Whether or not they've ever read MT's novel, most Americans already have some idea of what "Tom Sawyer" looks like. From the work of numerous artists, film makers, cartoonists, advertising designers and so on, images of playing hookey or whitewashing the fence or getting lost in the cave have become parts of our cultural consciousness. In MT's time, people "saw" Tom and the story as True Williams depicted them. Williams, who had worked on each of the MT books previously published by the American Publishing Company, did 160 of the novel's 162 illustrations.

The manuscript was short, especially for a subscription book; both the publisher and the author were probably counting on Williams' drawings to make Tom look bulkier. Beverly R. David suggests that that may account for the unusual design Williams created for the novel's 35 chapter headings: "these head pieces occupied from fifty to sixty per cent of the total page space." These designs are the most attractive feature of Williams' contribution to the volume, although they caused a difficulty in setting type that helped delay its publication.

MT was happy with Williams' "rattling pictures," as he called them in a letter to Howells dated 18 January 1876, where he spoke feelingly of the illustrator: "Poor devil, what a genius he has & how he does murder it with rum. He takes a book of mine, & without suggestion from anybody builds no end of pictures just from his reading of it."

One picture not by Williams was doubtless the result of a suggestion from MT. At the very end of the narrative is what looks to be a drawing of Aunt Polly -- except that it is actually of "Mrs. Partington," a character created in the 1850's by humorist Benjamin Shillaber. As Sinclair Hamilton has shown, the drawing can be traced back to an artist named Josiah Wolcott; this version of Mrs. Partington, though, was the work of Frederick M. Coffin, and was used as the frontispiece to Shillaber's 1854 Life and Sayings of Mrs. Partington. Books published by Elisha Bliss frequently recycled illustrations from other American Publishing Co. books to save money, but in this case it took additional effort to make this visual quotation to Shillaber's well-known book. Why MT chose to end his novel with this gesture isn't clear, but it might have been meant to indicate the debt Aunt Polly and Tom owe to Mrs. Partington and her nephew Ike (see Sources). Below are both drawings: on the left the first page of Shillaber's volume; on the right, the penultimate page of MT's:

 

The only other drawing not by Williams is supposed to be by Tom Sawyer: the house he draws for Becky. Most commentators think MT drew this picture himself (see The Big House).

Here are 12 examples of Williams' work. Many others can be seen, embedded in the pages of the first edition, by looking through the Prospectus for the novel.