It didn’t dawn on me until someone mentioned online that Tom Sawyer while living with Aunt Polly and Grandmother, didn’t mention his parents. Was this Mark Twain’s oversight? Or no reason needed to explain where his parents were?
I could be way off but I think that was covered in Huck Finn?
Aunt Polly mention’s her “poor dead sister” at one point. No mention of what happened to his dad, as far as I know.
He lived with his dad in Huck Finn IIRC but I can’t remember what happened.
No, he didn’t. Huck’s dad, not Tom’s, shows up at the start Huckleberry Finn, which is what prompts Huck to run away.
Oh you are right! Sorry.
There must have been a lot of tragedy in that family. If I remember correctly Mary and Sid, who also lived with Aunt Polly, were Tom’s half brother and half sister, not full brother and sister. Perhaps the dead sister was widowed twice.
Was Tom Sawyer one of those books which were expurgated as children’s editions? So that the book as we read it in school is different from the way it was actually written?
And, there is no Grandmother living with them, either.
It was the South soon after the Civil War wasn’t it? Most folks would have had dead fathers. . .
it was before the civil war
that’s why there were slaves
Sid is the half- brother. Mary is a cousin. No grandmother. His mother, Aunt Polly’s sister, is dead.
Didn’t Tom say his half-brother’s full name was Sid Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn?
Which just adds to the confusion, since Aunt Polly is raising a boy she isn’t related to
I read it as it was originally written, not a kid version.
Not in my experience. Discussions and plans to censor Sawyer and Finn are recent and have always, to my knowledge, centered on terms for African Americans that are now considered repulsive. In other words, the N word.
Readers from Twain’s time might have assumed that Tom’s parents died of disease or accident. Or maybe it’s just how people rarely wonder what happened to the parents of fictional nephews like Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Turns out that the boys do have parents, they just haven’t been seen since Della Duck became a heroin addict after World War II.
Wow, I never thought of that, but you’re right.
Maybe Tom (who was older) assumed the last name of his mother’s second husband when she re-married. Would that have been a common practice of those times? That does require two dead (or missing) dads, in addition to the deceased mom. But no matter what, since Sid is his half brother, the back story requires 3 dead or missing parents.
Or Aunt Polly just took on her dead sister’s boy and his half sibling as a package, not to break up the family. “Decent” Southerners were loath to break up slave families, right? So maybe it wouldn’t have been such a big-hearted sacrifice to raise a non-blood relative. The fact that Sid was the favored of the two just shows how much she values Sid’s “goodness,” given how much of a pain in the ass Tom was (relative to her standards). I know from my perspective, bloodlines wouldn’t make one kid more cherished than the other, but not sure what sentiments would have prevailed in that less-enlightened time.
Or how about this: Their mom had a fetish for guys named Sawyer, so she married two unrelated Sawyers consecutively. 
Actually, it was condemned and censored from first publication, but for different reasons. The chapter “You Can’t Pray a Lie” was extremely objectionable.
[spoiler]Huck decided he’d rather go to hell than abandon Jim. Very objectionable to the religious leaders of the time, since it was blasphemous to want to go to hell.
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The need for detailed background of every character is a recent phenomenon, probably beginning in the past 40 years. Before that, if the background was irrelevant to the story, no one cared.
Is Aunt Polly’s last name ever given? If it turns out her name is Polly Sawyer, well, that would answer a lot of questions about Tom’s family.
:smack:
Thank you.
Not necessarily. When I first read Huck Finn about 40 years ago, in a volume marketed to kids, all of the feud chapters was taken out; the N word was left in.
When I read it a few years later in an “adult” version and read about the feud, it was a “whoa - what happened?” moment. I think my Dad explained that sometimes books got edited like that, to make them “better for kids.”