The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Pap, the cabin, and a faked death
2. Jackson's Island and the raft
3. The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons
4. The Duke and the King
5. The letter Huck could not send
6. The sale of Jim and Tom's rescue
7. What the last stretch costs the book
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

Twain wrote this as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from 1876, and the first chapters lean on what happened there: Huck's treasure, the widow, Tom's talk of gangs. It first appeared in London through Chatto & Windus on 10 December 1884, then in the United States through Charles L. Webster and Company on 18 February 1885, which is why catalogs list both 1884 and 1885. The first British edition runs xvi plus 438 pages with 174 illustrations by E. W. Kemble.

Huck tells the whole thing himself, past tense, in the speech he grew up with, and he almost never stops to say what a moment means, which is how a bad situation can sound cheerful for pages at a time. I will walk through it in order, twists included. One thing to know first: the action sits before the Civil War, and the dialogue uses the language of that world, including the slur that people around Huck use for Jim. Readers and teachers still argue about it.

Pap, the cabin, and a faked death

Huck's trouble at the start is comfort. Widow Douglas and Miss Watson take him in and expect prayers and spelling lessons. Prayer does not seem to change anything, and Miss Watson's Providence knocks the Widow's flat every time, so Huck lets the question go.

The first report of his father is a mistake. A drowned man turns up twelve miles above town, and the town buries him as pap, but Huck settles down again, because a drowned man floats on his face, not his back, so the corpse was a woman dressed in man's clothes. He sells his whole fortune to Judge Thatcher for a single dollar so he never has to lie about where it is, and then one night pap is sitting in his room.

Pap goes for the money and for Huck's not stopping school, catches him in the spring, rows him three miles upriver, and crosses to the Illinois shore, where an old log hut stands in timber so thick nobody could find it without knowing. He locks the door and sleeps with the key under his head. The worst days are his rants about the government, and one night of the D.T.s when he sees devils hauling him off and chases Huck around the cabin with a clasp-knife, calling him the Angel of Death.

So he arranges the exit. While pap tows his raft to town, Huck climbs out through a section of the bottom log he has been sawing with a rusty wood-saw between a rafter and the clapboards, and loads a canoe with everything he can carry. He restores the log and covers the sawdust, then stages the scene: shoots a wild pig, smashes the cabin door with the axe, cuts the pig's throat on the floor, drags a sack of rocks from the carcass to the river so the ground shows a drag mark, bloods the axe and sticks his own hair on the back of it, and rips the meal sack so the meal sifts out behind him toward a lake. The town will drag the river for his body and hunt the lake for robbers, never for a living boy. Jackson's Island is good enough for him.

Jackson's Island and the raft

The island is three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide with a big cave in the ridge, and the cave holds everything they own. Jim is already there. He came the night after Huck was killed, walking the river road and swimming out to a raft when it passed, and the little birds tell them when rain is coming.

Jim has a plan with numbers in it. He means to float to Cairo, cross the Ohio, and land in a free state, then save until he can buy his wife, and after her the two children, and if their master will not sell, get an Abolitionist to steal them. At night he moans in his sleep, "Po' little 'Lizabeth! po' little Johnny!" He also tells Huck the story of the slap: he hit his four-year-old girl for not shutting a door, came back to find her still crying in the same spot, and when he shouted to startle her she never budge, because she had been deaf and dumb all along. He says the Lord God Almighty will have to forgive him, because he is never going to forgive himself. Huck writes that Jim cared just as much for his people as white folks do for theirs, that it don't seem natural, but he reckons it is so.

Most of these pages are weather and drifting things. A frame house floats past, and they find a naked man shot in the back, dead two or three days, whom Jim covers and tells Huck not to look at. They loot eight dollars sewed into a blanket overcoat lining, until a rattlesnake turns up curled on the foot of Jim's blanket and the mate bites his bare heel, and he swells up and lies four days and nights while Huck keeps his own part in it to himself.

