SOURCE: "'The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes': Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger," in Representations. No. 19, 1987, pp. 87-110.

Throngs of Ragged Children bent on earning or cadging small sums of money filled the streets of mid-nineteenth-century New York, if we are to credit the testimony of a large number of chroniclers of city life of the period. These genteel observers—journalists, novelists, social reformers, early criminologists—professed to be alternately appalled and enchanted by the spectacle of street children noisily and energetically playing, begging, and hawking a multitude of services and goods—shoeshines, matches, newspapers, fruit. In considering the accounts of this scene made by those who first concerned themselves with it, one soon becomes aware that a significant number of writers respond to it with strong ambivalence. For many of them, there is an undeniable charm or beauty, strongly tinged with pathos, in the spectacle of the pauper children: the high style with which they collectively wage their struggle for subsistence exerts a powerful appeal. For some of the same observers, though, the charm of the street urchins is a siren song: beneath their affecting exteriors many of them are prematurely criminal, expert manipulators of the responses of naive and sentimental adults.

George Matsell, New York's first chief of police, initiated the vogue for writing "sketches" of the city's street children with his sensationalistic and strongly unfavorable report of 1849 on "the constantly increasing number of vagrants, idle and vicious children of both sexes, who infest our public thoroughfares."¹ The extensive testimony of minister and reformer Charles Loring Brace, who devoted a long career to "saving" street children, is more ambiguous, and consequently more representative of genteel response in general. While professing to detest the criminal tendencies that he believes street life encourages in poor children—indeed, the "philanthropic" plans for them that he and his colleagues in the Children's Aid Society (founded in 1853) framed and enacted involved systematically removing them from the city—Brace nevertheless often confesses to feeling a powerful attraction toward the children themselves, especially the boys. Brace seems to have possessed a remarkable capacity for "activat[ing] male sympathies," to borrow a phrase historian Christine Stansell has used to characterize his program: both the middle-class, reform-minded men who funded and worked in his programs and many of the ragged boys whom they housed, counseled, educated, and sent away to work seem to have found compelling the particular version of male community institutionalized in his charities.²

One often hears in the language Brace and his colleagues directed toward their boy charges the familiar intensities of evangelical piety, hortatory and emotionally charged. Unsurprisingly to readers familiar with the rhetoric of nineteenth-century American Protestant revivalism. Brace's language frequently exhibits a markedly homoerotic character, as when in one of his Sermons to News Boys he appeals to his boy auditors' longings for an "older and wiser" male friend who would love and support them unreservedly:

Though you are half men in some ways, you are mere children in others. You hunger as much as other children for affection, but you would never tell of it, and hardly understand it yourselves.

You miss a friend; somebody to care for you. It is true you are becoming rapidly toughened to friendlessness; still you would be very, very glad, if you could have one true and warm friend.³

Although the "friendship" Brace is urging the street boys to accept here is ostensibly that of Christ, one can readily see how closely congruent a rhetoric of seduction could be with discourses of middle-class philanthropy like his, as when the adult male avows his willingness to recognize and respond (in various institutionally mediated ways) to adolescent male desires for dependency on an older, more powerful man for affection and support. The genteel gaze of Gilded Age New Yorkers seems always to descry disturbingly mixed qualities in pauper children, and the boundaries these imputed mixtures disturb are often ones of age and gender, as witness the ambiguous "half men" (adult males)/"mere children" (minors of indeterminate gender) to whom Brace addresses his exhortations.

Despite the pederastie overtones of some of their discourse, Brace and his fellow reformers seem to have been primarily interested in seducing poor children away from their underclass environments rather than actually engaging in sexual activity with them. However, at least one man who long associated himself with Brace's boy charities—Horatio Alger, Jr.—is known to have seduced boys sexually during at least one period of his career as well as to have actively participated in the reform movement to "seduce" New York street boys away from their milieu into an at least minimally genteel way of life. Alger has long been recognized as (in Hugh Kenner's phrase) "the laureate of the paradigms of ascent" in early corporate capitalist America; since 1971, his expulsion from the Unitarian ministry for pederasty in 1866 has been a matter of public record.⁴

In this essay I propose to explore how Alger's reformulation of domestic fiction as a particular brand of male homoerotic romance functions as a support for capitalism. Alger's writing provides a program cast in moralistic and didactic terms for maximizing a narrow but powerfully appealing range of specifically male pleasures: certain forms of social respectability and domesticity, the accumulation of modest wealth, and the practice of a similarly modest philanthropy toward younger needy boys. As a number of critics have noted, Alger's tales generally prove on inspection to be quite different from what the "Alger myth"—"rags to riches" for industrious poor boys—has prepared readers to expect. Rather than promising riches to boy readers, they hold out merely the prospect of respectability; also, rather than presenting an example of "rugged" and competitive individualism, they show boys "rising" through a combination of genteel patronage and sheer luck. As Michael Zuckerman perceptively observed, "beneath [Alger's] paeans to manly vigor" one can discern "a lust for effeminate indulgence; beneath his celebrations of self-reliance, a craving to be taken care of and a yearning to surrender the terrible burden of independence." Along-side the apparent support of such capitalist ideals of the period as the self-made man and the cult of success, notions to which Alger's writing pays lip service but fails to narrativize or thematize effectively, another agenda inconspicuously plays itself out in tale after tale—one that would appear to be the antithesis of the idea commonly associated with Alger that any reasonably bright boy can rely on his own hard work and "pluck" to catapult him to a place near the top of the Gilded heap. Actually, Alger's tales hold out a considerably less grandiose prospect for boy readers; that any boy who is reasonably willing to please his potential employers can attain a life of modest comfort. Only a character as programmatically resistant to this prospect as Bartleby the Scrivener stands to lose out entirely in the new modest-demand, modest-reward ethos of the rapidly expanding corporate/clerical workplace. A characteristic authorial aside in Alger's 1873 Bound to Rise; or, Up the Ladder makes apparent in unmistakable terms the large part patient passivity, rather than competitive aggression, plays in the scheme of his stories:

Waiting passively for something to turn up is bad policy and likely to lead to disappointment; but waiting actively, ready to seize any chance that may offer, is quite different. The world is full of chances, and from such chances so scized has been based many a prosperous career.⁶

"Rising" for Alger's heroes always remains a waiting game; within this pervasive passivity, there is an active and a passive position, but there is no way for a boy to take a more direct approach to the world of work and achievement in Alger's books.

