Horatio Alger, Jr.



Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. He initially wrote and published for adults, but a friendship with boys' author William Taylor Adams led him to writing for the young. He published for years in Adams's Student and Schoolmate, a boys' magazine of moral writings. His lifelong theme of "rags to respectability" had a profound impact on America in the Gilded Age. His works gained even greater popularity following his death, but gradually lost reader interest in the 1920s.

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Alger entered Harvard College at age sixteen and became a professional writer at seventeen with the sale of a few literary pieces to a Boston magazine. He worked briefly as an assistant editor for a Boston magazine before teaching in New England boys' schools for a few years. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1860, wrote in support of the Union cause during the American Civil War, and accepted a ministerial post with a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts in 1864. He left the church in 1866 following an internal investigation regarding sexual misconduct allegations involving two teenage boys of the parish. He denied nothing and relocated to New York City. In 1864 he published Frank's Campaign, his first boys' book, and in 1865 his second boys' book Paul Prescott's Charge.

He continued to write and published a third boys' book Charlie Codman's Cruise. He found his literary niche in 1866 with his fourth boys' book Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. His many boys' books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured a series of stock characters – the valiant youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil squire. In the 1870s Alger took a trip to California to gather material for future books but the trip had little influence on his writing; he remained firmly fixed in his "rags to respectability" formula. The Puritan ethic had loosened its grip on America during these years, and Alger's moral tone coarsened. Violence, murder, and other sensational themes entered his works; public librarians questioned whether his books should be made available to the young. He published about 100 boys' books and died in 1899. A biography that eventually proved to be a hoax was published in 1928 and held great sway for many years. Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has bestowed awards and scholarships on the deserving, and in 1982 Alger's works inspired a musical comedy called Shine!. One modern scholar has described his work as a male Cinderella myth noting similarities with the classic fairy tale.

Childhood: 1832–1847
Horatio Alger, Jr. was born in the New England coastal town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, on January 13, 1832, to Horatio Alger, a Unitarian minister, and his wife Olive Augusta Fenno. He was the descendant of Plymouth Pilgrims Robert Cushman, Thomas Cushman, and William Bassett and the descendant of Sylvanus Lazell, a Minuteman and brigadier general in the War of 1812; and Edmund Lazell, a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1788. Horatio's siblings Olive Augusta and James were born in 1833 and 1836, and an invalid sister Annie and a brother Francis in 1840 and 1842. Alger was a precocious boy afflicted with nearsightedness and bronchial asthma, but Alger, Sr. decided early that his eldest son would one day enter the ministry, and, to that end, he tutored the boy in classical studies and allowed him to observe the responsibilities of ministering to parishioners. Alger began attending the Chelsea Grammar School in 1842, but by December 1844 his father's financial troubles had increased considerably and, in search of a better salary, he moved his family to Marlborough, Massachusetts, an agricultural town 25 miles west of Boston. He was installed as pastor of the Second Congregational Society in January 1845 with a salary sufficient to meet his needs. Horatio attended Gates Academy, a local preparatory school, and completed his studies at age fifteen. He published his earliest literary work in area newspapers.

Harvard and early works: 1848–1864
In July 1848 Alger passed the Harvard entrance examinations, and was admitted to the class of 1852. The fourteen member full-time Harvard faculty included Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray in the sciences, C. C. Felton in the classics, James Walker in religion and philosophy, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in belles lettres; Edward Everett served as president. Alger's classmate Joseph Choate described Harvard at that time as "provincial and local because its scope and outlook hardly extended beyond the boundaries of New England; besides which it was very denominational, being held exclusively in the hands of Unitarians."

Alger flowered in the highly disciplined and regimented Harvard environment, winning scholastic prizes and prestigious awards. His genteel poverty and less than aristocratic heritage however barred him from membership in the Hasty Pudding and Porcellian clubs. In 1849 he became a professional writer when he sold two essays and a poem to the Pictorial National Library, a Boston magazine. He began reading Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and other modern writers of fiction, and cultivated a lifelong love for Longfellow whose verse he sometimes employed as a model for his own. He was chosen Class Odist, and graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1852, eighth in a class of 88.

