Ragged Dick
Ragged
Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks is a Bildungsroman by Horatio
Alger Jr., which was serialized in Student and
Schoolmate in 1867 and expanded for
publication as a full-length novel in May 1868 by the publisher A. K. Loring. It was the first volume in the six-volume Ragged Dick Series and became Alger's best-selling work. The tale follows a
poor bootblack's
rise to middle-class respectability in 19th-century New York City. It had a
favorable reception. Student and Schoolmate reported their readers were
delighted with the first installment, and Putnam's Magazine thought boys would love the novel. The plot and theme were
repeated in Alger's subsequent novels and became the subject of parodies and
satires.
Plot
The
text of Ragged Dick is based on the 1868 first book edition, annotated
for student readers. "Contexts" begins by looking at Ragged Dick
through the lenses of 1860s New York and Alger's own life there. Ragged Dick is
a fourteen-year-old bootblack
– he smokes, drinks occasionally, and sleeps on the streets – but he is anxious
"to turn over a new leaf, and try to grow up 'spectable". He won't
steal under any circumstances, and many gentlemen who are impressed with this
virtue (and his determination to succeed) offer their aid. Mr. Greyson, for
example, invites him to church and Mr. Whitney gives him five dollars for
performing a service. Dick uses the money to open a bank account and to rent
his first apartment. He fattens his bank account by practicing frugality and is
tutored by his roommate Fosdick in the three
R's. When Dick rescues a drowning
child, the grateful father rewards him with a new suit and a job in his
mercantile firm. With this final event, Richard is "cut off from the old
vagabond life which he hoped never to resume" and henceforth will call
himself Richard Hunter, Esq.
Major themes
The
Alger canon is described by Carl Bode of the University of Maryland as
"bouncy little books for boys" that promote "the merits of
honesty, hard work, and cheerfulness in adversity." Alger
"emblematized those qualities" in his heroes, he writes, and his
tales are not so much about rags
to riches "but, more sensibly, rags to
respectability". With a moral thrust entrenched in the Protestant
ethic, Alger novels emphasized that
honesty, especially of the fiscal sort, was not only the best policy but the
morally right policy, and alcohol and smoking were to be abjured. Alger knew he
wasn't writing great literature, Bode explains, but he was providing boys with
the sort of material they enjoyed reading: formulaic novels "whose aim was
to teach young boys how to succeed by being good" and which featured
"active and enterprising" boy heroes sustained by "an endearing
sense of humor" even in the most trying of situations. Dialogue was
"brisk" in the Alger novel and "when good disputed with evil,
good always won." Generally, a "malicious young snob" and a
"middle-aged rascal" schemed to hurt the hero's rise, and a
"mysterious stranger" and a "worldly but warmhearted
patron" were at hand to ensure his success. Violence was kept at arm's
length in the Alger novel, the tone remained "optimistic and
positive", suspense was never "of the nail-biting sort", and the
Alger universe was "basically benign". Bode points out that the
problems of upward mobility
in the Alger novel were never "insoluble", and, although luck was a
major element in the Alger plot, it was never luck alone that brought the hero
success but luck combined with "pluck".[1]
Gary
Scharnhorst finds six major themes in Alger's 100-plus boys' books and
considers that the major theme of Ragged Dick is a rise to
respectability. Scharnhorst points out that Dick states he intends to change
his way of life and "become 'spec-table". Early in the book, Mr.
Whitney "replaces Dick's suit with a neat one, signaling the beginning of
the transformation from Ragged Dick into Richard Hunter, Esq." Scharnhorst
follows Dick's progress through the tale to the moment when Dick is rewarded
with a clerical position and notes that "The status of respectability, not
a high salary, completes his transition from Ragged Dick to Richard
Hunter." Scharnhorst writes, "The recurrence in Alger's fiction of
the theme of the Rise to Respectability underscores the inaccuracy of the
widespread opinion that his heroes rise from rags to riches. Indeed, insofar as
Alger's heroes prosper at all, they do so because they deserve
prosperity, because they happily earn it with their virtue ... Alger's
heroes always merit their good fortune—an idea which, like respectability, is
associated only tangentially to wealth."[2]
Development of the theme of the story
Alger
had served as a Unitarian
minister in Brewster, Massachusetts for about a year and a half when a church committee charged
him with pederasty.
