Dawson family.
John D. Dawson (b. 1812?), from Scotland, had fourteen years’ teaching experience when he opened his school in Hannibal in April 1847. In 1849 he went to California, where he was a miner in Tuolumne County by 1850. Dawson’s was the last school attended by Clemens, who remarked in 1906: “I remember Dawson’s schoolhouse perfectly. If I wanted to describe it I could save myself the trouble by conveying the description of it to these pages from Tom Sawyer” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179). The school described in Tom Sawyer (chapters 6–7, 20–21) is reprised in the opening chapter of “Schoolhouse Hill” (214–24), with the schoolmaster modeled after Dawson. The school’s location, however, as described in “Schoolhouse Hill,” reflects Clemens’s recollection of Samuel Cross’s schoolhouse. In “Villagers” (93, 94, 94, 94) Clemens mentions Dawson’s school four times (Wecter 1952, 132–33; “Letter from California,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 17 Jan 50; Tuolumne Census, 135).
Theodore Dawson was the schoolmaster’s son. Clemens recalled him as “inordinately good, extravagantly good, offensively good, detestably good—and he had pop-eyes—and I would have drowned him if I had had a chance” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:179). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) show that he planned to introduce “pop-eyed” Theodore as Gill Ferguson, but he did not do so.
