William Dean Howells and Tom Sawyer

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/tomsawye/atlantts.html

Its well known that William Dean Howells and Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) were very close literary colleagues as well as very close friends. For this reason, I thought it would be interesting to examine a critical piece from Howells about a piece of Twain's fiction. Specifically, a review of the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

The beginning discusses a pivotal difference in the character and region between two important figures; the first being Tom Sawyer and the second being Tom Bailey. Curious as to who Howells is referring to when he says "Mr. Aldrich," a quick google search or two led me to the wikipedia page of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who it turns out was a contemporary novelist and poet with Howell. According to the free encyclopedia:
"Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on November 11, 1836.^[1] When Aldrich was a child, his father moved to New Orleans. After 10 years, Aldrich was sent back to Portsmouth to prepare for college. This period of his life is partly described in his semi-autobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), in which "Tom Bailey" is the juvenile hero. Critics have said that this novel contains the first realistic depiction of childhood in American fiction and prepared the ground for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bailey_Aldrich

So, Howells is describing how Twain has taken this established "boy" character and used it to explore entirely new themes and ideas in a totally different region from the one given to us by Aldrich. Though different, Aldrich does not mean to say that Sawyer is inferior in anyway, in fact he goes on to argue just the opposite:

"Mr. Clemens, on the contrary, has taken the boy of the Southwest for the hero of his new book, and has presented him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses no charm by being realistic in the highest degree, and which gives incomparably the best picture of life in that region as yet known to fiction."

So, Howells thinks that Sawyer's Adventures paint the best picture of the Mississippi to date, and more importantly frames the idea that the novel is "realistic in the highest degree." Howells is associating the fact that the novel treats its subjects faithfully and not romantically as a huge virtue of the work. He goes on to discuss how the novel is realistic in more depth, how it digs into more than just an entertaining plot and reaches into Tom's defining of his own self and his own reality in his rural environment. More than just Tom's introspection though, the novel seeks being realistic by giving a breathtaking and accurate portrayal of the region, at least in Howells mind. This is all summed up when Howells tells us that,
"The local material and the incidents with which his career is worked up are excellent, and throughout there is scrupulous regard for the boy's point of view in reference to his surroundings and himself, which shows how rapidly Mr. Clemens has grown as an artist."

Howells cant get enough of singing Twain's praise as a realist writer and a regionalist. I wondered at this point how much their friendship was leaking into the review and whether or not Howells was being a fair and objective critical source. It's difficult to say, but I like ti think that Howell's probably did at least try to put on a lens which was disengaged from his relationship with Twain. However, it doesnt seem crazy to think that Howells would be especially enthusiastic about his friends novel, especially when it touches on so many subjects that Howells, as a realist himself, would appreciate and find important. So, there are two candidate answers for why Howells thinks of Tom Sawyer so highly: on the one hand he was Twain's best friend and collaborator, on the other he is just another realist who appreciates what Twain has done with the work. Either way, the important thing is that Howells does a great job pointing out where we can trace realism in the text, and the primary place is in the great depiction of Tom's internal thoughts and feelings as the story progresses:
"The story is a wonderful study of the boy-mind, which inhabits a world quite distinct from that in which he is bodily present with his elders, and in this lies its great charm and its universality, for boy-nature, however human nature varies, is the same everywhere."