Joaquin Parada

Mrs. Gibson

English 8

November 12, 2020

Tom Sawyer

           As time passes many things of the past start to make no sense in terms of what people do. This change can be encountered when reading any classic by an author of the past. A good example of this is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which takes place over a hundred years ago. Since the time of Mark Twain, American Childhood has changed a lot due to technology making life easier along with ever-changing social norms that have reshaped certain people’s roles in society.

Most people born in the 21st century can’t imagine living without all the crazy technology we have now. Some things we have taken for granted for our entire lives like good medicine. Now medicine is made to not only work but also to taste good even though actual medicine tastes terrible. Because most people knew that if a medicine tasted bad then it was good medicine they tasted it to see if it was good. When Aunt Poll, got the pain killer, “She tasted it and was filled with gratitude. It was simply fire in a liquid form” (Twain 116). This is a good example of how technology has changed focus from what is required to what is wanted because there is no point in diluting medicine to make it taste good; that just makes the medicine worse in terms of usefulness.

On top of changes in technology, there have been many changes to society as a whole. One good example of this is that is clearly shown in the book is child abuse. Today a lot of the things that are done to punish the kids in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would be considered child abuse, but that was completely fine at the time that it was written. The best example of this is probably when tom took the blame for ripping Mr. Dobbins’s book and “took without an outcry the most merciless flogging that even Mr. Dobbins had ever administered” (Twain 191). How this event is described sounds like something that no one in their right mind would do but back then it was completely fine and most kids had to deal with getting hit if they ever did something wrong.

Another change in society would be how we treat kids who are abused by their parents, for example, Huckleberry Finn. From when your meet Huck, he is a kid that might as well be an orphan with how his dad thinks of him. Huck never goes to his house in fear of his dad, but even so, he still is under the jurisdiction of his dad. This leads him to hide down in the village and live wherever he can. This can be seen by how he lives in hog sheds and eats whatever people throw out. Today someone like him would immediately be put into child protective services due to his dad and probably be adopted by another family, but sadly this stuff didn’t exist back then. In the book, he just has to deal with his dad and make the best of what he can do.

These are just a small list of things that have changed for kids since the time that Mark Twain was alive, when technology was much less developed, and our society and social norms were substantially different. You can find these differences everywhere in old literature. We may see old literature as looking into a different world but in those times these things were normal. This cycle will keep repeating itself with the people from a hundred years from now thinking how strange our society is.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Twain, Mark. Puffin Books. Puffin Books, 2008.