Horatio Alger

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Ragged Dick probably wouldn’t have occupied Wall Street

November 14, 2011 in Books, Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

Our students are currently registering for spring semester courses and I’m feeling a little out of sorts about the fact that Cyrus and I aren’t offering Writing New York this year. It’s only the second time since 2003 that we will take the year off from WNY, this time due to the fact that Cyrus is teaching in Abu Dhabi. What will happen in spring 2013 and beyond is still a little up in the air, but for now we soldier on with #vWNY, our virtual version of the course, spread over two semesters here on the blog.

Our model, for those who may just be joining us, is to post something that approximates what we might have posted as a follow-up or complement to our lecture for a given today. Today’s reading assignment is Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick, which over the years I’ve taken to reading as the antithesis of Melville’s “Bartleby.” If that story has been taken up by Occupy Wall Street as either a prototype for the sit-in or as an illustration of the crushing effects of the one percent’s blindness to the social conditions of actual workers, Ragged Dick is a book about a humble, initially homeless bootblack’s aspirations to join the 1% through a combination of pluck and luck. He does make it, of course, if not to excessive wealth then at least to business-class respectability, and in doing so lays the cornerstone of American Dream ideology that continues to support people who somehow think that the 1% are “job creators” who will somehow allow the worthy hard workers of the world into their elitist circles and so should be exempt from paying their fair share of taxes. Um, okay.

Actually, the way I’ve always taught Ragged Dick has to do with what I see as its inadvertent revelation of exactly how corporate capitalism works. In this I’ve been heavily influenced by two important readings of the novel, one by Michael Moon (Emory University) and the other by Glenn Hendler (Fordham University). Both essays are included in the recent Norton Critical Edition of the novel, edited by Hildegard Hoeller (College of Staten Island), which we will adopt as our official edition once we resume teaching this course in the flesh. In the meantime, we recommend it to you.

Here’s the upshot of the argument I make in lecture, drawing on Moon’s gendered analysis of the nature of corporate capitalism and Hendler’s understanding of how the genre of the “boy book” worked in the nineteenth century, when Alger’s novels, like Twain’s, caused some amount of controversy for their celebration of rough-and-tumble boy culture. In Alger’s novel, of course, Dick cleans up. He stops wasting his money on childish things or working-class leisure activities. He puts aside money and buys a home. He charms older men and takes on younger boys as wards (and housemates). He has a keen eye for opportunity — “an eye for business” we’re told over and over from the moment we meet him. He knew how to “look sharp” in both senses of the word. Consider Alger’s initial description of Dick, who’s awakened from his sleeping place in a packing crate on Nassau Street:

Washing the face and hands is usually considered proper in commencing the day, but Dick was above such refinement. He had no particular dislike to dirt, and did not think it necessary to remove several dark streaks on his face and hands. But in spite of his dirt and rags there was something about Dick that was attractive. It was easy to see that if he had been clean and well dressed he would have been decidedly good-looking. Some of his companions were sly, and their faces inspired distrust; but Dick had a frank, straight-forward manner that made him a favorite.

Dick’s business hours had commenced. He had no office to open. His little blacking-box was ready for use, and he looked sharply in the faces of all who passed, addressing each with, “Shine yer boots, sir?”

“How much?” asked a gentleman on his way to his office.

“Ten cents,” said Dick, dropping his box, and sinking upon his knees on the sidewalk, flourishing his brush with the air of one skilled in his profession.

“Ten cents! Isn’t that a little steep?”

“Well, you know ‘taint all clear profit,” said Dick, who had already set to work. “There’s the blacking costs something, and I have to get a new brush pretty often.”

“And you have a large rent too,” said the gentleman quizzically, with a glance at a large hole in Dick’s coat.

“Yes, sir,” said Dick, always ready to joke; “I have to pay such a big rent for my manshun up on Fifth Avenoo, that I can’t afford to take less than ten cents a shine. I’ll give you a bully shine, sir.”

“Be quick about it, for I am in a hurry. So your house is on Fifth Avenue, is it?”

“It isn’t anywhere else, said Dick, and Dick spoke the truth there.