How does one explain the gap that yawns between the reputation of Alger's books as heroic fables of ascents from the gutter to the pinnacle of power and wealth with their actual narrative contents: the achievement—with the benefit of considerable "luck" and patronage—of a mild form of white-collar respectability that releases the boy hero from the competitive struggle he has had to wage on the street? I propose that the answer lies not in some quirk in Alger's personality but in some basic contradictions in his culture that the tales engage. Alger's books can be read—and were by generations of young readers, albeit probably largely unwittingly—as primers in some of the prevailing modes of relationship between males in corporate/capitalist culture. I will argue further that the pederastie character of much of the "philanthropic" discourse about boys in this period is particularly marked in Alger's texts, and that what this sexual undercurrent reveals is not so much that the leading proponents of this discourse were motivated in large part by conscious or unconscious pederastic impulses—some, like Alger, no doubt were; perhaps others were not—but that there are determinate relations between social forms engendered by the emergent Gilded Age culture and some of the quasisexual ties and domestic arrangements between males that impel Alger's fiction.⁷

"Gentle-but-Dangerous" Horatio Alger

Alger arrived in New York City in 1866, eager to put his disgrace in Brewster, Massachusetts, behind him and to establish himself as a professional writer for boys (he had combined careers as a divinity student and fledgling juvenile author for a few years before his exposure). In one of the first pieces he published after moving to New York. Alger expresses the kind of fascination with the precocity of street boys familiar from other genteel writing:

The boys looked bright and intelligent; their faces were marked by a certain sharpness produced by the circumstances of their condition. Thrown upon the world almost in infancy, compelled to depend upon their own energy for a living, there was about them an air of self-reliance and calculation which usually comes much later. But this advantage had been gained at the expense of exposure to temptations of various kinds.⁸

Struggling to establish himself as a popular writer in a competitive and demanding market, Alger may well have envied the ragged boys of Brace's Newsboys' Lodging House the "self-reliance" they had acquired not from reading Emerson (who is said to have once visited the home of Alger's parents) but from premature and extensive "exposure to temptations." The element of glamour he attributes to the street boy heroes of the books that followed Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (1867) for a decade or so after is a quality that arises (as I shall try to show) from the way the figure embodies certain sexual and class tensions that were markedly present in the culture of Alger's period, tensions that had forcefully asserted themselves at critical points in his own life. Unlike most of his genteel contemporaries, Alger shared with the street boys he began writing about in New York the experience of having been deemed out-cast and "dangerous" to the community. That the boy ideal in his fiction should magically combine both "gentle" (genteel) and "dangerous" (underclass) qualities is the generative contradiction in Alger's work, but it bears closely on significant contradictions in his culture. Gentility and public disgrace, respectability and criminality were states that were not supposed to interact closely in mid-nineteenth-century America, but they did so with notable violence at several points for Alger, as when his Unitarian minister father, plagued with debt throughout the author's childhood, was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1844, or when Alger himself was ejected from the ministry for (in the words of the report of the church's committee of inquiry) "the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys."⁹

The Discourse of the "Dangerous Classes"

Alger's pederasty was an act that simultaneously transgressed a number of fundamental proscriptions in his culture: its object was male rather than female, and a child rather than an adult. Although apparently the boys with whom he was sexually involved during his days as a Unitarian minister were themselves middle class, Alger may have added a third form of transgression—sex across class lines—to his offenses against the dominant morality with some of the numerous underclass boys he fostered during his thirty years' residence in New York.¹⁰

Although there is no lack of documentary evidence to support the assertion that feelings of guilt and anxiety over real and imaginary wrongdoing were felt by many of Alger's middle-class contemporaries, a considerable amount of literary energy in America as well as in Europe in the two decades before he began producing his books was devoted to representing the actual states of being deemed outcast or criminal as conditions that properly happened only to the denizens of a segment of the urban world somehow fundamentally disjunct from the one middle-class readers inhabited—despite the physical proximity of the two worlds. Some of the most popular writting of the day served to provide these readers with a vicarious experience of the supposed color and romance of underclass life while reassuring them not only that the "honest" or "deserving" poor could readily transcend the worst effects of poverty but also that the squalor and violence of their lives could be readily contained—in slums, workhouses, charity wards, and prisons. Such experiences were likewise contained (and placed on exhibit, as it were) on the fictive level in such voluminous and widely read works as Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (1842), G. W. M. Reynolds's Mysteries of London (1845-18), George Lippard's The Quaker City (1845), and Ned Buntline's Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848). In the late 1850s, Godey's Lady's Book opined that the vogue for books like these, which depicted the lives of "rag-pickers, lamplighters, foundlings, beggars … murderers, etc.," was having what it saw as the undesirable effect of "widen[ing] the social breach between honest wealth and honest poverty."¹¹ In 1867 Alger would begin pursuing his own literary method of bringing the "gentle" and the "dangerous" back into touch with one another—by locating these supposedly mutually exclusive qualities in the person of the same boy character.

An abundance of stimulating scholarship published in recent years has established the interdependence of the discourse of "the dangerous classes" in midto late-nineteenth-century fiction with the forensic forms of the same discourse, in government reports, police dossiers, and sociological studies.¹² One of the most notable characteristics of this massive body of discourse is its frequent placement of the figure of the child in the foreground. From its inception, writing of all kinds about "the dangerous classes" took as its special concern the peril to the social order that the children of the urban poor allegedly posed.¹³ Writing about the children of "the dangerous classes" frequently exceeded the ostensible purpose of alerting its readership to the minatory aspects of these "dangerous" children to celebrate their beauty or charm. This conflicting tendency reaches a culmination of sorts in the heroes of Alger's streetboy fictions, in which the child of "the dangerous classes" is presented as being an estimable and even desirable figure.

The Discourse of the "Gentle Boy"

The particular means by which the boy of the "dangerous classes" is idealized in Alger's texts involves his being conflated with another, older writerly construction, the "gentle boy." This figure was itself a hybrid, two of its principal antecedents being the exemplary "good little boy" (sometimes middle-class, sometimes not) of evangelical tract literature for children and (coming out of a quite different discursive formation) the boy version of the "natural aristocrat" central to Jeffersonian social mythology. This latter figure, the "natural little gentleman," the boy of lowly origins who manifests from early childhood the virtues and graces associated with "true gentility," was a staple of "democratic" writing for children. Alger's boy heroes are both a belated and an extreme version of him.¹⁴

One need not look far in the discourse of the "gentle boy" in nineteenth-century America to appreciate that the terms gentle and gentleman were extremely unstable markers of a broad spectrum of attributes ranging from purely moral qualities like chivalrousness and benevolence to purely economic ones like the source of one's income. Given the constantly shifting meaning that gentleman is given in the nineteenth century, one of the few generalizations about its usage it seems to me safe to hazard is that the term's exclusionary powers are usually more important than its inclusionary ones. That is, establishing who is a gentleman is usually secondary in importance to establishing who is not; a gentleman often is not so much a description of a type of person as an attempt to draw a line between two levels of social status. This yields widely various definitions of gentle and gentleman, such as (for example) the "high" or "aristocratic" sense of the term, "a man of 'good' family and independent financial means who does not engage in any occupation or profession for gain"—a sense of the term quite different from what one might call the "bourgeois" one, "a man who does not engage in a menial occupation or in manual labor to earn his living." By the first definition, to be a "true" gentleman one must be rich, leisured, and a member of an upper-class family; by the second, one need only not be a working man to qualify—that is, it excludes from its compass only lower-class men.¹⁵

