawyer

Whether or not they've ever read Mark Twain'snovel, most Americans already have some idea of what "Tom Sawyer" lookslike. From the work of numerous artists, film makers, cartoonists, advertisingdesigners and so on, images of playing hookey or whitewashing the fenceor getting lost in the cave have become parts of our cultural consciousness.In MT's time, people "saw" Tom and the story as True Williams depictedthem. Williams, who had worked on each of the MT books previously publishedby the American Publishing Company, did 160 of the novel's 162 illustrations.

The manuscript was short, especially for a subscriptionbook; both the publisher and the author were probably counting on Williams'drawings to make Tom look bulkier. Beverly R. David suggests thatthat may account for the unusual design Williams created for the novel's35 chapter headings: "these head pieces occupied from fifty to sixty percent of the total page space." These designs are the most attractive featureof Williams' contribution to the volume, although they caused a difficultyin setting type that helped delay its publication.

Mark Twain was happy with Williams' "rattlingpictures," as he called them in a letter to Howells dated 18 January 1876,where he spoke feelingly of the illustrator: "Poor devil, what a geniushe has & how he does murder it with rum. He takes a book of mine, &without suggestion from anybody builds no end of pictures just from hisreading of it."

One picture not by Williams was doubtless theresult of a suggestion from Mark Twain. At the very end of the narrativeis what looks to be a drawing of Aunt Polly -- except that it is actuallyof "Mrs. Partington," a character created in the 1850's by humorist BenjaminShillaber. As Sinclair Hamilton has shown, the drawing can be traced backto an artist named Josiah Wolcott; this version of Mrs. Partington, though,was the work of Frederick M. Coffin, and was used as the frontispiece toShillaber's 1854 Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington. Books publishedby Elisha Bliss frequently recycled illustrations from other American PublishingCo. books to save money, but in this case it took additional effort tomake this visual quotation to Shillaber's well-known book. Why MT choseto end his novel with this gesture isn't clear, but it might have beenmeant to indicate the debt Aunt Polly and Tom owe to Mrs. Partington andher nephew Ike. Below are both drawings: on the left the first page ofShillaber's volume; on the right, the penultimate page of MarkTwain's:

The only other drawing not by Williams is supposedto be by Tom Sawyer: the house he draws for Becky. Most commentators thinkMT drew this picture himself .
Here are 12 examples of Williams' work. Manyothers can be seen, embedded in the pages of the first edition, by lookingthrough the Prospectus for the novel.

Tom Sawyer