Alger's Dick

Here is an article I've found about Alger's work Ragged Dick.

The Dictionary of American Biography calls Horatio Alger the "most successful writer of boys' stories in the whole of American literature." Before moving to New York City in 1866, Alger had been a Unitarian minister for two years. He'd also published several works of fiction. But none had anything like the success of Ragged Dick. This first of Alger's "rags to respectability" novels appeared serially in Student and Schoolmate, a monthly periodical that featured moral tales for youth. Alger's story began running in January, 1867, with the picture below as a kind of frontispiece. Before the last installment appeared in June, Ragged Dick had attracted so much attention that the Boston publisher A.K. Loring signed Alger to a contract that led, by the end of the century, to 118 other novels modeled on the same archetypal plot. As success stories Tom and Dick's adventures resemble each other only by contrast. The chapter below recounts Dick's first visit to a fashionable New York church, under the sponsorship of the second of his three male mentors. It is strikingly secular in its emphases, but not much like MT's chapter on Tom Sawyer in church. Of course, we shouldn't forget that in Sunday School Tom is tempted to fall down and worship the socially "elect" Judge Thatcher -- and curiously the idea of being "adopted" into "sivilization" by a rich patron whom one has aided is picked up in Tom Sawyer by the story of Huck and the Widow Douglas.