Besides signifying rigid divisions and invidious distinctions between social classes, gentle and gentleman bore a number of other meanings. "Soft" definitions of gentleman were based not on the source of his income or on the lowest level of work that it was necessary for him to do, but on an unstable set of moral qualities that commonly included courtesy, chivalry, benevolence to "inferiors," and a lively sense of personal "honor." The range was even wider (and must have been even more confusing) for boys who aspired to be "gentlemen": to be considered "gentle," boys, besides possessing various combinations of the foregoing qualities, were also expected to be (in certain relations) tractable, docile, and mild—types of behavior neither required of nor even particularly admired in adult males. At the extreme of the "soft" end of the spectrum, we arrive at a stretch of potentially hazardous meanings for males living in a society in which gender roles were becoming ever more polarized, elaborated, and rigidly prescribed: "sweet," "delicate," "tender," "fond," "loving," "affectionate." Embodying such qualities, even when they were part of behaving in a "gentle" or "gentlemanly" manner, could be a treacherous business for nineteenth-century boys, especially if these qualities came into play not between the boy and an infant or female family member, where they might seem appropriate, but between one boy and another or between a boy and a man. At the "soft" end of the "gentle" spectrum, disgrace by (alleged) feminization threatened the unwary boy.¹⁶ Social constructions of such matters as what success and security, manliness and "gentle" behavior are, as well as what is truly "dangerous" about the urban poor, are some of the basic elements of which Alger's tales are composed. His attempts to stabilize in didactic narratives the volatile field of meanings these terms represented in his culture remain instructive in ways he could not have anticipated.

Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom

Perhaps the master trope, insofar as there is one, for nineteenth-century attitudes toward the urban poor is the figure common to pictorial representations of the proletarian uprisings in Paris in 1830: that of the young or mature man, usually depicted half naked, who is possessed of a beautiful, muscular torso and a bestial face.¹⁷ Middle-class facial beauty, lower-class muscle; middle-class mentality, lower-class bodiliness; middle-class refinement, lower-class brutality; lower-class vigor and middle-class malaise; an overbred middle class and an overbreeding lower class—these are some of the constants in the shifting spectrum of stereotypical paradigms of social class in which nineteenth-century sociologists, journalists, novelists, and illustrators traded. Ragged Dick, the prototypical Alger hero, is not composed of ugly face and muscular torso as a thoroughly "dangerous" youth in popular representation might be: other qualities are mixed in him. As the hero-to-be of Alger's particular brand of male homoerotic domestic romance, he conspicuously combines, to begin with, the qualities of appearing both dirty and handsome:¹⁸

But in spite of his dirt and rags there was something about Dick that was attractive. It was easy to see if he had been clean and well dressed he would have been decidedly good looking. (Ragged Dick, 40)

Sexual attractiveness is the one characteristic Alger's heroes all have in common. "Luck" comes to them, and "pluck" they exhibit when it is required, but their really defining attribute is good looks. Statements like the following occur ritualistically on the opening pages of the books:

Both [boys] had bright and attractive faces…. [Dick] had a fresh color which spoke of good health, and was well-formed and strong. (Fame and Fortune, 53)

In spite of the dirt, his face was strikingly handsome. (Phil the Fiddler, 283)

He was a strongly-made and well-knit boy of nearly sixteen, but he was poorly dressed…. Yet his face was attractive. (Jed the Poorhouse Boy, 401)

The narrators of Alger's tales are fierce discriminators of good looks in boys, which they suggest might be obscured for other spectators by shabbiness and grime. The boy's initially mixed appearance, the good looks revealing themselves despite the physical evidence of poverty—dirt and rags—is the infallible sign that one of Alger's boy characters is likely to emerge from his outcast condition to become a "gentle/dangerous" boy.

Besides the handsome faces and comely bodies visible despite their shabby coverings, another strikingly homoerotic characteristic of Alger's writing is the element of seduction involved in the first steps of the ragged hero's conversion to respectability through his chance street encounters with genteel boys and men. Here the mixing is not figured on the hero's person (handsome/dirty) but on the social level: "dangerous" (street boy) and "gentle" (genteel boy or man) not only meet but make lasting impressions on one another. This impression making takes the form of a mutual seduction of sorts, as in the following representative episode from early on in Ragged Dick. When Dick puts himself forward for hire as a guide for a rich boy who is visiting the city, the boy's businessman uncle hesitates to entrust his nephew to him. After a moment's reflection the older man decides to take the risk: "He isn't exactly the sort of guide I would have picked out for you," the man says. "Still, he looks honest. He has an open face, and I think he can be depended upon" (55). The man's quick physiognomic assessment of Dick is amply borne out by the rest of the story: the ragged boy is not only honest, open, and dependable; his contact with Frank (the rich boy) is decisive in his transformation from "street pigeon" to young gentleman. It is Ragged Dick's looks that initially allay the older man's anxieties about him; on the rich boy's side, young Frank does some seducing of his own. Amidst the plethora of advice and encouragement Dick receives from Frank and his uncle in the course of the single day of their acquaintance, it is possible to overlook the significance that direct physical contact has in Frank's ability to convince Dick that he is capable of "rising." The first instance of this occurs when Dick lapses for a short time from his usual jocular tone to tell Frank about his occasional "blue spells" over the hard and lonely life he lives on the street. Frank replies. '"Don't say you have no one to care for you, Dick,' … lightly laying his hand on Dick's shoulder. 'I will care for you'" (99). There is another laying on of hands by Frank when the two boys part and Frank persuades Dick to give up his unthrifty (and, by Frank's lights, immoral) streetboy amusements: "'You won't gamble any more,—will you, Dick?' said Frank, laying his hand persuasively on his companion's shoulder" (110). "A feeling of loneliness" is said to overwhelm Dick after Frank leaves the city, as a result of the "strong attachment" he has rapidly formed for the rich boy, but this feeling

of loneliness soon gives way to Dick's overriding desire to be fully "gentle" (genteel), rather than merely Frank's "gentle" (sweet, fond, affectionate) ragamuffin.

A modest suit of new clothes is almost always the symbolic gift that enables the Alger hero to begin rising (Dick's is a "hand-me-down" from Frank), just as the gift of a pocket watch is often ritually made at a later point in his ascent. It is as a part of the ritual of donning his first suit that the matter of the boy's still mixed nature frequently arises for a second time: "He now looked quite handsome," the narrator says of Dick when he has put on Frank's gift, "and might readily have been taken for a young gentleman, except that his hands were red and grimy" (58). Alger's hero's face can simply be washed clean, and most of his body encased in suit and shoes, but his hands are the last part of his person to be divested of signs of hard toil and "dangerous" living.

A particularly interesting example of the mixed Alger hero is Tattered Tom, hero of a book of that title (1871) that inaugurated the Tattered Tom series, which soon followed the successful Ragged Dick series. The appropriately named Tom, a girl who has taken to living on the streets disguised as a boy, is the only "girl hero" in all of Alger's books for boys. She competes on an equal basis with other boys selling newspapers and carrying heavy luggage for nickels. Although the narrator makes passing gestures toward women's rights ("There seemed a popular sentiment in favor of employing boys, and Tom, like others of her sex, found herself shut out from an employment for which she considered herself fitted"; 71), the book, far from being a feminist fable, thoroughly endorses the privileging of the figure of the attractive boy that impels all of Alger's books. Of all of his heroes, only Tom does not "rise" as a consequence of her demonstrably enterprising and honest behavior; she is finally rescued from her plight on the street and restored to her mother, a rich Philadelphia lady from whom she had been abducted years earlier, whereupon she resumes her long-lost genteel, feminine identity as "Jane Lindsay."