The narrator and the businessman alike seem to gravitate toward Dick, find him attractive in a way Moon deems pederastic. This attraction is key to Dick’s shoe-shine business and to his upward mobility over the course of the novel. Recognizing the role played by his good looks and his eagerness to charm older men leaves us with a picture of how corporate capitalism works that is much more accurate than the rags-to-riches ideology Alger doesn’t really represent after all. Dick plays of the businessman’s nostalgia for the wildness of youth, for life on the street, for the outdoors, away from daily bathing and polite society. That desire, in corporate capitalism, translates into older men’s eagerness to recruit and promote good-looking successors who remind them of their own youth. And through this desire the corporation perpetuates itself. Where Bartleby would prefer not to, obsequious Dick is more than willing to do whatever it takes.

Previously on PWHNY.

Did you know that Metropolitan Playhouse’s big winter festival centers on Alger this year? Check it.

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Ragged Dick round-up

February 14, 2011 in Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

I’m lecturing this morning in Writing New York on Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick, the prototypical pull-yourself-up/luck-and-pluck boy book about a boot black who makes good. It may be appropriate, then, that I woke up, post-Grammys, having had a nightmare that Justin Bieber was filming a new 3D musical adaptation of the novel. Though isn’t that what his movie is essentially supposed to be anyway? And hasn’t it already been done? To wit:

For other Ragged Dick-related posts, click here and here.

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Prostitution exposed! (1839)

February 10, 2010 in Writing New York by Bryan

This morning in lecture I spent some time talking about Horatio Alger’s 1868 novel Ragged Dick as belonging, in part, to the genre of the urban tourbook, offering armchair tourists an introduction to several of the city’s important civic landmarks and public spaces. Talking a little more generally about NYC guidebooks in the 19th century, I contrasted Alger’s approach — in which Dick scrupulously avoids taking his readers to the seedier neighborhoods he no doubt knew well — with books that offered to take readers into the depth of the city’s depravity, either in poverty-stricken neighborhoods where sin ran unchecked or behind the closed doors of the licentious upper-crust, on Bond Street and elsewhere.

As I usually do in this lecture, I showed a slide with this title page and frontispiece from an 1839 “moral reform directory”:

I’ve long used this image in lecture, but only recently came across a really fine discussion of the text itself. This morning (blame it on the hour!) I mixed up a few of the details, conflating this book with a publication it’s no doubt satirizing, a reform serial by the name of McDowall’s Journal.

As Donna Dennis recounts in Licentious Gotham, which I finally finished reading, McDowall’s Journal was published by a young Princeton Theological Seminary grad named John McDowall, who with the backing of New York’s Female Benevolent Society founded the publication to expose what he saw as a burgeoning sex trade and erotic publishing industry in the city. (He claimed that New York had 10,000 active prostitutes, which would have made one in ten New York females a sex worker.) McDowall ended up running afoul of civic authorities, who claimed that in exposing the details of the city’s seamy side he was merely peddling smut himself. It may have been the case that his threat to expose the names of prominent johns also made them nervous. In any case, he unwittingly set the model for a popular 19c stereotype: the moral reformer who takes up his cause in order to satisfy his own prurient interests. Following McDowall’s indictment by a grand jury for publishing material “calculated to promote lewdness,” the doors were opened to public discussion of sexual scandal and to popular literature that played to erotic interests.

Dennis follows her account of McDowall’s Journal with a discussion of Prostitution Exposed. If you can’t make out the details in the small print, the full title reads: PROSTITUTION EXPOSED; or, a MORAL REFORM DIRECTORY, Laying Bare the Lives, Histories, Residences, Seductions, &c. of the most celebrated COURTEZANS AND LADIES OF PLEASURE of the city of New-York, Together with a Description of the Crime and Its Effects, as also of the Houses of Prostitution and the Keepers, HOUSES OF ASSIGNATION, Their Charges and Conveniences, and other particulars interesting to the public.

Ostensibly intended to direct readers away from such “houses of assignation,” such “moral reform directories” nevertheless provided lists of names, addresses, prices, physical descriptions, and typical clientele and so doubled as directories for the trade itself.

Dennis sees Prostitution Exposed as intended in part to satirize the efforts of possibly prurient do-gooders like McDowall. She also notes the political implications of the double-entendre in the author’s pseudonym: “A Butt Ender.”

The slang clearly referred to a defiantly boisterous, unruly faction of egalitarian, prolabor Democrats in the 1830s (generally knows as Locofocos) that was closely linked to emerging machine politics. The Butt Enders probably took their name from the workingmen’s style of constantly chomping on the “butt end” of a “segar,” as popularized by the character of Mose, the famous Bowery B’hoy.

