Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks
Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in New York City in the late 1850s; published in 1867
SYNOPSIS
A fourteen-year-old orphan transforms himself from a homeless boot-black into a “respectable” young man through a combination of self-reliance and the help of friends.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Horatio Alger began a long career as a popular novelist for boys with the publication of Ragged Dick, his most successful book. So widely known were Alger’s 119 books in the late 1800s and early 1900s that a “Horatio Alger story” became a synonym for a person, real or fictional, who rises in life from rags to riches. Actually a story about the rise from rags to respectability rather than riches, Ragged Dick is set at a time when two interrelated trends were shaping American lives. Both urbanization, or the growth of cities, and the spread of industry posed new challenges to society. People moving from the countryside to cities were confronted with different ways of living and working than in the past. Mixing fact with fiction, Ragged Dick describes this new urban world and advises young boys how to best succeed in it.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Urbanization
In 1830 fewer than one in ten Americans lived in towns or cities; thirty years later approximately two in ten did. New York itself more than doubled in population between 1830 and 1860 to become a city of half a million residents. Like other cities, its growth was related to trade, manufacturing, and the internal improvements being made to move raw materials and finished goods from producer to consumer.
Improvements in transportation modes were essential to this change. Ragged Dick jokes in the novel about his “Erie shares,” referring to the Erie Railroad, which ran through southern New York state by mid-century. In the north of the state, the Erie Canal had provided water transport since its completion in 1825. Four feet deep and 363 miles long, it connected the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, which flowed into the Atlantic Ocean at New York City. After the canal opened, the cost of moving a ton of goods from New York to Lake Erie fell from $100 to $8 per ton. Such advances encouraged domestic trade between the lands being settled in the West and the urban East. As trade between these regions grew, New York developed into a thriving commercial center.
New York in the late 1850s was a dynamic city. In Ragged Dick, Alger mentions numerous buildings that illustrate the city’s commercial vitality. One is the Customs House, described as a massive structure reminiscent of the Parthenon in Athens. Customs—or taxes on imported goods—were a major source of government revenue in the 1800s. New York’s position as the nation’s leading port made its Customs House prominent. Another symbol of the city’s financial role is Wall Street, “a street not very wide or very long, but of very great importance” (Alger, Ragged Dick, p. 101). But in some ways New York still had a great deal of growing to do. The use of elevators was just making high-rises practical, and the only transportation between Manhattan and the nearby city of Brooklyn was the ferry that Dick rides in the novel.
Moreover, there were a great number of New Yorkers who did not share in the growing prosperity. The city’s rapid growth made it difficult to provide all its residents with adequate housing, health care, sanitation, and public safety. In fact, city government only slowly took responsibility for services intended to address the needs of its growing urban population. In its place, private efforts attempted to provide these services. Companies, for example, supplied water and collected garbage for people who could afford to pay. Despite such attempts, those people with little money tended to be crowded into tightly packed, unclean neighborhoods.
NEWSBOYS’ LODGING HOUSE
The Newsboys’ Lodging House provided 140 beds in three rooms connected by folding doors. Lodging cost 5¢ a night, in contrast to the 25 charged elsewhere in the city. Another 5i bought a boy a plain meal of coffee and bread, sometimes with soup. In 1866 the lodging house providing housing for 8,192 boys.
Ragged Dick belongs to a group of New Yorkers who endure a marginal existence: homeless street boys earning their own living. No child labor laws regulated their work, and the government offered them no support. Ragged Dick mentions an actual institution, the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where dinner and bed for a night cost what he could earn by shining one pair of shoes.
Despite its name, the lodging house also served two other types of young “street” workers—matchsellers and boot-blacks (shoeshine boys). The house was associated with the Children’s Aid Society established by Charles L.Brace and other private philanthropists in 1853. Its goals included giving street boys a basic education as well as “habits of industry and self-control and neatness” (Bender, pp. 197-99).
