Summary
Summary of Tom Sawyer Abroad
Who it’s for
For readers who enjoy comic travel, a boy's voice full of mistakes, and light satire, with airship adventures, desert wonders and friends who argue about everything they see.
What this book is
Tom Sawyer Abroad is a short adventure novel by Mark Twain, published in 1894. It brings back the three friends from his earlier books: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the man who once ran away from slavery with Huck. This time they leave the Mississippi behind and fly off in a strange airship, bound for Africa and the lands near it.
Huck tells the story himself, in his plain river talk, so every wonder and every foolish argument comes through his eyes. Twain uses the balloon trip to poke fun at book learning, at know-it-all boys and at the way people read the world from maps. You get a quick tale of deserts, caravans and lions, with plenty of jokes along the way. And you get three friends whose different ways of thinking keep bumping into each other, high above the clouds. Let us begin where the trip itself begins, with an odd machine and an odder inventor.
In this summary
- 1A strange machine lifts three friendsFree
- 2Huck and Jim doubt, Tom explains
- 3Over the ocean and into the desert
- 4Mirages, storms and a caravan below
- 5What the trip says about knowing things
- 6How Huck's voice carries the tale
Key point 1 of 6
A strange machine lifts three friends
The story opens back in the Mississippi town where Tom, Huck and Jim live. Tom has been reading about big ideas, and he is restless, the way he always is when life turns quiet. Then the boys hear of a remarkable flying ship, the invention of a foreign professor whose manner makes them uneasy.
Huck is the one telling us all this, and he does it the only way he knows, by saying what he saw and what he felt. He describes the machine as something much bigger and stranger than any steamboat. It has a body that floats on the air and wheels or blades that push it along. Huck has no fancy words for it, and that makes the machine seem even more strange to the reader.
The trouble is that the three friends do not simply look at the ship. They climb aboard, and the professor, who is something of a puzzle himself, takes it up into the sky. Before they know it, the town is shrinking beneath them. Huck is scared, Jim is more scared, and Tom is delighted.
This early part sets the pattern for the whole book. Tom sees a chance for glory and learning, Huck goes along because he follows his friend, and Jim worries about what a person can actually trust. The ground is gone, and so are the usual rules. What will two boys and two grown men make of a world they can see from above?
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Huckleberry Finn
- Huckleberry Finn narrates the journey, accompanying Tom and Jim while trusting his own eyes and common sense.
- Tom Sawyer
- Tom Sawyer is Huck's bookish, boastful friend, eager for adventure and fond of explaining everything to his companions.
- Jim
- Jim is the boys' kind, sensible companion, concerned about the flight's dangers and missing his home and family.
- The Professor
- The Professor is the foreign inventor of the airship whose strange manner makes Tom, Huck and Jim uneasy.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 36,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 2 h 25 min
- Listening time4 h
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 12 other languages