Alger was without job prospects following graduation and returned home, but continued to write, submitting his work to religious and literary magazines with varying success. He briefly attended Harvard Divinity School in 1853, possibly to be reunited with a romantic interest, but left in November 1853 to take a job as an assistant editor with the Boston Daily Advertiser. He loathed editing and quit in 1854 to teach at The Grange, a boys' boarding school in Rhode Island. When The Grange suspended operations in 1856, Alger found employment managing the 1856 summer session at Deerfield Academy. His poems at this time expressed a sexual ambivalence, and were sometimes written in a woman's voice.

His first book, a collection of short pieces called Bertha's Christmas Vision: An Autumn Sheaf was published in 1856, and his second, a lengthy satirical poem called Nothing to Do: A Tilt at our Best Society was published in 1857. Alger returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts and attended the Harvard Divinity School from 1857 to 1860, following graduation with a tour of Europe. He returned to a nation in the throes of the American Civil War, but was rejected for military service. He turned his pen to literature supporting the Union cause.

His first novel Marie Bertrand: The Felon's Daughter was serialized in the New York Weekly in 1864, and his first boys' book Frank's Campaign was published by A. K. Loring in Boston the same year. Alger wrote with much success for adult magazines at this time including Harper's Monthly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

Ministry: 1864–1866
On December 8, 1864 Alger was installed as pastor with the First Unitarian Church and Society of Brewster, Massachusetts. Between ministerial duties, he organized games and amusements for the boys in the parish, railed against smoking and drinking, and organized and served as president of the local chapter of the Cadets for Temperance. He submitted stories to Student and Schoolmate, a boys' monthly magazine of moral writings edited by William Taylor Adams (Oliver Optic) and published in Boston by Joseph H. Allen. In September 1865 his second boys' book Paul Prescott's Charge was published by Loring to favorable reviews.

Early in 1866 a church committee was formed to investigate sexual misconduct reports about Alger. He denied nothing, admitted he had been imprudent, considered his association with the church dissolved, and left town. Church officials reported to the hierarchy in Boston that Alger had been charged with "the crime of ... unnatural familiarity with boys." Alger sent Unitarian officials in Boston a letter of remorse, and his father assured them his son would never seek another post in the church. Officials were satisfied and decided no further action would be taken.

New York City: 1866–1896
Alger relocated to New York City, abandoned forever any thought of a career in the church, and focused instead on his writing. He wrote "Friar Anselmo" at this time, a poem that tells of a sinning cleric's atonement through good deeds. He became interested in the welfare of the thousands of vagrant children who flooded New York City following the Civil War. He attended a children's church service at Five Points which led to "John Maynard", a ballad about an actual shipwreck on Lake Erie that brought Alger not only the respect of the literati but a letter from Longfellow. He published two adult novels Helen Ford and Timothy Crump's Ward which did poorly. He fared better with stories for boys published in Student and Schoolmate and a third boys' book Charlie Codman's Cruise.

In January 1867 the first of twelve installments of Ragged Dick appeared in Student and Schoolmate. The story about a poor bootblack's rise to middle class respectability was a huge success. It was expanded, and published as a novel in 1868. It proved to be his bestseller. After Ragged Dick he wrote almost entirely for boys, and signed a contract with publisher Loring for a Ragged Dick Series.

In spite of the series' success, Alger was on financially uncertain ground and tutored the five sons of international banker Joseph Seligman. He wrote serials for Young Israel, and lived in the Seligman home until 1876. In 1875 Alger produced the serial Shifting for Himself and Sam's Chance, a sequel to The Young Outlaw. It was evident in these that Alger had grown stale. Profits suffered, and he headed West for new material at Loring's behest, arriving in California in February 1877. He enjoyed a reunion with his brother James in San Francisco and returned to New York late in 1877 via a schooner around Cape Horn. He wrote a few lackluster books in the following years that rehashed the formulaic Alger of old but this time the tales were played before a Western backcloth rather than an urban one.

