Ragged Dick

Ragged Dick

Henry T. Coates and Company edition, 1895
Author	Horatio Alger Jr.
Original title	Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Ragged Dick Series
Genre	Bildungsroman
Publisher	A. K. Loring
Publication date	May 5, 1868
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Followed by	Fame and Fortune

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. One modern scholar considers the story a "puerile fantasy" about class assimilation. The plot and theme were repeated in Alger's subsequent novels and became the subject of parodies and satires.

Ragged Dick and Alger's Silas Snobden's Office Boy inspired the musical comedy Shine! in 1982.

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.

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 "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".