ABSTRACT
With these words of advice to a street urchin, Horatio Alger enshrined the rags-to-riches myth as an American article of faith. Many dismissed Alger’s story as silly, but others proclaimed Ragged Dick the most influential American novel published before 1900. It was odd that Alger’s benign, simplistic, preindustrial formula for success should have been so popular in the ruthless, complex, industrial world of late-nineteenth-century America. Yet, Alger’s significance derives from this incongruity. Ragged Dick reassured readers that individuals still mattered and old values were still relevant in an increasingly impersonal and immoral world. Alger muted what the historian Samuel P. Hays called “the shock of change.”1