Alongside this conventional story of a tomboy who attempts to live as a street boy but is rescued and reclaimed for genteel femininity it is possible to perceive a highly unconventional story of a partially feminized street boy who is drawn upward into genteel femininity by the irresistible magnetic force of Alger's model. This tale represents a twist on the standard one because its hero ends up becoming entirely feminine, instead of the mixed composite of putatively masculine and feminine qualities that Alger's heroes usually represent. Tattered Tom can be read not as a story of a literal sex change but of the "rise" from the street to the parlor usual in Alger combined with an unusually complete reversal of gender roles from street boy to young lady.

While it might be difficult to support such a reading of Tattered Tom on the basis of that text alone, it is possible to do so by interpreting the tale in the context of the series it follows (the Ragged Dick series, and the first three volumes of the Luck and Pluck series) and the one it introduces and to which it gives its name. One of the characteristics of a proliferating multiple series like Alger's street-boy stories is that repetitions and variations in the writing from volume to volume can produce meanings that are not readily available to the reader of any single volume in the series. The unique degree to which Tattered Tom in its course completely refigures Alger's typical boy hero as a genteel young lady provides a good example of the way formulaic and apparently tautological and repetitious writing like that in Alger's serials can generate unexpected meanings. By inaugurating a major series of boys' books with the story of a "female street boy" and by frequently employing gender-related formulae from the other stories of the series with the gender-signifier reversed, Tattered Tom represents a point in Alger's writing where the dynamic interactions of the relative age, gender, and class positions of child and adult characters are revealed with particular clarity. When, for example, the narrator says that Tattered Tom's face is dirty but that if it were clean, "Tom would certainly have been considered pretty" (80), his use of the normative feminine-gender term pretty recalls at the same time that it momentarily reverses other descriptions of the boy heroes of the previous tales in the series who have been said to have dirty but handsome faces. Similarly, when the narrator says of the benevolent gentleman who takes an interest in Tattered Tom, "There was something in this strange creature—half boy in appearance—that excited his interest and curiosity" (42-43), the text exhibits with exceptional directness the primary role that ambiguities of age and gender play in the appeal of Alger's heroes (one thinks of Brace's "half men"/"mere children") to their genteel benefactors.

"The Fashionable Newsboy at Home": Alger's Reformulation of the Domestic Ideal

"The idea of a fashionable newsboy! It's ridiculous!"

—Alger, Herbert Carter's Legacy (1875)

Having attracted the attention and favor of a genteel man with his unmistakable good looks, and having in turn been "seduced" by the warm concern of a rich boy into embracing genteel aspirations, Alger's prototypical hero begins his transformation from "dangerous" child/vagrant into "gentle" youth. That Alger's books are not only homoerotic romances but also represent a genuine reformulation of popular domestic fiction is made evident by the regularity and narrative intensity with which the tales highlight the boy hero's moving from the street or from a transitional charity shelter into his own modest little home (usually a boardinghouse room).¹⁹ That this transition is perhaps the most crucial in the boy's development is manifested in the elaborate care that Alger expends on discriminating the fine points of comparative domestic amenities at this point in his narratives. Once his boy hero reaches the point of setting up a little home of his own, Alger, otherwise often vague about "realistic" detail, shows himself to be as astute a recorder of the differences between the four or five lowest grades of boardinghouses as Balzac could have wished to be.

Having negotiated shifting one type of social construction of themselves ("dangerous") for another ("gentle"), Alger's heroes, in their culminating move into private lodgings, undertake the project of shifting another set of social constructions—those of gender identity and family role. As I have discussed above, gender confusion is thematized extensively in the street phases of Alger's tales only in the case of the female street boy, Tattered Tom. As long as he remains a poor boy on the streets, the Alger hero's behavior remains fairly conventionally gender bound. But once the "gentle boy" is removed from the street and street occupations and is placed in a private, at least minimally genteel domestic setting, he and his boy friends begin to differentiate themselves along (for boys of Alger's day, or of our own) highly unconventional gender-role lines. For example, as soon as fifteen-year-old (formerly Ragged) Dick can manage it, he moves his twelve-year-old friend Henry Fosdick (their very names suggesting they somehow belong together) into his lodgings with him. The two boys share a cult of domestic comfort and respectability that in many ways conforms to the standards of simplicity", cleanliness, and efficiency set in Alger's time by ideologues of "scientific" domesticity like Catharine Beecher.²⁰ As it is in her work, the Alger hero's first real home, like the poor but decent lodgings Dick and Fosdick take on Mott St., is a man's refuge from the demands of the marketplace and an appropriately ordered decor in which for him to pursue self-improvement.²¹

Dick and his friend and roommate Fosdick inaugurate the second major phase of their joint ascent by moving from their extremely modest digs in Mott St. to a more pleasant place uptown on Bleecker St. These are the opening lines of the sequel to Ragged Dick:

"Well, Fosdick, this is a little better than our old room in Mott St.," said Richard Hunter, looking complacently about him.

"You're right, Dick," said his friend. "This carpet's rather nicer than the ragged one Mrs. Mooney supplied us with. The beds are neat and comfortable, and I feel better satisfied, even if we do have to pay twice as much for it."

The room which yielded so much satisfaction to the two boys was on the fourth floor of a boarding-house in Bleecker St. No doubt many of my young readers, who are accustomed to elegant homes, would think it very plain; but neither Richard nor his friend had been used to anything as good. They had been thrown upon their own exertions at an early age, and [had] had a hard battle to fight with poverty and ignorance. Those of my readers who are familiar with Richard Hunter's experiences when he was "Ragged Dick" will easily understand what a great rise in the world it was for him to have a really respectable home. (Fame and Fortune, 9-10)

The Bleecker St. boardinghouse that is the boys' second home together is relatively luxurious; the narrator contrasts it with the minimal, unfastidious amenities that have been available to them back on Mott St.: "There once a fortnight was thought sufficient to change the sheets, while both boys were expected to use the same towel, and make that last a week" (52).

The practical, quotidian ideals of the domestic ideology in its "scientific" and privatizing aspect (a clean and comfortable home that serves as both a haven from the world and a suitable environment for continuous self-improvement) seem entirely congenial to Alger. Other aspects of the conventional domestic ideal that had come into being in the two or three decades preceding, such as its rigid polarization of gender roles, seem considerably less congenial to him. In order to consider how Alger represents these matters, one must attend not to those attitudes that Dick and Fosdick share, like their desire to live as "respectably" as they possibly can afford to, but those characteristics of either boy by means of which the text differentiates, and indeed to some degree dichotomizes (although not nearly as far as other domestic definers of gender roles would have done), their respective personalities.

Alger characterizes the younger boy, Fosdick, as a sweet, timid, quiet, and clever boy, obviously the stereotypically feminine version of the "gentle boy" type, in contrast with the stereotypically masculine Dick, who is thoroughly "gentle" in Alger's ambiguous sense (handsome, kind, nurturant, and, to all appearances, born with embryonic genteel values despite his actual origins in poverty) but is also self-confident, "handy," and generally competent in the realm of what Alger's culture defined as masculine affairs. The significant twist on the gender-role stereotypes in this representative tale of Alger's is that it is Dick, the "dominant" type of these two gentle boys, who plays the maternal role in Alger's version of domesticity and not, as one might expect, the "feminine" character Fosdick.