Immigration
America’s new urban population was both native-born and immigrant. Until the 1840s, cities consisted primarily of American-born residents, but after that date a large number of immigrants began to arrive. In the 1840s and 1850s, most of these immigrants were Irish. Ireland had been suffering from a long economic depression that worsened in 1845 because of a disease that destroyed the country’s main food crop, potatoes. The resulting famine killed approximately one million people. Those who could afford the travel expenses emigrated to America. Extremely poor when they arrived, the Irish remained in eastern ports such as New York and Boston, where they made up a large part of the new industrial work force. Only one boy in Ragged Dick has an obvious ethnic identity— Micky Maguire, whose name marks him as Irish.
Individualism
The mid-nineteenth century urban world saw a decline in the traditional willingness to defer to one’s social “betters,” those members of wealthy and/or prominent families. Displacing this old attitude was the egalitarian ideal, the notion that every individual deserves respect. Even without good clothes and manners, one’s character could earn one respect, as shown in the novel by the acceptance Ragged Dick receives from those more affluent than he. Though raggedly robed, the novel’s hero refrains from stealing, cheating, or bullying younger boys. “His nature,” in Alger’s words, “was a noble one” (Ragged Dick, p. 44).
The influence of individualism on politics is evident in the growing numbers of men who became eligible to vote. In 1821 the state of New York abolished all property qualifications for voting. In economics the government adopted a hands-off or “laissez-faire” approach that showed respect for individualism. The belief was that as individuals worked to increase their personal well-being, public prosperity would follow.
A laissez-faire economic policy encouraged people to live according to the work ethic, the notion that hard work and frugal living should be central activities of one’s life. According to this ethic, economic well-being reflected an individual’s own efforts. Success was within everyone’s grasp and those who worked hard could achieve it. This was not a new idea in Alger’s day. In colonial America, Benjamin Franklin had lived by the work ethic and had advocated it in a variety of his publications. Nor did the work ethic extend to merely economic realms; it also reflected Protestant religious values that viewed work as pleasing to God. Valued by society and religion, work was regarded as a key part of a moral life.
The changing world of work
By the mid-nineteenth century, the nation had begun to industrialize. Industrialization involved more than the use of machinery for manufacturing goods; it changed the nature of business by bringing workers together into ever larger workplaces. These eventually grew into sprawling factories. Industrialization also broke manufacturing down into ever smaller steps. Before industrialization, a skilled artisan might make an entire product from start to finish. In a factory, a product was put together by many workers, each doing one specific task.
Industrialization led to a distinct separation between business owners and workers, despite society’s discussion about the equality of all individuals. The process also influenced the formation of a distinct middle class. Larger in scale than previous systems, industrial manufacturing and commerce created a need for managers and professionals who could serve as factory supervisors, accountants, and clerks. These jobs offered higher pay, cleaner and safer working conditions, and greater social standing than the average, machine-operating factory position. But they also required a higher level of education. “Save your money, my lad,” advised a character in Ragged Dick. “Buy books, and determine to be somebody, and you may yet fill an honorable position” (Ragged Dick, p. 109). The link between education and middleclass employment helped create a new understanding of childhood as a time of training for adult work. Families sought to keep their children in school long enough for them to gain sufficient skills for at least an entry-level position in a middle-class profession. In Ragged Dick, the characters’ different levels of education influence the work available to them.
Efforts were also made to give those already in the work force an education. But instead of emphasizing such traditional college subjects as Latin and Greek, these efforts sought to provide established members of the work force with a more practical education in the arts and sciences. On an excursion through the city, Ragged Dick mentions one such effort, known as the Cooper Institute. The institute, also known as Cooper Union, was established by Peter Cooper, a New York millionaire who began work as a mechanic. Opened in 1859, it offered public lectures and made available rooms for discussion and formal instruction.
The absence of women
Women hardly appear in Ragged Dick. In part, this reflects the nineteenth-century divide between the worlds of men and women. Society placed the highest value on
those women who embraced a domestic existence. Women were expected to limit themselves to the private sphere of family life, where their reputedly high moral character could be separated from the rougher world of business.
One reference in Ragged Dick—to Alexander T. Stewart’s department store—alludes to an aspect of women’s urban existence that became increasingly evident in the nineteenth century: the emergence of the department store. The burgeoning availability of goods helped create this innovation in selling. Whereas most urban stores in the 1850s were specialty shops (like the one in which Dick’s friend Harry Fosdick finds work), department stores began to offer a wide variety of goods. Their larger size and diversity led them to establish fixed prices, a practice that differed from smaller stores, where customers often bargained over price. Department stores also tried to create a pleasant environment in which customers felt free to adopt a more leisurely approach to shopping. Located in the center of the city, the stores became a destination for middle-class women. Stewart’s New York store was one of the earliest and largest in the nation.
