Sunday-school
The Sunday-school of St. Petersburg, meeting from nine to half-past ten each Sabbath morning before the church service, was a place Tom Sawyer hated with his whole heart, though his half-brother Sid and cousin Mary were fond of it. Housed in a small, plain church building with high-backed, uncushioned pews seating about three hundred, the school was run by the earnest but pompous Superintendent Mr. Walters, a slim, sandy-haired man of thirty-five who wore a stiff standing-collar and spoke in a special Sunday-school voice wholly absent on weekdays. The institution was designed to inculcate Scripture and discipline, but its actual operation was a theater of bargaining, showing off, and barely suppressed rebellion.
Structure and Reward System
The school operated a ticket-based incentive system that turned spiritual education into a form of currency speculation. Pupils memorized Bible verses to earn small blue tickets, each with a Scripture passage printed on it; ten blue tickets could be exchanged for one red ticket, and ten red tickets for one yellow ticket. Ten yellow tickets entitled the holder to a very plainly bound Bible worth forty cents, awarded by the superintendent. Mary had acquired two Bibles through this patient work over two years, and a boy of German parentage had won four or five by once reciting three thousand verses without stopping—though the strain left him "little better than an idiot" thereafter. The system made the delivery of a Bible a rare and noteworthy event, firing every scholar's heart with a fresh ambition that often lasted a couple of weeks. Tom, who had never truly hungered for the prize itself, had long yearned for the glory and éclat that came with it.
Tom's Manipulation of the System
Tom exploited the ticket economy with the same entrepreneurial cunning he had used to whitewash the fence. On the morning of the prize ceremony, he waylaid arriving boys and bought tickets of various colors for ten or fifteen minutes, trading a piece of licorice and a fishhook for a yellow ticket, a couple of white alleys for three red tickets, and other trifles for blue ones. When he came forward with nine yellow tickets, nine red tickets, and ten blue ones to demand a Bible, it was a "thunderbolt out of a clear sky" for Mr. Walters, who had not expected an application from this source for the next ten years. The boys who had traded their tickets to Tom for the wealth he had amassed in selling whitewashing privileges suffered the bitterest pangs, realizing too late that they had contributed to this hated splendor. The prize was delivered with as much effusion as the superintendent could pump up, though his instinct told him a mystery lurked beneath the surface.
The Examination Day and Its Subversions
The school year culminated in "Examination" day, a public performance of learning that intensified the master's severity. The schoolhouse was brilliantly lighted and adorned with wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers; dignitaries and parents filled the benches. Scholars recited declamatory gems like "Give me liberty or give me death"—Tom broke down in the middle, utterly defeated—and young ladies read original compositions steeped in a nursed melancholy and a wasteful gush of fine language, each inevitably closing with a sermon. The prime feature was these compositions, which followed themes their mothers and grandmothers had used before them: "Friendship," "Memories of Other Days," "Religion in History," and the like. One dark-complexioned young lady read a ten-page nightmare titled "A Vision" that wound up with a sermon so destructive of hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize; the mayor declared it the most eloquent thing he had ever heard, saying Daniel Webster might well be proud of it.
Religious Revival and Its Aftermath
During a period of religious revival that swept the town, the Sunday-school's influence extended beyond its walls. Tom, recovering from measles, found that everyone had "got religion": Joe Harper studied a Testament, Ben Rogers visited the poor with a basket of tracts, and even Huckleberry Finn greeted him with a Scriptural quotation. Tom alone felt lost and crept home to bed, realizing that he was the only one in town without salvation. The revival's hold proved temporary, however; Tom soon found Joe Harper and Huck Finn up an alley eating a stolen melon, having suffered a relapse. The institution's power to enforce genuine piety was as fleeting as the emotional fervor it generated.
The Sunday-school's Broader Significance
The Sunday-school functioned as a microcosm of the village's social and moral order, yet its rigid structures were constantly undermined by the very children it sought to discipline. Tom's manipulation of the ticket system, his theatrical failure on Examination day, and the revival's rapid collapse all exposed the gap between institutional ideals and lived experience. The school's reward system, designed to encourage virtue, instead became a playground for barter and deception; its public performances, meant to display learning, became occasions for humiliation and farce. In the end, the Sunday-school remained a fixture of village life, but one whose authority was perpetually contested by the irrepressible energies of boyhood.
