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Reading Horatio Alger's 1868 “boys' book,” Ragged Dick, I am struck by its excesses. On every corner Dick confronts scams, “drop-games,” fleecings, and petty thieveries; he can barely turn around without bumping into some form of street crime. And, as Dick bumps into that crime, the novel indulges in its second conspicuous excess, positioning Dick opposite doubles: characters who bear a marked resemblance to our hero except that they are con men, swindlers, counterfeiters, and he—of course—is not. What is the point? What do these excesses mean? Like many readers of Ragged Dick, we might ascribe its excesses to Alger's awareness of his audience. Painting a moral tale for juveniles, he relies upon the repetition of fairly simple patterns (“good guys versus bad guys”); after watching Dick vanquish one rascal after another, readers learn that only “honesty” can bring respectability and a rise in fortune. Or we might refine our delineation of Alger's audience (he writes primarily for rural boys, unfamiliar with the ways of an expanding urban environment) and suggest that by presenting a street-scam in every chapter, Alger provides practical as well as moral lessons for his readers; again, after putting down this book no boy need lose fifty dollars to a rogue willing to take his money in return for a bad sixty dollar check. But such explanations of Ragged Dick's excesses leave me unsatisfied; more is going on here, and to understand those complexities we need attend to Ragged Dick's historical context and to the psychodynamics of its representation of a character “on the make.”
Written in 1868, Ragged Dick is a product of the Reconstruction Period, reconstruction not only of a war-devastated South and of a political Union, but also, more generally, of