He denied nothing, said that he had been imprudent, and resigned from the
ministry, vowing never to accept another ministerial post. Church officials
were satisfied, and no further action was taken. Alger relocated to New York
City, where he cultivated a humanitarian's interest in the city's many vagrant
children. A prolific author, he published to great success in Student and
Schoolmate, a children's monthly magazine, and when its publisher asked him
to develop a serial about street boys he wrote Ragged Dick, a tale about
bootblacks.
New
York City's bootblacks at the time Alger wrote Ragged Dick were boys,
usually between the ages of ten and sixteen, "with any number of bad
habits, and little or no principle".[3] They gambled, smoked cigar butts retrieved from the gutter,
patronized Bowery theaters and concert halls, slept on the streets or in
shelters supported by the charitable, and were "more proficient in
profanity than the Water Street roughs".[4] Alger told the Ladies Home Journal in 1890, "I
had conversations with many street boys while writing 'Ragged Dick' ... and
derived from many of them sketches of character and incidents".
Alger
adapted the conventions of the moral, sentimental, and adventure literature of
the period to fashion the formula he would employ in writing Ragged Dick
and the dozens of boys' books that followed it. "Alger did not invent his
formula out of whole cloth," Alan
Trachtenberg wrote, "but boiled down the
conventions to make a more refined brew: a style accessible both to young and
adult readers; clever dialogue and vivid descriptions; a cast of characters who
presented a range of moral positions; a physical setting itself a part of the
action."[5]
Trachtenberg
points out that Alger almost certainly consulted New York City guidebooks and
incorporated their advice on crooks, cheats, and conmen into his manuscript,[6] and explains that Alger's series books and characters bear
similarities to the anecdotal nature of myths, legends, and folktales:
"Stories of gods and of larger-than-life persons like Paul
Bunyan have an anecdotal quality similar
to the sequence of encounters, adventures, confrontations, and coincidences
that comprise the narratives of Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom and
their kin among Alger's legion of boy heroes."[6]
Ragged
Dick has been described as a
"puerile fantasy of the assimilation of the so-called dangerous classes to
the bourgeois social order",[7] but Sacvan Bercovitch believes Alger created "a
relatively realistic hero" in Dick—one who smokes, swears, plays pranks,
and spends what money he has with abandon, yet one who displays an emotional
depth foreign to Alger's subsequent heroes, who increasingly exhibited
"the slow accretion of civilized instincts and habits, including proper
speech, cleanliness, and courtesy" and who lacked Dick's "sense of
humor, sadness, and critical intelligence".[8]
Probable homoeroticism
Trachtenberg
points out that Alger had tremendous sympathy for boys and discovered a calling
for himself in the composition of boys' books: "He learned to consult the
boy in himself," Trachtenberg writes, "to transmute and recast
himself—his genteel culture, his liberal patrician sympathy for underdogs, his
shaky economic status as an author, and not least, his dangerous erotic
attraction to boy—into his juvenile fiction."[9] He believes it impossible to know whether Alger lived the
life of a secret homosexual, "[b]ut there are hints that the male
companionship he describes as a refuge from the streets—the cozy domestic
arrangements between Dick and Fosdick, for example—may also be an erotic
relationship."
Trachtenberg
observes that nothing prurient occurs in Ragged Dick but posits that
"the few instances of boys touching each other tenderly or older men
laying a light hand on the shoulder of boys, might arouse erotic wishes in
readers prepared to entertain such fantasies." Such images, Trachtenberg
believes, may imply "a positive view of homoeroticism as an alternative way of life, of living by sympathy rather
than aggression." Trachtenberg concludes, "in Ragged Dick we
see Alger plotting domestic romance, complete with a surrogate marriage of two
homeless boys, as the setting for his formulaic metamorphosis of an outcast
street boy into a self-respecting citizen."[10]
Publication history
Ragged
Dick was first published as a 12-part serial in Student and Schoolmate, beginning with January
1867 issue. Alger expanded the tale into a novel, which was published by A. K.
