Horatio Alger
Horatio Alger, Jr. (1834-99) was a prolific writer of dime novel stories
for boys. From the debut of his first novel, Ragged Dick, in 1867, Alger was
instrumental in establishing a new genre of dime novels known as the 'city
story.' The genre arose out of the wide-spread urbanization that followed the
Civil War and paralleled the rise of industrialism. Alger's stories heroicized the
young street urchins living in poverty among large, urban centers such as New
York, Boston, and Philadelphia. With uncommon courage and moral fortitude,
Alger's youths struggle against adversity to achieve great wealth and acclaim.
These rags to riches stories were enormously popular with the public and
flourished in the decades from 1870 to 1890.
Alger's stories continued to be reprinted well after his death, as
evidenced by this 1911 issue of Boy's Home Weekly. Alger's name appears
twice on the cover, its prominence pointing to the author's continued popularity
and the importance of a famous writer's reputation for increasing a
publication's circulation.
Q：Think about what do they teach people? What do his characters
represent? How do they achieve success? Can you make any connections to our
readings on 'work'.
His work is usually talking about how poor child become rich and
famous through their hard working and being honest. They grow up in a He
was the most popular writer in the end of 19th. Graduated from Harvard and he
is a gay.
And his work spirit American young people’s to fighting , work hard
American have a Horatio Alger Association. And have Horatio Alger Award.
Works: “The Cash Boy”
Horatio Alger Background:
Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19thcentury American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels
about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of
middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage,
and honesty. His writings were characterized by the "rags-to-riches" narrative,
which had a formative effect on America during the Gilded Age. Alger's name
is often invoked incorrectly as though he himself rose from rags to riches, but
that arc applied to his characters, not to the author. Essentially, all of Alger's
novels are the same: a young boy struggles through hard work to escape
poverty. Critics, however, are quick to point out that it is not the hard work
itself that rescues the boy from his fate, but rather some extraordinary act of
bravery or honesty, which brings him into contact with a wealthy elder
gentleman, who takes the boy in as a ward. The boy might return a large sum
of money that was lost or rescue someone from an overturned carriage,
bringing the boy--and his plight--to the attention of some wealthy individual. It
has been suggested that this reflects Alger's own patronizing attitude to the
boys he tried to help.
Alger secured his literary niche in 1868 with the publication of his fourth
book Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class
respectability, which was a huge success. His many books that followed were
essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured a cast of stock characters:
the valiant hard-working, honest youth (who knew more Latin than the villain),
the noble, mysterious stranger (whom the poor boy rescued and by whom he
got rewarded), the snobbish youth (cousin), and the evil squire (uncle).
In the 1870s, Alger took a trip to California to gather material for future books,
but the trip had little influence on his writing. In the last decades of the 19th
century, boys' tastes changed, and Alger's moral tone coarsened accordingly.
The Puritan ethic had loosened its grip on America, and violence, murder, and
other sensational themes entered Alger's works. Public librarians questioned
whether his books should be made available to the young. By the time he died
in 1899, he had published around a hundred volumes.
First Novel: Ragged Dick, or Street Life.
The first novel Alger wrote in New York, Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New
York with the Boot-Blacks, 1868, was to be his most popular juvenile adventure.
Indeed, it was continuously in print for the next forty years. The eponymous
hero, Ragged Dick, leads the reader on a tour of mid-nineteenth century New
York City. He humorously claims acquaintance with Peter Cooper, Horace
Greeley, and other worthies: "Me and Peter Cooper used to go to school
together" and "My friend Horace Greeley told me the other day that he'd get
me to take his place now and then when he was off makin' speeches if my
edication hadn't been neglected." Far from being tainted by his surroundings,
Dick displays a natural goodness that blesses the lives of others he meets. "He
had lived without a knowledge of God and of religious things," but "he was so
far good that he could appreciate goodness in others."
Ragged Dick's plot and character development set the pattern Alger followed in
more than one hundred additional novels, including Fame and Fortune, 1869 (a
sequel with the same character); Rough and Ready, 1869; Ben, the Luggage
Boy, 1870; Paul, the Peddlar, 1871; Tattered Tom, 1871; and Strive and
Succeed, 1871. The structure was simple: a poor but able youngster with no
prospects, due to his own efforts and with help from kind and good adults,
dramatically improves his station in society.
Evaluation:
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
temperance 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 "wordly but warmhearted patron" were at hand to
assure 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 detects six major themes in Alger's 100 plus boys' books, and
decides that the major theme of Ragged Dick is the Rise to Respectability.
Scharnhorst points out that Dick himself states he intends to change his way of
life and "become 'spectable". 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]