ABSTRACT
With these words ofadvice to a street urchin, Horatio Alger enshrined the ragsto-riches myth as an American article offaith. 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."l
Appropriately enough, Alger's book was set in New York City-the center of America's late-nineteenth-century modernization. As the home of robber barons, urban bosses, labor leaders, and social reformers, Gotham was simultaneously the symbol of excess and exploitation, reassessment and promise. Ragged Dick was the first American book to depict the city in positive terms as a source of fascination and opportunity as well as, but not solely, a place of suffering and sin. Its poor could prosper if frugal, hard-working, honest, and
lucky. Because its elite had a social conscience, the gap between rich and poor was bridgeable. Social conflicts could be negotiated.