The relationship between the dominant boy in the maternal role and his partner (for example, Dick and Fosdick, respectively, in the first three volumes of the Ragged Dick series) is thoroughly familial; so much so, in fact, that Alger specifies (another significant example of his uncharacteristic precision about detail) that nine months after the two boys move in together ("at the end of nine months, therefore, or thirty-nine weeks"; chapter 20, "Nine Months Later," Ragged Dick, 166), Dick is said to bring forth a little bundle—a nest egg of $117 that has accumulated in his new savings account. But fascinating as the nursing of this nest egg is depicted as being for both boys, they eventually acquire a real human child: in the third volume of the series they adopt a small beggar boy to round out their family, and they make available to him in his turn the experiences—primarily domestic ones—that have aided their own earlier transformations from "dangerous but gentle" street boys to young gentlemen and members of an ideal, genteel, all-boy family.

This fantasmatic family serves as a lingering ideal in Alger's books, but, as he depicts it, it is a far from stable unit.²² For example, Mark the Match Boy, the adopted "son" of Dick and Fosdick, is revealed at novel's end to be the missing and long-sought-for grandson of a rich merchant from Milwaukee. The old man rewards Dick and Fosdick handsomely for fostering the boy, who is then removed to Milwaukee to enjoy the life of the grandson of a rich gentleman. Dick and Fosdick revert to nursing a now considerably enlarged nest egg. Dick's intermittent maternity toward his "nest egg" and his temporary ward Mark, and the essential interchangeability of "baby" and capital in this scheme—the last in the series of transformations I have been describing—requires consideration in relation to one final aspect of domesticity in Alger, and that is the all-important habit of "saving." Good looks combined with other virtures—honesty, enterprise, male homosociability—are all qualifications for "good fortune" in the forms this takes in Alger. But once the hero begins to "rise" and achieves a modicum of domestic stability, the activity or habit that is represented as being indispensable to maintaining his personal ascendancy is that of "saving." It is by saving, i.e., thriftily and systematically accumulating bits of capital, that Dick produces his nest egg; it is by virtue of these habits that he shows himself to be a fit parent (mother) for Mark; and it is his "saving"—by rescuing from dead-end poverty—first Fosdick and then Mark that the cycle of ascent is renewed in the series. Just as Dick has been saved in order to learn to "save" himself, so will he save younger boys and provide them a model of "saving" both money and still more boys. This religion of accumulating (saving) both money and other boys is ubiquitous in Alger:

The disposition to save is generally the first encouraging symptom in a street boy, and shows that he has really a desire to rise above his circumstances, and gain a respectable position in the world. (Mark the Match Boy, 293)

Of greater value than the [monetary] sum … was the habit of self-denial and saving which our hero had formed. (Risen from the Ranks, 141)

Boys who have formed so good a habit of saving can be depended upon. (Fame and Fortune, 11)

"All labor is respectable, my lad, and you have no cause to be ashamed of any honest business; yet when you can get something to do that promises better for your future prospects, I advise you to do so. Till then earn your living in the way you are accustomed to, avoid extravagance, and save up a little money if you can." (Ragged Dick, 109)

It is in the "saving" (i.e., salvific) habit of "saving" money and other boys that Alger's work represents its cycle of transformations—street boy into "gentle" boy, newly "gentle" boy into domestic partner and foster parent (mother), capital into baby and baby back into further capital—reaching a state of equilibrium: at the end of the narrative, there lies ahead for Alger's heroes a static future of endlessly pursuing the two "saving" projects (i.e., of money and other boys). I want now to consider the question of what is being "saved" in Alger's fantasmatic no-loss chain of transformations and exchanges, the process that begins at the lowest end of his society—at an isolated ragged boy—and extracts from this supposedly unpromising figure the particular combination of virtues and powers normally ascribed to his remote social superiors—gentility, domesticity, wealth, philanthropy.

"Taking an Interest": The Art of Saving Boys

As became apparent in the last section, the salvaging operation ongoing in Alger's writing is a complex one. In each book, a boy is "saved from ruin," from possibly becoming a criminal or a derelict, by being fostered as a candidate for recruitment into the petty bourgeoisie. Furthermore, an outmoded model of virtue (thrift, probity, self-restraint, ambition, hard work—"the Protestant work ethic") is reformulated to correspond more closely to the requirements of changed social and economic conditions: aspiring to and finally reaching the kind of low-level clerical position that brings "respectable" social status as well as access to a modest array of consumer "goodies" to its holder is presented as being a high moral achievement. What is ultimately being saved or recuperated in Alger's writing, though, is something more primal than the notion of the worldly efficacy of a certain combination of virtues: it is a belief that a kind of "magic" acts to secure his boy heroes in the corporate/capitalist network. As I have discussed earlier in this essay, critics of Alger have often decried the regularity with which an experience of sheer "luck" sets his boy heroes on their way, rather than some experience like a recognition of the workings in their world of some consistent notion of "character" or "self-making." It is crucial to notice in this regard that the ritualistic "lucky break" that initiates the boy's rising usually takes the form of his attracting the attention of a well-to-do male patron, usually through some spontaneous exhibition of his physical strength and daring. The "magic trick" that the Alger text ultimately performs is to recuperate the possibility of a man's taking an intense interest in an attractive boy without risking being vilified or persecuted for doing so—indeed, this "interest" is taken in a manner that is made thoroughly congruent with the social requirements of corporate capitalism on the sides of both parties: boy and potential employer alike "profit" from it.

Alger's 1876 Sam's Chance; and How He Improved It, in the second Tattered Tom series, provides a representative example of this in the interactions of fifteen-year-old Henry, a clerk in a shipping company, and his employer, James Hamilton. Although Henry is said not to be aware that Hamilton favors him or is even aware of his presence in the firm, the narrator relates that the older man has been "observing him [Henry] carefully, fully determined to serve him in the future if he should deserve it" (89). One day, after four years in the firm. Henry is called into Hamilton's office, where his employer interviews him about how he manages his life and his small income, and then, pleased with what he learns, invites the boy to make a substantial investment in a shipping venture the firm is about to undertake:

Henry stared at his employer in surprise. How could he, a boy with thirty-five dollars capital, join in such an enterprise?

"I don't see how I can," he replied. "I am afraid you take me for a capitalist."

"So you are," said his employer, "Have you not money in the bank?"

Henry smiled. (93)

Hamilton encourages Henry to participate in the venture, saving he will take the boy's savings bank book (with thirty-five dollars in the account) as security. "Thirty-five dollars will pay a year's interest on the five hundred dollars I lend you; so my interest is secure." Hamilton tells him. "I am willing to take the risk," the older man tells him (twice) to counter Henry's anxieties about becoming his "partner" (94-95). Henry finally happily agrees to the transaction and rises to leave Hamilton's office with the words, "Thank you, sir, I am very grateful to you for your kind interest in me."