In New York, Alger continued to tutor the town's aristocratic youth and to rehabilitate its street boys. He was writing both urban and Western-themed tales. In 1879, for example, he published The District Messenger Boy and The Young Miner. In 1877 Alger's fiction became a target of librarians concerned about sensational juvenile fiction. An effort was made to remove Alger's works from public collections, but the debate was only partially successful, defeated by the renewed interest in Alger's work after his death.

In 1881 Alger informally adopted street boy Charlie Davis and in 1883 John Downie, another street boy who moved into Alger's apartment. In 1881 he wrote President James A. Garfield's biography, but filled the work with contrived conversations and boyish excitements rather than facts. The book sold well. Alger was commissioned to give Abraham Lincoln a biographical treatment but again it was Alger the boys' novelist opting for thrills rather than facts.

In 1882, Alger's father died. Alger continued to produce tale after tale of honest boys outwitting evil, greedy squires and malicious youths. His work appeared in hardcover and paperback, and decades-old poems were published in anthologies. He led a busy life with the street boys, his Harvard classmates, and the social elite. In Massachusetts he was regarded with the same reverence as Harriet Beecher Stowe. He tutored with never a whisper of scandal.

Last years: 1896–1899


In the last two decades of the 19th century, the quality of Alger's books deteriorated and his boys' works became nothing more than reruns of the plots and themes of his past. The times had changed, boys expected more, and a streak of violence entered Alger's work. In The Young Bank Messenger, for example, a woman is throttled and threatened with death – an episode that would never have occurred in his earlier work.

He attended the theater and Harvard reunions, read the literary magazines, and wrote a poem at Longfellow's death in 1892. His last novel for adults A Disagreeable Woman was published under the pseudonym Julian Starr. He took pleasure in the successes of the boys he had informally adopted over the years, retained his interest in reform, accepted speaking engagements, and read portions of Ragged Dick to boys' assemblies.

His popularity dwindled in the 1890s and with it his income. In 1896 he had (what he called) a nervous breakdown that forced him to relocate permanently to his sister's home in South Natick, Massachusetts. In the last two years of his life he suffered from bronchitis and asthma, and died on July 18, 1899, barely noticed by the newspapers.

Before his death, Alger asked Edward Stratemeyer to complete his unfinished works. In 1901, Young Captain Jack was completed by Stratemeyer and promoted as Alger's last work. Alger once estimated that he earned only $100,000 between 1866 and 1896; at his death he had little money, leaving only small sums to family and friends. His literary work was bequeathed to his niece, to two boys he had casually adopted, and to his sister Olive Augusta who destroyed his manuscripts and his letters.

Writing
Gary Scharnhorst, author of Horatio Alger, Jr., describes Alger's style as "anachronistic", "often laughable", "distinctive", and "distinguished by the quality of its literary allusions." These allusions are what set his work apart from the pulps, Scharnhorst opines, and include the Bible, Shakespeare (in half his books), John Milton, Longfellow, Cicero, Horace, Joseph Addison, Oliver Goldsmith, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and many others. "By the diversity of his allusions," Scharnhorst writes, "Alger ... both revealed his erudition and enhanced the literary quality of his work."