Loring of Boston on May 5, 1868. Thousands of copies sold out within weeks, and
the novel was republished in August 1868. It was the first in a six-volume
Ragged Dick series. The book was Alger's best-selling work and remained in
print for forty years.[11]
Literary significance and reception
Student
and Schoolmate reported in its February 1867 issue
that the first installment of Ragged Dick "has created no little
excitement among our numerous readers, as we supposed it would. Everybody is
delighted."[12] Scharnhorst observes that the Providence Evening Press,
the Boston Transcript, The Christian Register, and the Monthly Religious Magazine praised the
story, describing it as "simply charming", "excellent", and
"spirited and inspiring". According to Scharnhorst, Booth
Tarkington acknowledged the book as one of ten
that made the "greatest impression on his life", and in 1947
"the Grolier Club
of New York selected it as one of the hundred most influential American books
published before 1900."[13]
Putnam's Magazine, in its issue of July 7, 1868, wrote that "Ragged
Dick is a well-told story of street-life in New York, that will, we should
judge, be well received by the boy-readers, for whom it is intended. The hero
is a boot-black, who, by sharpness, industry, and honesty, makes his way in the
world, and is, perhaps, somewhat more immaculate in character and manners that
could naturally have been expected from his origin and training. We find in
this, as in many books for boys, a certain monotony in the inculcation of the
principle that honesty is the best policy, a proposition that, as far as mere
temporal success is concerned, we believe to be only partially true. However,
the book is very readable, and we should consider it a much more valuable
addition to the Sunday-school library than the tales of Inebriates, and
treatises on the nature of sin, that so often find place there."[14]
Edwin
P. Hoyt writes that "Ragged Dick ... caught the American fancy ...
[It] represented something virtually unknown to boys in the American
countryside and totally unsung until [its publication]: the street waif who
made his living in the jungles of brick and stone". Hoyt points out the
Alger refined the many "stylistic tricks" he had been polishing for
several years. The action displayed an authorial confidence, and the language
captured the "coarse and ungrammatical" style of the metropolitan
street boys. The book was a virtual guide to Manhattan in 1866, and "for
that reason if for no other it approached the realm of literature". Hoyt
points out that "[T]here had never been such a book ... one swindle after
another is exposed to readers who had never heard of such things."[15]
Scharnhorst
indicates Alger's legacy resides not only in the several parodies and satires
by William Dean Howells, Stephen
Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Nathanael West,
John Seelye, Glendon Swarthout,
and William Gaddis,
but also in the Horatio Alger Awards and in the many young readers who embraced
his moral and humanitarian philosophy and were disinclined to embrace robber baron capitalism.
Scharnhorst writes "It would seem that Alger was either over-rated as an
economic and political propangandist or – more probably – his books were simply
not designed thematically to spread the gospel of orthodox capitalism and
convert the readership of The
Masses.[16]
In
the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, the character Nucky
Thompson gives the book to his nephew,
saying that "he could learn a lot from it".
Adaptations
Ragged
Dick and Alger's Silas Snobden's
Office Boy inspired the 1982 musical
comedy Shine!
The show's librettist,
Richard Seff, writes that the musical is an original based on Ragged Dick
and Silas Snobden's Office Boy: "We've borrowed characters from
both novels, youthened some, aged others, re-invented a few, created a few of
our own. We stuck with Alger's pervasive theme: That in America one could begin
with nothing, and with the right attitude, hard work, application and a little
bit of luck, dream a dream and chart a course on which to achieve it."[17]
Eugene
Paul reviewed a production mounted by the New York Musical Theatre
Festival in 2010 and wrote that "Virtue
... is the message and the thrust of the show." In his plot summary, Paul
wrote that Ragged Dick is working his way slowly up the ladder of
respectability when an opportunity to improve his prospects is offered him in
Snobden's haberdashery. He faces a setback when his wicked stepfather, Luke,
arrives on the scene. Dick avoids him and pursues his goals. "But
everything comes crashing down when the darling son of a noble banker who has
befriended Dick is kidnapped by none other than his stepfather, Luke. Suspicion
and hatred, none of which Dick deserves, force him out of his job ... If you
want to know how Dick overcomes these tribulations—but then, you already know,
don’t you. There is always a happy ending in Horatio Alger’s stories."[18]
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