Popular entertainment
Differences between middle- and working-class life also appeared in the types of entertainment each class supported. The middle class supported efforts to make urban life more refined. They were key supporters, for example, of efforts to establish public parks in which people would experience nature in an aesthetically pleasing design. Working-class entertainment, by contrast, centered around saloons and the theater. In the early 1800s, staged entertainment appealed to all classes, but as the century progressed, music and theater began to separate into genteel “highbrow” and popular “lowbrow” forms.
As Ragged Dick’s activities reveal, the city offered both types of entertainment. The Bowery is the site of Dick’s inexpensive nightly entertainment during his life as a boot-black. There he is able to enjoy a melodrama at the Old Bowery Theatre, followed by a feast of oyster stew or a bit of smoking and gambling.
The trees and meadows of Central Park, which was under construction at the time, would soon provide New Yorkers with more “wholesome” relaxation options. Prior to the construction of Central Park, New York. had small parks that served their immediate area. Central Park was a bolder vision: five times as large as all other city parks combined, it would be easily accessible to all. One of its two designers, Frederick Law Olm-sted, believed the shared experience it would provide New Yorkers would help create a sense of community among them. Construction began in the late 1850s and the first attraction, a skating rink, opened in the winter of 1858-59. By 1863 the park was completed.
The Novel in Focus
The plot
Ragged Dick, as the novel’s hero is initially called, is a fourteen-year-old orphan who works as a boot-black, polishing customers’ boots on the sidewalks of the city’s avenues. The plot advances, over a period of about ten months, through three stages in Dick’s life. The first describes life as a boot-black and how Dick is encouraged to leave it behind. The second part of the novel details the use he makes of this advice, while the third tells of his successful search for a new job. The novel does not focus on Ragged Dick’s character, which changes very little; it concentrates instead on the outward signs of his progress. By the novel’s end, he has completed a transition from life as an illiterate boot-black to that of an educated accountant’s clerk, boosted by his own efforts and the support of a circle of friends and acquaintances.
Dick’s life as a boot-black is characterized by an easy-going, live-for-today attitude. By using his wits, he earns enough to rent a room, but he prefers instead to pass his evenings in the Bowery, where he spends his extra money on good times. His only complaint is the discomfort of sleeping outside in bad weather; otherwise he feels that little is lacking from his life.
An appealing character, Ragged Dick is honest, humorous, alert, energetic, capable, and generous. He lives as he does because no one has ever suggested that he do otherwise. This changes when Dick meets Frank Whitney, a boy slightly younger than he. Frank stops in New York on his way to boarding school, and Ragged Dick offers to show him the city. Frank agrees but persuades Dick to first clean up and change his ragged clothes for a suit that Frank gives him.
The following chapters describe their tour of New York. Ragged Dick shows Frank the prosperous new urban life of the city. But he also points out the shady side of urban life, like the scams that city people pull on newcomers from the countryside. Highlighted in these chapters is Dick’s honesty, a marked contrast from the con men around him.
The day proves unusual for Dick in several ways. He finds that he is treated well by others because he looks “respectable,” and is swayed by his companion’s views of education. Committed to preparing himself for adult life, Frank regards education as the key to his future success. He urges Dick to apply himself in the same way— that is, to change himself from a working-class to middle-class person. Dick is appreciative of Frank’s comments, for his new friend is the first person ever to encourage him in this way. There is one obstacle to making this change, however: entry-level wages in a middle-class profession are too low to live on. Without some savings or other support, the transition from worker to middle-class employee is out of reach.
