CHAPTER I

Horatio Alger
he New York City of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful
place for many of its inhabitants. Areas such as Five Points (the
setting for the movie Gangs of New York) were dangerous and
£ lthy, filled with abandoned or neglected chitdren. Many slept outside
ar night, and most wore badly Gaing, ragged clothes. During the day
they hawked matches, sold newspapers, shined shoes, or pickedpock
ets in order to ger money to eat. The authorities did little to alleviate
the situation, and in one celebrated incident a street urchin found
naked was represented in a court case by the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Horatio Alger, the chronicler of this world to a public who may
have preferred not to know that it existed, was not himself a New
YOrkef having been brought up in middle-class comfort in
Massachusetts with a private school education followed by Harvard
(see Rychard Fink's Introduction to the 1962 edition).
Though he had had some writing published, Ragged Dick, or Street
Life in New York with tbe Boot-Btacks was his first bestsellef setting
the template for scores of poor-boy-makes-good novels that had a
massive influence on young Americans (Groucho Marx and Ernest
Hemingway were among those said to have devoured Alger's work).
Here we will look at the outline of the story and Alger's significant
place in the success literature.
The story
At a time when Central Park was still"a rough tract of land"lined
with workers' huts, there was a bootblack known as Ragged Dick.
With his mother dead and his father gone to sea, Dick spends his days
shining boots for businessmen, his evenings(if he has some spare
coins) watching cheap plays at the Old Bowery theatef and his nights
in doorways wrapped up in newspapers. If he's flush he will stay at the
Newsboys Lodging House for 6 cents a night and buy a meal at a
cafe.