Scharnhorst descries six major themes in Alger's boys' books. The first, the Rise to Respectability, he observes, is evident in both his early and late books, notably in Ragged Dick whose young impoverished hero declares: "I mean to turn over a new leaf, and try to grow up 'spectable." His virtuous life wins him – not riches – but, more realistically, a comfortable clerical position and salary. The second major theme explores Character Strengthened Through Adversity. In Strong and Steady and Shifting for Himself, the affluent heroes are reduced to poverty and forced to meet the demands of their new circumstances. Alger occasionally cited the young Abe Lincoln as a representative of this theme for his readers. The third theme is the Beauty versus Money central to Alger's adult fiction. Characters fall in love and marry based on the their character, talents, or intellect rather than the size their bank accounts. In The Train Boy, for example, a wealthy heiress chooses to marry a talented but struggling artist and in The Erie Train Boy a poor woman wins her true love despite the machinations of a rich, depraved rival.

All of Alger's boys' novels rework the same plot: a young boy struggles to escape poverty through hard work and clean living. However, it is not always the hard work and clean living that rescue the boy from his situation, but rather a wealthy older gentleman, who admires the boy as a result of some extraordinary act of bravery or honesty that the boy has performed. For example, the boy might rescue a child from an overturned carriage or find and return the man's stolen watch. Often the older man takes the boy into his home as a ward or companion and helps him find a better job (sometimes replacing a less honest or industrious boy).

According to Scharnhorst, Alger's father was "an impoverished man" who defaulted on his debts in 1844. His properties around Chelsea were seized and assigned to a local squire who held the mortgages. Scharnhorst speculates this episode in Alger's childhood accounts for the recurrent theme in his boys' books of heroes being threatened with eviction or foreclosure, and may account for Alger's "consistent espousal of environmental reform proposals". Scharnhorst writes "Financially insecure throughout his life, the younger Alger may have been active in reform organizations such as those for temperance and children's aid as a means of resolving his status-anxiety and establish his genteel credentials for leadership."

Hoyt believes that about 1880 Horatio's morality was "coarsened" (possibly through the Western tales he was writing) because "the most dreadful things were now almost casually proposed and explored in the Alger books." He continued to write of boys and their fortunes (and was met with the same enthusiasm by new generations of readers) but the violence and "the openness in the relations between the sexes and generations" were something he would never have attempted in the 1860s. The Puritan ethic was losing its grasp on America, Hoyt reminds his reader, and this ideological change was reflected in Alger's work.

Scholar John Geck of the University of Rochester libraries' The Cinderella Bibliography notes that Alger relied on "formulas for experience rather than shrewd analysis of human behavior." Geck points out that "the formulas Alger employs are culturally centered" and are "strongly didactic and work only insofar as they effectively address the social concerns and aspirations of adolescents facing the uncertainties of growing up male in a polyglot America that exudes confidence and certainty to mask its lack thereof as its population and geographical territory burgeons." The frontier had been closed when Alger was writing he observes, "[b]ut the idea of the frontier, even in urban slums, provides a kind of fairy tale orientation in which a Jack mentality can be both celebrated and critiqued ... Alger's works are intended for the young whose motivations for action are effectively shaped by the lessons they learn."

Geck notes that perception of the "pluck" characteristic of an Alger hero has changed over the decades. During the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, "the Horatio Alger plot was viewed from the perspective of the Progressive movement as a staunch defense of laissez-faire capitalism, yet at the same time criticizing the cutthroat business techniques and offering hope to a suffering young generation during the Great Depression.“ By the Atomic Age however "Alger's hero was no longer a poor boy who, through determination and providence rose to middle-class respectability. He was instead the crafty street urchin who through quick wits and luck rose from impoverishment to riches."

Geck observes that Alger's themes have been transformed in modern America from their original meanings into a Male Cinderella myth, and are an Americanization of the traditional Jack tales. Each story has its clever hero, its "fairy godmother", and obstacles and hindrances to the hero's rise. "However", he writes, "[T]he true Americanization of this fairy tale occurs in its subversion of this claiming of nobility; rather, the Alger hero achieves the American Dream in its nascent form, he gains a position of middle-class respectability that promises to lead wherever his motivation may take him." The reader may speculate what Cinderella achieved as Queen and what an Alger hero attained once his middle class status was stabilized and "[i]t is this commonality that fixes Horatio Alger firmly in the ranks of modern adaptors of the Cinderella myth."