The second part of the novel shows how Dick puts Frank’s advice to use. As the young bootblack and Frank part, Frank’s father gives Dick five dollars, remarking that Dick can repay the loan by helping someone less fortunate someday. Dick decides to rent a room and open a savings account. Having made these decisions, he has two meetings that further fix him on his new path. An affluent businessman, Mr. Greyson, whose shoes he shines, invites Dick to attend his Sunday School class. Later that day, Dick treats a fellow boot-black, Harry Fosdick, to dinner. Fosdick is an educated boy who is new to the streets, having been recently orphaned. Dick proposes that Fosdick teach him to read and write in return for sharing his room. In a few weeks, Dick helps Fosdick get a job, using his own savings to buy Fosdick a respectable suit. Fosdick applies to many jobs. Finally, with the timely help of Mr. Greyson, who provides him with a desperately needed reference, the boy secures a position as a shop clerk.
The novel then skips nine months ahead. Dick has learned to read and write; he continues to save money, living frugally with Fosdick. The final episode of the novel focuses on Dick’s decision to find a new job. He has enough education and has learned to behave respectably (by, for example, controlling his use of slang in conversation). He joins Fosdick on an afternoon’s errand that takes them on the Brooklyn Ferry. When a young boy falls overboard, Dick leaps to his rescue. After an interview the following day in which Dick refers to himself for the first time as “Richard,” the boy’s father offers him a job as a clerk in his accounting firm—at more than triple the usual starting salary. Shortly thereafter, Dick finds that his ragged old suit has been stolen. He decides to keep his boot-black equipment to remind himself of his humble beginnings.
Alger’s messengers
Alger uses the characters in Ragged Dick to illustrate the qualities and circumstances that he believes are necessary for success. He emphasizes Dick’s honesty and pluck, the energy and alertness that win him opportunities to get ahead. By contrast, two other boot-blacks, Johnny Nolan and Micky Maguire, lack these qualities and are therefore less successful. Nolan is an honest but lazy boy: he lacks the necessary energy to work his way up the economic ladder; Maguire is energetic enough but dishonest.
The novel’s middle-class boys do not display the range of personalities that the lower-class boys do. Rather, they come to Ragged Dick’s aid. Frank Whitney introduces Dick to a new attitude toward life. Harry Fosdick, a boy who has suffered downward mobility that Dick helps reverse, has the education to help Dick move up. These boys illustrate another of Alger’s messages: those more fortunate should help those who are less fortunate. Adults, in their brief appearances, also contribute to Ragged Dick’s ascension in society; Mr. Whitney’s financial gift starts Dick on his way, while a nameless policeman points out a prosperous bookstore owner who began life as a newsboy.
The moral
Although Ragged Dick mixes humor and drama with moral instruction, its focus is always on showing its readers how to get ahead in life. Alger had been a teacher and minister, and these experiences carry over into his writing. He infuses his plot with the personal belief that “success” requires not only self-discipline but also the timely intervention of others. The individualism that Alger advocates is generous, not coldhearted. Dick benefits from the aid of others, and he, in turn, uses his savings to assist those in need, at one point helping a friend’s family pay their rent.
In keeping with the work ethic, Alger points to all labor as valuable. Any job, even boot-blacking, offers the dignity of labor, the chance to prove oneself an honest man. It bears repeating that Dick’s journey to prove himself and achieve success is not one of the “rags-to-riches” stories with which Alger is so often associated. Instead, it is the rise to a respected middle-class position that matters in the novel.
Sources
Ragged Dick mentions actual sites in New York, such as the Bowery, Central Park, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. Researching his subject, the author himself spent time with boys on the street and at the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He often named his fictional characters after people in his own life. Johnny Nolan was the name of a street boy Alger knew, and the fictional Micky Maguire can be traced back to a real street tough named Paddy Shea. Details in the plot hark back to real-life models as well. In fact, the Newsboys’ Lodging House improvised a savings plan for its residents—a table that held over a hundred individually assigned boxes with slits at the top, into which the boys could drop their extra earnings. Ragged Dick’s “rise” in the novel begins with the opening of a savings account that brings to mind these makeshift banks.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Reception
Released first in twelve installments in a magazine, Ragged Dick became Alger’s bestselling book. The Providence Evening Press praised the book as charming, while the Boston Transcript applauded Alger for exposing the struggling nobility of street boys. Some liked the liveliness with which Alger delivered his message; others thought the message naive. Hardly anyone believed Alger’s books had literary merit. Later, in the 1870s and 1880s, a movement to remove Alger’s books from public libraries developed. The movement rested on growing concern over the sensationalism of dime novels and other cheap forms of children’s writings.