With Hamilton's "interest" in Henry thus firmly secured, three months come and go, during which period nothing passes between man and boy except frequent "pleasant word[s] or smile[s]" (107). Henry is then called back into Hamilton's office, and then talk immediately turns to their mutual "interest": "I have just received a statement of [the outcome of the shipping venture]," Hamilton tells Henry, "and as you are interested, I have called you in to let you know how it has turned out." Henry is delighted to learn his investment has earned him a hundred dollars. The following conversation ensues:

"I shall charge you interest on the five hundred dollars you borrowed of me, at the rate of seven percent. You have had the use of the money for three months."

"Then the interest will amount to eight dollars and three quarters," said Henry, promptly.

"Quite right; you are very quick at reckoning," said Mr. Hamilton, looking pleased.

"That is not a difficult sum," answered Henry, modestly.

"I did not suppose you knew much about computing interest. You left school very young, did you not?"

"At twelve, sir."

"You had not studied interest then, had you?"

"No, sir; I have studied it since."

"At evening school?"

"No, sir; I study by myself in the evening."

"How long have you done that?"

"For two years."

"And you keep it up regularly?"

"Yes, sir; occasionally I take an evening for myself, but I average five evenings a week at studying."

"You are a remarkable boy," said the merchant, looking surprised.

"If you flatter me, sir, I may grow self-conceited," said Henry, smiling. (108-9)

Once again, a mutually "profitable" encounter leaves Henry "smiling" and Hamilton looking "surprised" and "pleased," their "partnership" fulfilled. The boy has proven himself to be as quick and expert a computer of "interest" as his merchant employer; with a little further education in calculating "risk," one suspects, he will have little more to learn from Hamilton. (In their crucial first nine months together, Ragged Dick is said to learn everything from Fosdick that he has to teach, which includes reading, writing, and "arithmetic as far as Interest"; 167.)

The recognition and avowal of "interest"—one's own in other men and theirs in oneself—and the close study of calculation and risk in pursuing these "interests" are matters that have figured as highly problematic and emotionally charged concerns in male homosexual behavior in homophobic capitalist culture. As Michael Pollak has written of the institutions of the "sexual market" of the gay ghetto (bars, baths, cinemas, and so on), as these functioned between the time of the emergence of gay liberation in Western metropolises at the beginning of the 1970s and the decline of "casual sex" practices among many gay men in recent years in response to the AIDS epidemic: "Of all the different types of masculine sexual behavior, homosexuality is undoubtedly the one whose functioning is most strongly suggestive of a market, in which in the last analysis one orgasm is bartered for another."²³

As is evident from passages like the dialogue from Sam's Chance quoted above, the network of calculation, risk, and interest that binds males together in Alger's work is a complex one; the economic working of the quasisexual marketplace of these "boys' books" leaves the crude barter system described by Pollak far behind. At a representative moment in an earlier entry in the Tattered Tom series. Paul the Peddler, distinctions between the boy hero or his body and corporate economic forms vanish; as Paul considers how to come up with thirty-five dollars to buy out another boy's necktie stand, the narrator observes:

If Paul had been a railroad corporation, he might have issued first mortgage bonds at a high rate of interest, payable in gold, and negotiated them through some leading banker. But he was not much versed in financial schemes, and therefore was at a loss. (164)

Paul's being "at a loss" is a circumstance that "gets worse before it gets better"; his case provides a typical example of the way in which the networks of interest between males in Alger's fiction can be disrupted by the incursion of the feminine—a quality that is frequently represented in these stories as being equivalent to (in readily recognizable infantile-fantasy form) the quality of anality. Paul becomes involved in a series of misadventures when he attempts to sell a valuable "ring" his mother has found and given him to provide the capital for his "rise." A con man named Montgomery who poses as "a jeweler from Syracuse" is said to overhear "with evident interest" a conversation between Paul and another boy about this ring. The man steps forward and avows his "interest in examining" and possibly buying Paul's ring; permitted to do so, he pronounces it "handsome" and valuable, and invites the boy to his hotel room to complete the transaction (199-200). Once at the hotel (called "Lovejoy's"), Montgomery grabs Paul and applies a sponge soaked in chloroform to his nose until the boy passes out. "Eyeing the insensible boy with satisfaction," he seizes the ring and flees (208-9).

Alger's fictions never allow such disruptions of the networks of male interest by the incursion of what it represents as the feminine/anal—a position of jeopardy into which every "gentle boy" can at least potentially be forced—to become more than temporary: Paul recovers his ring and completes his sale of it, then deposits most of the proceeds with his gentleman patron, who promises him "interest" on it (295). When the con man is sent off to Sing Sing after being convicted of assaulting and robbing Paul, according to the narrative, even the man's wife is said to be indifferent: "As the compact between her and her husband was one of interest rather than of affection, her grief at his confinement is not very deep" (304). Compacts of interest between man and wife, the narrative leads us to assume, are ignoble, but between man and boy "on the market," there is no comparably invidious distinction to be drawn between mutual "interest" and "affection": they come to the same thing, and both qualities are estimable.

Older men who might (but actually do not) stand in relation to Alger's boy heroes as fathers may "take an interest" in them that may eventuate (as we have seen) in actions as various as respectful advancement or rape, but none of these interactions with older men on the boys' part leaves any permanent trace in the lives of the boy characters except in the form of yet another accession of capital. Domestic arrangements are formed between boy and boy, but relations between man and boy remain casual, intermittent, and extradomestic: the "rise" of Alger's hero is fostered by "interested" older patrons, but (the informing, contradictory fantasy runs) the boy remains entirely self-fathering.

Alger's particular version of the "self-made man" takes the form of this "self-made" all-boy family that the boy protagonist generates with his money. This version of domesticity, as I have suggested above, derives from the infantilefantasy equivalence that the stories propose between femininity and anality. Drawing on the succinct psychoanalysis of the "magic-dirt" complex that Norman O. Brown makes in Life Against Death, I would argue that Alger's writing denies sexual difference—and privileges the figure of the formerly "dirty" boy-turned-gentle over figures of other age, gender, and class positions—"in the interest" of promoting this particular notion of self-making, of simultaneous self-mothering and self-fathering, that it takes over from capitalist culture:

The infantile fantasy of becoming father of oneself first moves out to make magic use of objects instead of its own body when it gets attached to that object which both is and is not part of its own dody, the feces. Moneyu inherits the infantile magic of excrement and then is able to breed and have children: interest is an increment.²⁴

Alger's all-boy families merely imitate the extraordinary propensities for self-reproduction, for apparently asexual breeding, that they are represented as discovering already ongoing in their first accumulations of capital. The chain of "magical" transformations I have charted in Alger's writing from ragged to gentle boy by way of a series of negotiations of capital into baby and then back into capital conforms entirely to Brown's Freudian reading of the fantasy of transformation of bodily excrement into capital increment by way of the metamorphosis of feces into baby and subsequently into "magical," self-engendering money.

