Tom Sawyer

The novel was well-received when it was get-go publish and became a bestseller in its day. An anonymous review in The Atlantic Monthly in 1876 characterizes Tom in a persuasive fashion, noting first how Tom be wants in the sort of town visualised in the novel and that he has been bred to fear God and venerate Sunday-school:

His subjection in these respects does not so deeply affect his inherent tendencies but that he makes himself a lamb burden to the poor, tender-hearted old aunt who brings him up with his orphan blood brother and sister, and struggles vainly with his manifold transgresss, actual and imaginary. The limitations of his transgressions are nicely and artistically traced (Anonymous 617).

The critic further notes that Tom is always ready for every adventure and is never as bad as he may think he is.

The structure of the novel is seen as attacking the conventions of earlier juvenile fiction and so of dramatic out in a new direction. Walter Blair in 1939 considered the constitution of the book and tried to place it in its context. He notes that the children in earlier juvenile fiction had generally been either unassailable or bad, with the bad being notable for their tendency to sin rather than for any other reason. The stories generally reached an ending with a moral lesson. Humorists noted the difference between the way everything was clad together in these books and the way things occurred in real life, oftentimes the way we would criticize a si

The book has an episodic nature that made couplet pick out it had no plot, but in fact the structure is overmuch tighter than Twain's view might indicate. Twain always claimed that as long as a book was content to write itself, his relate never flagged.

It was when the book tried to get him to think and track down that he put it away and forgot about it. This explains why Twain was more comfortable writing short stories than novels, for a elongated work required careful planning, against which he rebelled. Gerber notes that Tom sawyer seems to have a very simple structure on its surface, but in fact it is a complex run short of four structural patterns, each one taken from a popular genre of the 1870s. The first is the episodical structure of local pretext writing, something at which Twain excelled. The pattern is evident in the first five chapters in which the author reports and romanticizes the life of this boy in St. Petersburg. The second is the cause and result pattern found in much juvenile fiction of the time, and in these works the prize behavior of the Good Boy invariably leads to praise and prosperity, plot of ground the shocking lapses of the bad Boy lead to physical and eldritch punishment:

Leary, Lewis. "Tom and Huck: Innocence on Trial." The Virginia quarterly Review (Summer 1954), 417-430.

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