Dime novels
Industrialization contributed to the development of a new form of entertainment—the dime novel, so called because a copy cost 10$. Beginning in the 1840s, innovations in printing had made it possible to print materials more quickly and inexpensively. Subsequent lower prices helped expand the market for books and magazines that appealed to the general public. The impact spread into children’s literature, the market for which Alger wrote. Before the advent of lower prices, the market had been filled by books that aimed to guide children in the development of proper social attitudes. The plots of these works unfolded in family settings, with parents serving as the source of lessons and instruction. The dilemmas that children faced were the ordinary ones of daily life.
In contrast, dime novels usually featured romance, historical incidents, and violent action. Dime novels for children told tales that were concerned with adventure (such as boy-heroes living on their own) rather than moral edification. Dime novels first became popular around 1860, a few years before Ragged Dick appeared, and continued to enjoy a widespread readership until about 1895.
Horatio Alger’s combination of moral messages and dramatic events actually places him between the earlier and later types of young people’s literature. As a series of lessons on how to succeed in the working world, Ragged Dick remains tied to the earlier literature. Yet its characters live independently of adults, and its incidents often form a humorous mix of adventure and travelogue. Like the dime novels of the period, Alger’s tales celebrate individualism.
Gilded Age
Between 1865 and 1901 the United States underwent a transformation from a country of small isolated communities into a vast industrial network, its regions linked by transportation and communication advances. Railways expanded from 35,000 miles of track in 1865 to a whopping 53,000 miles in 1870. In 1867, the year Ragged Dick was published, George Pullman founded the Pullman Palace Car Company, introducing a luxury dining and sleeping car for train travelers. Pullman’s innovation reflected a focus on opulence during an era that became known as the Gilded Age, a period known for its spectacular splendor and the promise of affluence. The extreme poverty of the era received less attention, and the desperate condition of the masses was often overshadowed by the emphasis on luxuriant living.
Several American businessmen managed to accumulate tremendous wealth during this period. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie are two of the best-known examples. The son of a peddler, Rockefeller rose to dominate the oil industry. Carnegie, the son of Scottish immigrants, climbed from factory worker to factory owner. These two were exceptions, though, for most of the nation’s wealthiest citizens inherited their riches and the network of opportunity that such holdings provided. Still, they generally worked hard to improve their positions. Elsewhere, more moderately successful men moved up from the lower to the middle class in sufficient numbers to justify the hopes that Alger must have raised in his young readers. In fact, these hopes were not at all farfetched, since Alger’s hero strives not for “riches” but for a “respectable” steady job.
Survival of the fittest
Social mobility, people’s movement from one economic class into another, usually meant upward mobility. Yet downward mobility, of which there are several examples in Ragged Dick, was also possible. Many people explained this reality by referring to a theory called “survival of the fittest.”
In 1864 a book by Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” appeared in New York. The book, Social Statics, maintained that the pressure to survive had a positive effect on the human race. Proponents of the theory argued that it led to social progress, for those with intelligence, self-control, and skill were more likely to survive (and thrive), while those without such qualities were eliminated. The phrase, adopted by the scientist Charles Darwin, spread through society and confirmed the laissez-faire attitude of government to the poor. Reinforcing this attitude were books such as those by Horatio Alger, which preached about self-improvement through hard work.
There were 942,292 people in New York in 1870; certainly not all of them would succeed. While Alger’s books suggest that those with sterling characters would have the best chance, Ragged Dick also shows an awareness that unethical men sometimes succeed in politics. The street-tough Micky Maguire is described as a fine prospect for the political profession. If he were fifteen years older, says the novel, he would have “been prominent at ward meetings, and a terror to respectable voters on election day” (Ragged Dick, p. 123). The allusion here is to groups like the Tweed Ring, a small group of men led by William Tweed, who controlled politics in New York from 1866 to 1871. For years the ring embezzled millions of dollars earmarked for the building of a new city courthouse. The New York Times finally exposed the theft in 1870, and a year later Boss Tweed and his ring were defeated in city and state elections.
For More Information
Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962.
Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Cashmand, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: New York University Press, 1984.
Hemstreet, Charles. Nooks and Corners of Old New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.
Scharnhorst, Gary, with Jack Bales. The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.