when did the story kake place?

When you speak about when, you are speaking about the setting of a piece of literature. We can talk about this as the "Setting of Time"

Setting of Time

Mark Twain wrote his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in the late nineteenth century, but the actual setting of the novel is in the decade of the 1840s. We can be sure of this because slavery is most definitely still in force. Gender roles were very specific and the vernacular of Missouri is well-established in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Another aspect of the time is the use of superstition and, specifically, bad luck, that marks the mid nineteenth century.