The escape from pap is not final. Huck paddles into town as a girl named Sarah Williams and gets fed and questioned by a woman. The town has decided pap murdered Huck, then decided the runaway nigger Jim did it, and there is three hundred dollars on Jim and two hundred on pap. The woman's husband means to search the island after midnight, so Huck warns Jim and that night they shove off. They go wrong in the fog: the raft comes apart, Huck teases Jim about dreaming the night alone, and Jim tells him the trash is people who put dirt on a friend's head. It takes Huck fifteen minutes to go and humble himself to Jim, and he says he was never sorry afterward. They miss Cairo the same night, and days later a man on the bank tells him he must be a fool, which is how he learns they went by it. Two men in a skiff, thinking pap has the small-pox, back water and leave two twenty-dollar gold pieces on a board. Then a steamboat strikes through the raft at night, and Huck swims for shore and lands at the Grangerfords'.

The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons

Huck comes ashore as a lost relation called George Jackson and is fed like one. The house is worth the stay: a crockery cat and dog that squeak when pressed, a family Bible, Pilgrim's Progress about a man who left his family for no stated reason, and on the walls crayon pictures drawn by a daughter who died at fifteen, mourning ladies under weeping willows captioned "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas."

On Sunday both families sit in the same church with shotguns between their knees while the preacher talks on brotherly love. The feud is older than anybody's memory: Buck Grangerford can only say a lawsuit ended in a shooting thirty years ago, and Huck never learns what the original trouble was about. Then Miss Sophia elopes with Harney Shepherdson, and the family rides out with guns. The fight turns into a running battle at the log store: Buck and his cousin Joe hold off four or five men from behind woodpiles until the men slip around on foot and come in from behind. The boys jump for the river, both hurt, and swim the current while the men shoot from the bank calling to kill them. Huck waits in a tree until dark, then drags the two bodies ashore and covers their faces, crying over Buck, who was mighty good to him. Harney and Miss Sophia got across safe. When Huck reaches the creek the raft is gone, until Jim raises his voice from the dark: he had dived deep and hidden her in a crick among the willows.

The Duke and the King

Two men come aboard in the dark, and neither lasts an hour before Huck measures them. The young one is by rights a duke, the lineal descendant of the infant Duke of Bridgewater; the old one is the late Dauphin, son of Louis the Sixteen, corrected by the duke into the late Charlemagne, the rightful King of France. Jim and Huck kneel and majesty them for the rest of the trip. Huck's own sentence is the quiet center: it did not take him long to make up his mind that these liars were no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds, and he never said nothing.

They run every grift the river will hold. The king preaches a camp-meeting sermon as a reformed pirate and collects eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents in an afternoon. The duke advertises The Royal Nonesuch at the court house, three nights only, ladies and children not admitted, at fifty cents a head, and prints a handbill with a picture of a runaway nigger and two hundred dollars under it, so they can travel by daylight with Jim tied up, claiming they captured him up the river.

The Wilks episode is the worst of it. A man dies and leaves property to two brothers from England, and the Duke and King arrive first and take the parts. Huck cannot keep still, and when he gets the stolen gold he hides it in Peter Wilks's coffin and leaves Mary Jane a note: "I put it in the coffin. It was in there when you was crying there, away in the night." The real brothers arrive with letters, a lawyer yells to dig up the corpse and look, and in the storm that night the crowd finds the bag of gold on the dead man's breast. Huck slips away in the dark. Later, in a town downriver, an audience lays a trap at one of their shows, and Huck and Tom watch the king and the duke go by all over tar and feathers, astraddle of a rail.

The letter Huck could not send

By Pikesville the arrangement has come apart. Huck comes back from town to find the raft gone, and a boy tells him Jim was caught and sold for forty dollars to the Phelpses, with a handbill posted for two hundred.