Alger's works experienced a resurgence following his death and sold in the millions. They attracted favorable critical comment, but readers lost interest at the advent of the Jazz Age. Estimates of books sold between his death and the 1920s range from seventeen million to twenty million. In 1926, however, reader interest plummeted and his major publisher ceased printing the books altogether. Surveys in 1932 and 1947 revealed very few children had read or even heard of Alger. The first Alger biography was a heavily fictionalized account by Herbert R. Mayes in 1928. Mayes later admitted the work was a fraud.

Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has bestowed an annual award on "outstanding individuals in our society who have succeeded in the face of adversity" and scholarships "to encourage young people to pursue their dreams with determination and perseverance."

A 1982 musical, Shine!, was based on Alger's work, particularly Ragged Dick and Silas Snobden's Office Boy. It has been performed off and on since, including Off Broadway.

Sexuality
Scharnhorst writes that Alger "exercised a certain discretion in discussing his probable homosexuality" and was known to have mentioned his sexuality only once after the Brewster incident. In 1870 the elder Henry James wrote that Alger "talks freely about his own late insanity&mdash;which he in fact appears to enjoy as a subject of conversation." Although Alger was willing to speak to James, his sexuality was a closely guarded secret. According to Scharnhorst, Alger made veiled references to homosexuality in his boys' books and these references, Scharnhorst speculates, indicate Alger was "insecure with his sexual orientation." Alger wrote, for example, that it was difficult to distinguish whether Tattered Tom was a boy or a girl and in other instances he introduces foppish, effiminate, lisping "stereotypical homosexuals" who are treated with scorn and pity by others. In Silas Snobden's Office Boy, a kidnapped boy disguised as a girl is threatened with the "insane asylum" if he should reveal his actual sex. Scharnhorst believes Alger's desire to atone for his "secret sin" may have "spurred him to identify his own charitable acts of writing didactic books for boys with the acts of the charitable patrons in his books who wish to atone for a secret sin in their past by aiding the hero." Scharnhorst points out that the patron in Try and Trust, for example, conceals a "sad secret" from which he is redeemed only after saving the hero's life.

Alan Trachtenberg of Yale University points out in his introduction to the Signet Classic edition of Ragged Dick (1990) that Alger had tremendous sympathy for boys and discovered a calling for himself in the composition of boys' books. "He learned to consult the boy in himself," Trachtenberg writes, "[T]o transmute and recast himself&mdash;his genteel culture, his liberal patrician sympathy for underdogs, his shaky economic status as an author, and not least, his dangerous erotic attraction to boys&mdash;into his juvenile fiction. He observes that it is impossible to know whether Alger lived the life of a secret homosexual, "[b]ut there are hints that the male companionship he describes as a refuge from the streets&mdash;the cozy domestic arrangements between Dick and Fosdick, for example&mdash;may also be an erotic relationship." Trachtenberg observes that nothing prurient occurs in Ragged Dick but believes the few instances in Alger's work of two boys touching or a man and a boy touching "might arouse erotic wishes in readers prepared to entertain such fantasies." Such images, Trachtenberg believes, may imply "a positive view of homoertoicism as an alternative way of life, of living by sympathy rather than aggression." Trachtenberg concludes "[I]n Ragged Dick we see Alger plotting domestic romance, complete with a surrogate marriage of two homeless boys, as the setting for his formulaic metamorphosis of an outcast street boy into a self-respecting citizen."

Fonds

 * The Papers of Horatio Alger, 1880-1953 (990 pieces) are housed at the Huntington Library.
 * H. Jack Barker Papers, undated (3 liner feet) are housed at Emory University's Manuscripts, Archives, & Rare Book Library.
 * Seligman Family papers, 1877-1934 (0.8 linear feet) are housed at American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, Ohio).