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Unsigned handwritten manuscript notes by Samuel Clemens for a never-performed stage version of 'Tom Sawyer,' three pages, 5.5 x 9, no date but circa 1884, offering a treatment for the dramatic scene in which Tom, Huck, and Becky encounter Injun Joe in the cave. The notes read, in part: "Enter Tom & Huck. Find bag. 'No use now—got to starve.' Tom says 'No.' Examine—money all there. Discover girls asleep. Wake them. Talk. We'll save you. Gives them his crust & some bats…Devilish face of Joe peeks out—will hive those boys—steals behind boys. Girls see him & scream. Boys jump up & stand paralyzed. Then they jump for the rock & the dodging begins for life & death, the girls looking over. (Maybe Tom trips him.) 'Now, Huck.' They fly—Joe pursues, the girls scream." In fine condition. Housed in a handsome custom-made full morocco presentation portfolio, with gilt-stamped spine and title.
As early as 1875, Clemens had asked his friend William Dean Howells to dramatize the then still-unpublished Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Howells refused, but Clemens pressed ahead, composed a synopsis of his own to secure copyright and subsequently wrote at least some of the play. While these plans ultimately fell through, in 1883 the author once more attempted to translate his book into a stage success. This time, he managed to complete a dramatic version, and the play was duly copyrighted on February 1, 1884. Although Clemens 'was so pleased with this piece of work that even before he had finished it he was pondering on the cast which might properly perform it and trying to dictate terms,' the great theatre manager Augustin Daly did not take long to reject the chance to stage 'Tom Sawyer,'' and after this 'one hears no more about the author's attempting to dramatize his novel' (cf. Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck, and Tom, ed. Walter Blair, pp. 250-252).
These are three out of a total of 26 pages of working notes for the play, constituting the last three of a ten-page group termed 'C' by their editor, Walter Blair. At the time of Blair's editorial work, the notes were dispersed among several libraries: all but one of this ten-page group (C1-3 and C5-10) were then among the Mark Twain Papers at Bancroft Library, UCA, Berkeley (while C4 rests in Yale University Library). The three pages at hand form a sub-unit that provides a later plan for Act IV, in which Tom and Becky, lost in the cave, encounter Injun Joe.
Twain’s efforts to dramatize The Adventures of Tom Sawyer reflect his entrepreneurial instincts and his desire to expand his literary reach beyond the printed page. The cave episode, one of the novel’s most suspenseful sequences, was particularly well-suited to theatrical adaptation. These notes reveal Twain thinking in explicitly theatrical terms—blocking movement, pacing action, and emphasizing moments of fear and surprise—demonstrating his awareness of stagecraft conventions of the era. Although the 1884 dramatization ultimately failed to reach production, these surviving notes provide valuable insight into Twain’s creative process and his engagement with another artistic medium.
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