Beltings and beatings play a prominent role in Twain's boy fictions. In “The Story of the Bad Little Boy” (1865), Jim is “always spanked…to sleep” by his mother and, instead of a good-night kiss, “she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.” While in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–85), when Huck stays with pap in the cabin in the woods, “by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand it. I was all over welts.” It is the prevalence of such punishments, and attempted punishments, in Tom Sawyer's young life that provides the starting-point for my present analysis of childhood discipline and its fictional representation in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). For to focus on the different types of punishment Tom undergoes, the supervisory controls which are placed over him, and the way he responds to them, is to suggest a reading of Twain's novel as illustrative both of the changing forms of domestic discipline being introduced in America in the 1830s and 40s, and the spaces in which that discipline functions. In pursuing this line of inquiry, I build on previous work on the development of modern American social regulation in the antebellum period, and particularly that by G. M. Goshgarian and Richard H. Brodhead.