Alger's tales sometimes manifest a modicum of selfawareness on the author's part with regard to his role of purveyor of a "magical thinking" that effectively links infantile fantasies of self-fathering with some of the fundamental formations of capitalist culture. In his recent study of forms of popular narrative in nineteenth-century America, Michael Denning has likened the function of Alger's street-boy heroes—"dangerous" figures drawn from contemporary popular, nongenteel fiction (story papers, dime novels) who enact what Denning (correctly) reads as unequivocally genteel moralistic fables—to the use of "a ventriloquist's dummy to recapture and reorganize working class culture."²⁵ I would supplement Denning's characterization of Alger as a ventriloquist across class lines (as well as, I would add, across lines of prohibited sexuality between man and boy) with a brief analysis of Alger's representation of himself in the figure of Professor Henderson, a magician/ventriloquist who figures as a patron/employer of the boy hero of Bound to Rise. Henderson first deceives the boy Harry Walton, who has come to work as his assistant, by throwing his voice into a trunk, from which emerges a child's voice pathetically pleading, "Oh, let me out! Don't keep me locked up in here!" Harry is said merely to "smile" when he realizes Henderson has tricked him with ventriloquism (102). Shortly thereafter, Henderson repeats the trick in the boy's presence, this time at the expense of an elderly woman character; Henderson and Harry have a good laugh at her chagrin. The trick is more elaborate the second time: Henderson throws his voice into the boy's body and increases their mirth by making Harry seem to lie to the woman to the effect that the professor does indeed have someone locked away in the trunk; this time Henderson specifies (ventriloqually) that the child is female—in fact, his little daughter. The climax of the trick comes when the professon throws open the trunk and shows the woman that there is no one there (114-15).

The reader may share some of the woman character's discomfort over the "little girl in the trunk" trick that at a critical point in the episode turns into the "vanishing daughter" trick. Not much imagination is required to produce the biographical speculation that the little girl locked in the trunk, crying to be released, is a figure from Alger's psychological past who survived in encrypted and rejected form in his unconscious and whose ultimate fate was to be pressed into service as comic relief in texts like Bound to Rise. Even more thoroughly than the ambiguously feminine Tattered Tom, this fantasmatic "little girl" vanishes almost without a trace from the magical network of male interests through which she is passed in this text—leaving the reader to suspect, at this and other points in the Alger corpus, that the "dangerous" figures in his writing are not really at any point the ragged street boys whose labile qualities it celebrates but the little girls it almost totally excludes—along with the femininity they embody, a "threatening" quality insofar as it might permanently disrupt the smooth unfolding in the America of the time of the exclusively male homosocial institutions of corporate capitalism.

It was in the decade or so after Alger's death in 1899 that Lewis Hine began to produce his extraordinary photographs of the new, turn-of-the-century generation of urban street boys at their work of peddling, shining shoes, selling newspapers, and delivering parcels. What is striking about Hine's photographs is their self-conscious refusal to "gentle" their underclass subjects in the way that Alger and his philanthropist colleagues had done: Hine's boy subjects are not represented as picturesque ragamuffins or charming but dangerous "animals" or "savages," some of whom will inevitably make their way to affluence and respectability. Rather, his images of these boys reveal their sufferings as real, lasting deformations rather than as transient experiential way stations on the road to untroubled security and success: the child subjects of Hine's photographs characteristically look weary, depressed, and even bitter. In association with the Progressivist reform organization the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Hine wrote and lectured extensively on the need for legislation prohibiting the exploitation of poor children as laborers by either their parents or their employers: his photographs, he insisted, were his incontrovertible documentary evidence that children forced to support themselves by full-time employment at low-paying labor were generally destroyed physically and morally in the process. Hine supplemented his photographic record of street-boy life with his own antisentimental testimony about their plight: for example, a propos of his 1909 photograph of a Hartford, Connecticut, newsboy named Tony Casale, Hine records that the boy had recently shown his boss the marks on his arm where his father had bitten him "for not selling more papers"; Hine also mentions that the boy said he disliked being the object of verbal abuse from the drunken men with whom he constantly came in contact on the city streets.²⁶

Hine and the NCLC encountered strong popular resistance to their movement; politicians and other members of their audiences vociferously denied that conditions for street-child laborers were as grim and brutalizing as Hine represented them as being. Hine's street boys, his opponents often argued, were Horatio Alger heroes, toiling their way up from paupery to comfortable, respectable lives.

It was during these years, between the turn of the century and the beginning of World War I, at the height of the Progressive Era, that Alger's books, republished in cheap reprints that suppressed substantial amounts of the books' didactic moralizing, sold in the millions of copies.²⁷ During his lifetime, Alger had had only one genuine bestseller, the early Ragged Dick; only posthumously did he achieve true mass popularity. It was also during the early years of the twentieth century that the term "a Horatio Alger story" became fixed in the language to mean a tale of a man's "rise" from boyhood poverty to a position of great wealth and power. The myth that Alger's are male-capitalist Cinderella tales has had an astonishing success of its own. How can one account for the ubiquity of this inaccurate characterization of the content of Alger's stories? With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that one thing that was being "saved" in Alger's writing was a notion of "virtuous poverty rewarded" that was already archaic when his first street-boy series appeared in the decade after the Civil War. The Alger mania of readers in the first fifteen years of this century might be said to have served as a reinoculation of American readers with the myth of "virtuous poverty rewarded," an article of faith that was being vociferously combatted from Progressivist, socialist, and organized-labor quarters during those years. I would attribute some of the popularity of Alger's stories with boy readers during and after his lifetime to their propensity for combining a not inaccurate representation of the conditions, requirements, and mild rewards to be expected on the extensive lower reaches of the corporate workplace with a version of boy life—idyllic, domestic, self-perpetuating, untroubled by direct intervention from parents or other adult figures of authority or by the "threat" (to male supremacy) of female enfranchisement—that may strike us as highly unrealistic at first glance but that is (again) a not inaccurate version of some of corporate culture's favorite modes of self-presentation (i.e., as fraternal, financially rewarding, benevolently hierarchical, open to individual talent or "merit").

I would attribute the extraordinary tenacity of the "rags-to-riches" misreading of Alger to corporate/capitalist culture's need for a serviceable mythology of "success" like Alger's—but one which entirely represses (as Alger's does not) the determinate relations perceptible in his stories between the achievement and maintenance of white-collar "lifestyles" and particular, exclusive modes of relationship between males. I first began to read Alger's writing out of an interest in thinking about ways in which his pederasty might have determined it, but I have come to think that the far more interesting way his work manifests male homosexuality is not as indirect autobiographical data for a single figure (i.e., Alger) but as an encapsulation of corporate/capitalist America's long-cherished myth, its male homoerotic foundations fiercely repressed, that the white males who control wealth and power have their eye out for that exceptional, "deserving," "attractive" underclass youth who defies his statistical fate to become (with the benefit of limited paternalistic "interest") yet another "gentle boy from the dangerous classes."

Notes

I wish to thank Jane Tompkins and Larzer Ziff for thoughtful readings of an earlier draft of this essay, and Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Warner for helpful advice on subsequent versions of it. I also wish to thank Michael Rogin for making valuable editorial suggestions.

¹ Quoted in Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York, 1986), 194. I have depended on the chapter of Stansell's book in which this report is quoted ("The Use of the Streets," 193-216) for my brief opening account in this essay of genteel response to street children in New York City in the years just before Alger's arrival on the scene.

² Ibid., 212.

³ Charles Loring Brace, Short Sermons to News Boys (1866), 140-41.

