From Bad Boys to Good Managers: Twain, Aldrich, and the Creation of a Middle-Class Ideal

Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 1869 novel The Story of a Bad Boy and Mark Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer feature extended camping trips on islands and other telling similarities that illustrate Aldrich's influence on his friend's book. Indeed, Alan Gribben argues that The Story of a Bad Boy represents "the standard work" that Twain "tried to surpass" (158). Because of this obvious resemblance, most critics who discuss the similarities between Aldrich's and Twain's books are interested in positioning them as ideal types of the Bad Boy genre, then using those books to help explain that genre.¹ Mary Lystad, for example, has shown that both novels privilege the boy's peer group over his family (68). Tim Prchal has delineated the ways in which "these works had an influence on the era's reconstruction of masculinity" (188). And Peter Kramer has argued that Bad Boy books use "the secure knowledge of the boy's inevitable maturation and adult success" to justify the depiction of a "highly pleasurable vision of total social disorder" (121).

While these readings delineate Bad Boy books' normative depictions of a "typical" American boyhood that would lead to a "typical" adulthood, these tales have yet to be fully explored in class terms. Viewing these texts against the ideological ascendancy of the American middle class during the increasing organizational complexity of the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, we realize that Aldrich and Twain participated in the American project of projecting middle-class cultural hegemony by arguing that boyhood mischief demonstrates the managerial acumen that leads to adult success.² Aldrich's "bad" Tom Bailey, whose sole appearance comes in a novel published during the rush of bureaucratization that characterized post-Civil War America, contains a straightforward portrayal of a promising youth whose mischief reveals an aptitude for organizing and staffing complicated projects. Twain's "bad" Tom Sawyer—whose career stretched from Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn (1885), through the composition of the ultimately unpublished Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, and into a revival of the character in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)—allows for a more nuanced depiction of the ascendant middle class. As the portrayals multiplied, Tom Sawyer became easier to read as a procedure-following technocrat: an important depiction during a transition in conceptualizing the middle class, from good people who ran small businesses to savvy managers of large-scale enterprises who were also good people. Perhaps more significantly, iterating Tom allowed Twain to create versions of his young manager that implicitly express doubts about middle-class hegemony as well as those that echo Aldrich's sanguine embrace. In order to fully understand how Aldrich's and Twain's bad boys participate in and critique the development of middle-class hegemony during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, it will be helpful to consider the evolution of the American middle class during that century.³

As C. Dallett Hemphill explains, although colonial Americans lacked conceptual recourse to notions of class,⁴ the "always-messy reality" of the colonial class system featured three "sorts": a leisured upper sort who "did not have to work for a living," a middling sort whose members "need[ed] to engage in business or a profession" in order to support themselves, and a lower sort who "did not own land or capital" and usually performed manual labor for wages. The middling sort were further differentiated "by a desire for self-improvement" and the use of proper deportment to demonstrate class status (349). Consequently, "middling readers" helped to form middle-class culture as they consumed the British conduct manuals popular between 1820 and 1860 (354).

Unsurprisingly for an ideological construct rooted deeply in conduct manuals, a signal feature of this middling-sort identity is an outwardly performed moral rectitude. And while Jennifer Goloboy has argued that the "riskiness of eighteenth-century business encouraged" a preference among the American middle class for "people who seemed steady, reliable, and hardworking" (539), this moral rectitude...