Huck's first idea is decent and useless: write to Tom Sawyer and let Miss Watson know where her runaway is. He gives that up because she would sell Jim straight down the river again, and because word would get around that Huck Finn helped one to his freedom. He kneels to pray, and the words will not come, and he knows why: he is playing double, and you cannot pray a lie. So he writes the letter first and sees whether he can pray afterward:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

He feels washed clean of sin, and sits thinking, and every place he looks, Jim is standing watch so Huck can sleep, or is glad to see him come back out of the fog, or is the man he saved by telling two men they had small-pox aboard, the best friend old Jim ever had in the world. Then he sees the paper in his hand. It is a close place, and he decides it forever, and tears it up:

All right, then, I'll go to hell.

Everything after it is paid for out of that decision.

The sale of Jim and Tom's rescue

Huck means to steal Jim back himself, but he walks into the Phelps farm, is taken for a nephew who was due that week, and learns that Jim is chained by one leg with a ten-foot chain to his bed-leg, down by the ash-hopper. Then Tom Sawyer walks in, and Huck has to keep being Sid.

Tom takes over, and the object stops being Jim's freedom and becomes Jim's escape. He plans to dig him out, which will take about a week, and then improves on that for weeks: a rope ladder cooked up in a pie, the bed-leg sawed in two with the sawdust swallowed, rats and spiders turned in for the prisoner's company. Huck keeps pointing out that a man could simply lift the bedstead and slip the chain off, and Tom tells him that is the infant-schooliest way of going at a thing, because there is more honor in getting a man out through dangers you contrived yourself than through dangers somebody else furnished. The digging is done at night with case-knives, and the hands come up blistered.

The night itself goes fast. They come out through the hole in order, Jim first and Huck next and Tom last, and at the fence Tom's britches catch on a splinter and snap it, and a voice sings out that he will shoot. Bullets whizz, they run for the canoe, and the barking dogs are their own. Tom is the gladdest of them all, because he has a bullet in the calf of his leg. Jim will not move a step without a doctor, not if it is forty years, so Huck rows to the village and brings the old man back on a story about a dream that shot his brother. While Tom sleeps, men in a skiff tie Jim as he sits with his head on his knees, and he goes back into chains on bread and water.

Then Tom wakes up and drops the truth. Miss Watson died two months ago, ashamed she had ever meant to sell Jim down the river, and set him free in her will. The whole rescue had been performed on a man who was already free, and Tom is proud of it because he wanted the adventure. He gives Jim forty dollars for being a prisoner so patient, and Jim tells Huck that the dead man in the floating house was pap, so the six thousand is still with Judge Thatcher. Huck finishes by deciding not to be adopted and sivilized after all, and to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.

What the last stretch costs the book

The final section strains, and it is fair to say so. Tom's list of obstacles reads like a boy inventing tasks in a treehouse, and the danger that was concrete, Jim sold for forty dollars to strangers, turns into costume and play. Readers often feel that the last fifth belongs to a different, lighter book, one where Jim is an object for other people's amusement rather than a man with a wife and children waiting.

The rest of the book carries its own burden. The dialect takes some getting used to, and some readers never get past it. The racial language sits in ordinary speech, which is what Twain wanted, and the book clearly puts Jim on the raft as the sanest and most decent person in it, while still letting the con men play him for laughs. Both things are true at once, and the argument about it is not going away.

What holds it together is the voice. Huck notices what people do with their hands and their money, repeats what he does not understand, and never once analyzes himself. On the raft, at night, with the shore sounds going by, the book is as good as anyone has claimed.

FAQ

When and where was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first published?

In London through Chatto & Windus on 10 December 1884, then in the United States through Charles L. Webster and Company on 18 February 1885, which is why catalogs list both 1884 and 1885.

Is it a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?

Yes. Twain wrote it as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from 1876, and the opening chapters reuse Huck's treasure, the widow, and Tom's talk of gangs.

How big is the first British edition?

The first British edition runs xvi plus 438 pages with 174 illustrations by E. W. Kemble, and this summary follows that text.