⁴ Hugh Kenner's phrase occurs in his "The Promised Land," in A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York, 1975), 20. Richard Huber rediscovered the documentary material on Alger's pederasty and discussed it in his book The American Idea of Success (New York, 1971).

⁵ Michael Zuckerman, "The Nursery Tales of Horatio Alger," American Quarterly 24, no. 2 (May 1972): 209.

⁶ Horatio Alger, Jr., Bound to Rise; or, Up the Ladder (New York, 1909), 101, in a chapter significantly entitled "The Coming of the Magician."

⁷ My thinking about homoeroticism, homophobia, social class, and capitalism in this essay is indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), especially her chapter "Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend," 161-79. I am also indebted to Luce Irigaray, "Commodities Among Themselves," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans, Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), for her analysis of the determinate relation between homophobia and the foundations of patriarchal economics: "Why is masculine homosexuality considered exceptional, then, when in fact the economy as a whole is based upon it? Why are homosexuals ostracized, when society postulates homosexuality?" (192). In considering the profound effects of the requirements of the forms of corporate capitalism emergent in Alger's time on his culture, I have also profited from Alan Trachtenberg's treatment of this matter in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982).

⁸ Alger's sketch of the boy residents of the Newsboys' Lodging House of the Children's Aid Society (Brace's organization) originally appeared in the pages of the Liberal Christian. It is reprinted in Gary Scharnhorst with Jack Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 79. The appearance at long last of a factually reliable biography of Alger like this one makes writing about his work substantially easier.

⁹ I quote this formulation from Scharnhorst, ibid., 67.

¹⁰ The boys involved were apparently all members of Alger's Unitarian congregation in the small Cape Cod community of Brewster. If Alger did cross class lines "for sex" in his later years in New York, where, according to Scharnhorst, he entertained hundreds of street-boy friends in his rooms (Lost Life, 77) and semi-officially adopted three of them (124-25), it was of course only the official version of the morality of his time and place that he was violating: the casual sexual exploitation of the poor by those economically and socially "better off" than they was of course a pervasive feature of nineteenth-century urban life. For the example of New York City in the decade before the Civil War, see Christine Stansell, "Women on the Town: Sexual Exchange and Prostitution," in City of Women, 171-92.

¹¹ Quoted in Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 210-11.

¹² Stansell gives a brief and useful history of the "sketch" of scenes, especially street scenes, of urban poverty in New York in the three decades before the Civil War in City of Women, 195-97, demonstrating as she does so how much what genteel observers of the time "saw" depended on expectations that writing about "the problem" had helped form. Stansell writes, "Although the problems of the streets—the fights, the crowds, the crime, the children—were nothing new, the 'problem' itself represented altered bourgeois perception and a broadened political initiative." She goes on to say, "Matsell's report and the writing Brace undertook in the 1850s distilled the particular way the genteel had designated themselves arbiters of the city's everyday life" (197). Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (New York, 1973), gives extensive documentation of the interdependence of the depictions of the urban poor to be found in Sue, Balzae, and Hugo with contemporary forensic writing. D.A. Miller has analyzed similar interdependences between contemporary "policing" techniques and the fiction of Wilkie Collins, Dickens, and Trollope in such articles as "From Roman policier to Roman-police: Wilkie Collins's The Moon-stone," Novel 13 (Winter 1980): 153-70; "The Novel and the Police," Glyph 8 (1981): 121-47; "Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House," Representations 1 (February 1983): 59-89; and "The Novel as Usual: Trollope's Barchester Towers," in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84 (Baltimore, 1986), 1-38. Mark Seltzer has explored the relation of the forensic discourse of surveillance to Henry James's writing in "The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance," in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore, 1982), 95-118.

¹³ M.A. Fregier's influential 1840 study Des Classes dangereuses de la population dans les grandes villes has been called "a close study of the process by which the course of the lower-class child's life was shaped toward crime" by Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes, 120.

¹⁴ John G. Cawelti traces the lines of descent of this "democratic" boy hero in his chapter on Alger in Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (Chicago, 1965). See also in the same volume, "Natural Aristocracy and the New Republic: The Idea of Mobility in the Thought of Franklin and Jefferson," 1-36.

¹⁵ For comparative purposes, see the discussions of the shifting parameters of gentility in nineteenth-century England in the respective introductory chapters of the following two works: Robin Gilmour, The Idea of the Gentleman in the English Novel (London, 1981), 1-15; and Shirley Robin Letwin, The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 3-21.

¹⁶ All these senses of the term, and all these potential occasions of social unease ranging from simple embarrassment to disgrace and persecution, are alive in American Renaissance writing about the "gentle" and "gentlemen." The figure of the "gentle boy" reached an apogee of sorts in Hawthorne's 1832 tale of that name. A second key text for this figure as it appears in American Renaissance writing is Thoreau's poem, "Lately, alas, I knew a gentle boy …," which he published in the "Wednesday" section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).

¹⁷ See Chevalier, Laboring Classes, 414.

¹⁸ References to Alger's novels will be given by short titles in the text. The editions cited are: Ragged Dick (New York, 1962); Fame and Fortune (Boston, 1868); Phil the Fiddler, in Struggling Upwards and Other Works (New York, 1945); Jed the Poorhouse Boy, in Struggling Upwards; Tattered Tom (Boston, 1871); Mark the Match Boy (New York, 1962); Risen from the Ranks (Boston, 1874); Sam's Chance, and How He Improved It (Chicago, n.d.); Paul the Peddler: The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant (New York, n.d.); Bound to Rise; or, Up the Ladder (New York, 1909).

¹⁹ Nina Baym briefly but perspicaciously classifies Alger as a domestic writer in Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), 261.

²⁰ For an informative account of Beecher's theory of domesticity, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973), 158ff.

²¹ See Mary Ryan, "Varieties of Social Retreat: Domesticity, Privacy, and the Self-Made Man," in Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981), 146-55, for Ryan's discussion of the compatibility and indeed the congruence of the cult of the "self-made man" with the cult of (feminine) domesticity.

²² Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), employs the term fantasm to denote "the traces and symptoms of a fundamental family situation which is at one and the same time a fantasy master narrative" that "is an unstable and contradictory structure, whose persistent actantial functions and events … demand repetition, permutation, and the ceaseless generation of various structural 'resolutions'" (180). If, as Jameson suggests, a residue of fantasmatic thinking about "a fundamental family situation" is characteristic of all bourgeois narratives, then it becomes possible to perceive many more narratives as being fundamentally "domestic"—or antidomestic—in their emphases than most of us are probably used to doing.

²³ Michael Pollak, "Male Homosexuality; or, Happiness in the Ghetto," in Philippe Aries and André Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, trans. Anthony Foster (Oxford, 1985), 44.

²⁴ Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn., 1959), 279.

²⁵ Michael Denning, "Cheap Stories: Notes on Popular Fiction and Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century America," History Workshop 22 (Autumn 1986): 6.

²⁶ Quoted in the catalog entry for Lewis Hine's photograph entitled Bologna, Hartford, Connecticut, 1909, in Julie R. Myers, et al., Of Time and Place: American Figurative Art from the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C., 1981), 92.

²⁷ Scharnhorst, Lost Life, 149-56, provides an illuminating account of the "editorial reinvention" of Alger's work (often by silent abridgement) in the years after his death (149-56).