Mose, the moral reformer! A new line for his c.v. And to whom is this moral reform directory dedicated? To the “Ladies Reform Association for the Suppression of Onanism.” Nothing like a prostitute to keep the kids from indulging in the solitary vice. As Dennis notes, Prostitution Exposed is the “earliest surviving book dealing with material of a plainly libidinous nature to be both written and published in the city.”

Previously.

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Hating on the Bowery, Now and Then

February 11, 2009 in Neighborhood Scenes, Writing New York by Bryan

am_MarshBowery.jpgI wrote a while back about attempts in the 1820s to gentrify the Bowery. More recently, a couple blogs I follow have charted current efforts to remake the street’s image as a luxury shopping district with a little bit of urban edge. (That shitty Hamptons store “Blue & Cream” in the shitty Avalon building even went as far as tagging their own store with “graffiti” directing passers-by to their recession sales inside.) Most recently we’ve seen attempts to move away from the idea of “the” Bowery toward a “Bowery district” (spreading the faux-seedy influence and reputation?) or slips from newcomers calling it “Bowery Street” (as if to contain its once-unruly energy and long reputation as the dark twin to Broadway?).

EV Grieve directs us to another NY history blog, Inside the Apple, which has this to say about previous attempts to rename the Bowery:

The most famous Dutch bouwerij
was owned by Peter Stuyvesant, who lies buried in the churchyard of St. Mark’s in the Bowery on 10th Street and Second Avenue. For years, this church was known as St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie, its archaic spelling not only hearkened back to the days of the Dutch, but also helped distinguished it from the nearby thoroughfare. By the
late 19th century, the Bowery had become synonymous with skid row.
A lot of the Bowery’s reputation was deserved, but at least part of the blame for its near-universal name recognition was the musical A Trip to Chinatown, which featured the song “The Bowery.” Its chorus boasts:

The Bow’ry, the Bow’ry
They say such things and they do strange things,
On the Bow’ry! The Bow’ry!
I’ll never go there any more.

By 1916, the street’s reputation had gotten so bad that civic groups
battled to come up with a new name for the thoroughfare. One suggestion
was “Cooper Avenue” in honor of Cooper Union founder (and Jell-O
pioneer) Peter Cooper. A rival proposition recommended “Central Broadway.” It’s hard to imagine the chaos this name change might have brought about in a city that
already featured Broadway, West Broadway, and East Broadway.
Neither of these suggestions had any real traction, perhaps because there was still nostalgia for the old Bouwerie of Peter Stuyvesant. Indeed, that nostalgia was so strong that in 1956 a group of merchants suggested that Third Avenue be renamed “The Bouwerie,” to invoke the charm and refinement of a bygone age. (That this would have given the city a Bowery and a Bouwerie a block apart seems not to have figured into their calculations.) Plans were underway at the time to remove the last vestiges of the Third Avenue “El,” and it seemed logical to local boosters to get rid of the name Third Avenue–which they saw as intimately connected to the failure of the “El”–and replace it with Bouwerie, which would increase the street’s cachet and, presumably, retail rents.

raggeddick.jpgWhile preparing for this morning’s lecture on Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), I noticed for the first time just how much the novel hates on the Bowery. In its opening sequence the otherwise industrious street urchin Dick realizes he’s overslept and probably missed a few shines because he’d spent the prior evening at the Old Bowery theater. Even though the theater is one of the spots that keeps Dick in town, the novel remains pretty equivocal about the entertainment provided there: clearly Dick enjoys it, but later in the novel he reforms and promises not to waste his money there in the future. The book’s less equivocal about Bowery fashions: one pair of pants is frowned on by the narrator as “very loose in the legs, and presenting a cheap Bowery look.”

And Dick is fine with this dis. He’s more than happy to scrub up for an imagined life as a clerk (no Bartleby is Dick!) and he continually fantasizes about having a “manshun” on the “Avenoo.” At the novel’s close, he and his pal Fosdick resolve to leave their little pad on Mott Street and move to “a nicer quarter of the city.”

If Alger were still writing today (or if some team of underpaid ghost writers continued to churn out sequels the way someone keeps turning out new titles in the Boxcar Children series) I’m sure we’d see Ragged Dick — ragged no longer — ready to move back down to the Bowery now that the Whole Foods had arrived. Slumming’s the new Old New York luxury craze, after all!

slumming.jpg

(h/t to Grieve for the last illustration, as well as a bunch of the links above; topmost image: Reginald Marsh, “The Bowery,” 1928)

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