The Great American Rascal: Tom Sawyer at 150
claremontreviewofbooks.com
claremontreviewofbooks.com
It was an old copy and was not censored and included all the racial slurs. It took me years before knowing that the words used were racial slurs as those words were not in common usage in India.
People who want to censor Twain misunderstand his message, either out of ignorance, or purposefully so as to take the sting out of Twain's social commentary and rewrite history.
Perhaps you can think of some works of literature set in India where characters utter analogous slurs, and the purpose of the author is to criticize the caste system?
https://medium.com/luminasticity/mark-twain-racism-2-tom-saw...
If I pick up a copy on a random bookstore shelf or unused from Amazon, is it likely to be censored?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation
You can definitely find censored versions in the modern marketplace. Here's censored Tom Sawyer:
https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Twains-Adventures-Tom-Sawyer/dp/...
As to what the odds are that any random copy would be censored, it's hard to say. For a work that's out of copyright, there's no copyright owner who can take legal action to thwart publication of modified versions. However in the US at least, such editions are typically advertised as modified because they are being marketed to schools and such as safe for children. If an edition is explicitly labeled as "unabridged", it's probably fine because otherwise there's the possibility of an ornery anti-censorship advocate pursuing a false advertising consumer protection claim.
The most poignant moment is in Huckleberry Finn, where (floating on the Mississippi) the protagonist asserts:
"If my friendship damns me to hell, then I'll go to hell with him."
Looking it up...
"I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up."
I thought that was quite an interesting pull for a kid in 1960s USSR.
But he had one of the most incisive and intellectual minds of his times, which was biting in its criticisms/satire of American and the larger Human civilization. Everybody (but Americans especially) should read his set of essays titled; On The Damned Human Race for edification.
I often wonder what he would think of current-day American society and so-called democracy. He actually coined the term "Gilded Age" to highlight the covering of everything rotten/corrupt with a superficial sheen so as to sell it to the masses. If that doesn't describe today's society i don't know what does.
Read, The Lowest Animal (aka The Damned Human Race) by Mark Twain - https://www.thoughtco.com/the-lowest-animal-by-mark-twain-16...
And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor (some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance) insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development – nameable as the Human Being. Below us – nothing.
"Nothing but the frenchman" lmao. The irony. I wonder if this was meant to be satirical.
The essay itself is highly thought-provoking and an evisceration of Mankind. I especially like his indictment of "Moral Sense";
One is obliged to concede that in true loftiness of character, Man cannot claim to approach even the meanest of the Higher Animals. It is plain that he is constitutionally incapable of approaching that altitude; that he is constitutionally afflicted with a Defect which must make such approach forever impossible, for it is manifest that this defect is permanent in him, indestructible, ineradicable.
I find this Defect to be the Moral Sense. He is the only animal that has it. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. It has no other office. It is incapable of performing any other function. It could never have been intended to perform any other. Without it, man could do no wrong. He would rise at once to the level of the Higher Animals.
Since the Moral Sense has but the one office, the one capacity -- to enable man to do wrong – it is plainly without value to him. It is as valueless to him as is disease. In fact, it manifestly is a disease.
The Moral Sense enables a man to do wrong. It enables him to do wrong in a thousand ways. Rabies is an innocent disease, compared to the Moral Sense. No one, then, can be the better man for having the Moral Sense. What now, do we find the Primal Curse to have been? Plainly what it was in the beginning: the infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it.
The point is that moral sense enables one to distinguish right from wrong and so when you do wrong to others you are fully conscious of the suffering it causes. And yet mankind does it in a thousand different ways.
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/tom-sawyer#:~:text=T...
Relatable to any kids forced to do chores.
You will love then Poe's essay on the "theory and practice of scams" titled; Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences - https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/diddlnga.htm
Here's a share back you may enjoy, fellow Ram Dass enjoyer: https://easternhealingarts.com/a-soft-answer
PS: My HN handle is based on my real name and not because i am a follower of "Ram Dass" (American) ;-)
I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.
Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!
And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.
I really, really hope they're worrying unnecessarily! I think it's better to find out early if a teacher is going to have an issue with things like that.
They will grow out of it eventually. Most of them anyways.
I don't think that's a bad thing. We shouldn't put the past on a pedestal, but it makes me wonder who the Tom Sawyer of the 21st century is. I just hope it isn't Katniss Everdeen or Edward Cullen.
Technology has changed, but humans haven’t.
How about Harry Potter?
Well, all of those have in common that they are fantasy and not really connected to this reality, while Tom Sawyer was a fictional adventure in reality.
I'd rather have one of the Baginses (not the Sackville mind you)
Normally you'd start with the first book from the Chrestomanci series, but I think The Magicians of Caprona (1980) and Witch Week (1982) might be the best for a new fan.
It's shame she passed away before writing much more and getting the fame she deserved :(
She had a unique and cozy style and way of world building and character design, where there is challenge and conflict but not deep malice or misery, if that makes sense..
...what do you think will cause kids to be unable to understand it? They understand things like the Odyssey and the Iliad, Charles Dickens, the Bible/Torah/Quran/Baghvad Gita/etc., Faust, Don Quixote, etc. all of which were written far earlier
They certainly don't use many of the same words, probably don't sail or float on a river (but how many kids could ever do that). What else? The core elements of friendship, loyalty, cunning, and the base satire are all still relevant and visceral today
In English, which is NOT my native language. I had to memorize my lines without understanding half of them :)