Horatio alger who is he

Though never to wear the cloth again, he resolved to live out the Christian ideal, expiating his sin by saving others. How exactly he would do it, he didn't yet know. T he Manhattan he came to was the city of Gilded Age robber barons, of Boss Tweed, and of millions of ambitious newcomers, drawn by the postwar boom and its seemingly boundless opportunities. Below the prosperity, though, was another New York, a nighttown of squalid slums that travelers compared to Calcutta.

There was scarcely a block in the poorest areas that a pedestrian could negotiate "without climbing over a heap of trash or, in rain, wading through a bed of slime," as Otto Bettmann describes it in The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible. To the physical pollution corresponded a moral one. Many streets were so dangerous that policemen hesitated to walk them alone. The New York City street urchin entered the national consciousness in those years.

More than 60, neglected or abandoned kids ran unsupervised in the streets, partly because of the fallout from the tremendous wave of immigration from Ireland and continental Europe that was taking place. With immigration came a social pathology of maladjustment to the New World: families that fell apart; alcoholism and drug abuse opium could be purchased across the counter ; out-of-wedlock pregnancies and, inevitably, neglected children; physical and sexual abuse of every imaginable kind.

Beside the foreign immigrants, there were the under-aged and unacknowledged casualties of the Civil War. Somehow they made their way to the city, and now accept constant struggle as a part of their daily lives. W hat was to be done about the juveniles likely to die on the streets or end up behind bars?

Social worker Etta Angel Wheeler found one answer, when she came upon a child wandering naked and unclaimed. The legal authorities to whom she appealed refused aid. In desperation, she turned to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which determined that, "the child being an animal," it would grant shelter and protection.

Practical philanthropists came up with better answers and put them into effect. Charles Loring Brace mused on what to do about the city's "great numbers of children sleeping about the streets at night, in boxes or under stairways. There used to be a mass of them at The Atlas , sleeping in the lobby and cellar, until printers drove them away by pouring water over them. There they might be instilled with a " 'sense of property,' and the desire of accumulation, which, economists tell us, is the base of all civilization.

At the heart of such institutions lay the recognition that a civilized society is only as sound as its youngest members. H oratio Alger, both as a novelist and a philanthropist, belongs to this effort of reclamation. He, too, asked himself what could be done about these homeless children.

Looking for the answer, he wandered through the city's worst neighborhoods. Alger explained that the watch was a graduation present from his parents.

Perhaps one day you'll get a fine watch. I got no family to gimme, and I ain't about to be adopted by a rich man, unless yer willin. There's a crate with some straw in a yard back of Pearl Street, but a big feller beat me to it, so I was bummin' it last night. Sand boxes is swell, 'cuz yer can get it up all around yer. But in winter nothing beats them steam gratin's. They's just like a featherbed. At a church service in Five Points, the city's worst slum, Alger struck up a conversation with several boys, listening closely to their patois.

As Horatio interviewed them, these "street arabs" spoke of broken homes, violent confrontations with parents, rocky futures. He saw how their cocky attitudes masked a profound despair. Alger advised them to improve themselves, to get a job with a future instead of hanging about the streets, squandering whatever came their way from shining shoes or picking pockets. Some nodded in agreement, expressing the desire to change their lives; more were content to take life as they found it.

Why, Alger pondered, did individuals subjected to the same conditions turn out very differently? One boy might become a thief, a sociopath, even a killer. His neighbor, subjected to the same poverty and broken home, might aim to be a decent, upright citizen. What was the difference between them? What saved certain boys, he came to believe, was character —a quality that gave them the strength to resist sloth and temptation.

But was this inborn? In that case determinism won the day, and change was out of the question. Or, given the right opportunity, could a dispossessed lad win his share of the American dream simply by willing the change? The latter, Alger thought—but only if the boy stopped viewing himself as a victim and instead sought the proper advice. As these boys spoke—and as Alger meditated upon the worst crime of the slums: the stealing of childhood from children—an idea came to him.

He would be Brother Anselmo redivivus. He had sinned against youths; now he would rescue them and in the process save himself. He would do it as a novelist—a novelist who would, as he put it, "depict the inner life and represent the feelings and emotions of these little waifs of city life.

O ut of this resolve, Alger wrote Ragged Dick in He would pack an emotional punch in this book, graphically displaying the horror of juvenile life on the streets.

The idea that there were parents who could abandon or abuse their children was new to many Americans. Alger was forced to give this up due to alleged sexual scandals with young boys. There is reason to believe that Alger was homosexual, but his sexual orientation wasn't known to the general public so it probably didn't affect his fame at all.

Alger wrote more than stories during his lifetime which were published by more than 70 different publishers. Many of his stories were published a chapter at a time in magazines.

He was such a popular author in this time period that he was often working on 3 or 4 stories at the same time. Since he was writing so many stories at once, Alger would sometimes make mistakes in names of his characters. If you look through his stories, you can find that some of the details aren't consistent.

Occasionally a magazine would run two of Alger's stories at the same time, so to avoid confusion, they would put one of them under a pen name Silas Snobden's Office Boy is an example of this. Alger became the bestselling author of his time period with millions of copies sold to the public. Horatio Alger had many different reasons for writing his success stories. He hoped to influence the class that he was writing about.

He wished to do this by showing them what "energy, ambition and and honest purpose may achieve. Alger knew that there was luck in his stories that the average person couldn't hope to obtain. To Alger, the "modern age did not guarantee success through hard work alone; there had to be some providential assistance as well.

Alger put an emphasis on the moral values of his heroes and a lack of morals in his villains. The minor characters always saw the hero as being honest even before they knew him. A general trust was central to his stories. The majority of his readers clung to the images of success, fortune, and wealth, but ignored the morals.

They didn't see that much of the fortune came as a result of the good deeds that the hero did. After Alger's death, some of his stories were abridged to get rid of the good deeds of the hero to please the public.

The stories that Alger wrote followed a few basic themes. The main character was generally a poor boy in his late teens who was either an orphan or had to support his mother family as well as himself. He could have clear enemies from the beginning of the story. He would end up in some kind of situation where he would help someone and in return received money or a better job.

By work, perseverance, and luck he became rich. Horatio Alger creates a hero that every child, from the time his books were written to the present, would love. Hear from librarians about amazing collections, learn about historic bindings or printing techniques, get to know other collectors. Whether you are just starting or looking for expert advice, chances are, you'll find something of interest on blogis librorum. Recent Posts. Books Tell You Why, Inc.

Fulfillment Operations: Johnnie Dodds Blvd. Columbus, OH All rights reserved. It was a success. The next year, Alger moved to New York City to pursue his writing career. It was there that Alger met the orphaned and homeless children on the streets — an unfortunate result of the American Civil War — that served as inspiration for his characters. Alger wrote a total of 18 novels for youth between and , the most famous being Ragged Dick. His storylines followed a similar path: a young boy living in poverty overcomes the odds by living an honest life and working hard.