Warren's 1865 Life and Public Services of an Army Straggler is one of the very few examples of realistic Civil War fiction incorporating humor. Most fiction of the Civil War was, understandably, quite serious and often celebratory. Not so Warren's work. Billy Fishback, the hero of the Life is, as we say, a low-down, rotten, dirty little sneak with no redeeming whisper of conscience, who roams about the South taking advantage of the poverty-stricken inhabitants. Billy is a "straggler," by which of course is meant a deserter, of the Confederate Army and is about as cowardly as it is humanly possible to be. So it is with great wit that Warren names Billy "his own and his country's hero."
Warren himself was a Confederate soldier, and "straggling" was by no means an unpopular choice for soldiers in the long-suffering Confederate forces. Jefferson Davis reported in September 1864 that over one third of the Confederate Army was absent without leave. Billy's demented picaresque--which includes but is not limited to horse-stealing, widow-conning, and impersonating an officer--definitely fits the bill of a con man, but Billy, unlike so many other characters of this type, does not delight. He is too vicious and without charm. The audience rejoices, not in Billy's successes, but in his defeats. He is the "biter bit," to borrow Richard Boyd Hauck's term for the con-man out-conned. Perhaps the best illustration of this comes at the close of the work. Having conned a seat for himself on a crowded train by telling the riders that he is tending to a wretched-looking fellow sick with small pox--and thus clearing the car entirely--Billy is aghast to find the man really does have the deadly disease. Billy contracts it and dies.
It is in some ways a satisfying close to a dark vision of Civil War culture. A somewhat lighter take on a very similar character would appear years later in Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Billy and his more clever, and perhaps even less principled, frenemy Captain Slaughter, prefigure the Duke and the Dauphin, whose ability to deceive is matched by their ability to delight their reading audience. Though we rejoice thoroughly in the fall of the Duke and the Dauphin in much the same way that we are pleased to see Billy defeated, we are significantly less appalled by their manners. Which raises a question: to what extent do modern, and for that matter contemporary, notions of class dictate the reading of these texts?
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes is as good a place as any to begin considering the specifics of Southwestern Humor. In fact, Longstreet's narrators provide one of the clearest examples of the dilemma of what I have started calling the "intimate outsider" (doubtless there's a better term, but I don't know it). Though born in the South, both Baldwin and Hall are separated from those they observe by their education in the North, by their manners, language, and knowledge of the world. Baldwin is the more game of the two, attempting to participate in the country life of those around him. He shoots (badly), dances (worse), and rides (humiliatingly), all with a cheerful spirit that earns him the grudging respect of the locals. Hall is another story; effete, withdrawn, sentimental, Hall lacks Baldwin's zest for life and local color, and, as a result, has even more trouble fitting in. However, neither narrator can be said to truly fit in to Georgia life. Longstreet seems to favor Baldwin's approach (perhaps their shared name is a clue?)
The short and essentially unconnected stories that make up Georgia Scenes appeared separately in the Southern Recorder and the States Rights' Sentinel between 1833 and 1835, when they were collected and published in book form. When taken together as a unit it is easy to recognize Longstreet's chief accomplishment, his startling grasp of realism. Longstreet paints southern life in all its gruesome glory, but unlike some authors he also celebrates its beauty and the power of human goodness. The disgust the modern reader almost certainly experiences while reading about the "gander pull" (a fairly horrible competition in which riders on horseback attempt to pull the greased head off a living goose) is tempered by Longstreet's celebration of the genuine feminine virtues of country girls. Dark and light mingle here in tales Edgar Allan Poe praised for their "verisimilitude."
The short and essentially unconnected stories that make up Georgia Scenes appeared separately in the Southern Recorder and the States Rights' Sentinel between 1833 and 1835, when they were collected and published in book form. When taken together as a unit it is easy to recognize Longstreet's chief accomplishment, his startling grasp of realism. Longstreet paints southern life in all its gruesome glory, but unlike some authors he also celebrates its beauty and the power of human goodness. The disgust the modern reader almost certainly experiences while reading about the "gander pull" (a fairly horrible competition in which riders on horseback attempt to pull the greased head off a living goose) is tempered by Longstreet's celebration of the genuine feminine virtues of country girls. Dark and light mingle here in tales Edgar Allan Poe praised for their "verisimilitude."
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The Southwestern Humorists
In days of yore, or so I'm told, critics had an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the 19th century southwestern frontier as something of a literary wasteland. In doing so they merely followed the popular sentiment, alas still alive and well today, that those states that had aligned themselves with slaveholders in the Civil War could only be untutored racist barbarians, too morally and spiritually impoverished to be capable of great literature on the same level with their genteel and cultured brethren to the North. However, the rising tide of a rapidly opening canon over the last half century has brought to light many texts otherwise ignored, and it is no longer acceptable to assume that Mark Twain and William Faulkner, for example, sprung up unassisted from the scorched earth of the American South. Reading the Southwestern Humorists, we discover their roots grown long in the rich soil of a significant frontier literary tradition.
Southwestern Humor was in its heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, 1830-1861 when William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a weekly New York sporting paper, was known for its humorous sketches. The authors of these sketches often hailed from the southwestern frontier territories, from Georgia and Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri. Their gentlemen narrators sought to record for public consumption the way of life in these wild proto-states, the dialect of their people, and the unique humor of the rugged frontiersman. Widely read outside of New England (still under the thumb of the literary giants in Boston), the Spirit of the Times was a success due in large part to the anti-romantic, realistic writings of the southwest.
The authors who penned these tales were not professional "men of letters" (like New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau) but doctors and lawyers deeply engaged in the lives of the communities about which they wrote. Men like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Kittrell J. Warren, and George Washington Harris lived and worked, for the most part, in the communities that appear in their stories, and the narrators they created were similar to themselves. Intimate outsiders, the authors and their narrators were too educated to truly fit into the worlds they wrote about, but ideally situated to describe them.
Reading what they describe is always a curious experience and occasionally rather hard to take since much of what must have been considered humorous in the 19th century is rather appalling now. The description of the casual abuse of slaves and animals and the brutal violence of everyday relationships would scarcely be tolerated in today's strangely moral publishing world, unless their depiction was accompanied by a multitude of disclaimers and a healthy moral at the close. But these authors give it to us raw; while evil is often punished and good rewarded, it seems more accidental than anything else. Universal justice is by no means to be relied upon. As Richard Boyd Hauck argues in A Cheerful Nihilism (1971) readers will find in the protagonists of this literary tradition a nihilism that renders them incapable of making meaning in an absurd world. Though they are often adept at pulling a confidence trick, these protagonists lack the ability to create and maintain confidence, both in themselves and in the world around them.
Southwestern Humor was in its heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, 1830-1861 when William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times, a weekly New York sporting paper, was known for its humorous sketches. The authors of these sketches often hailed from the southwestern frontier territories, from Georgia and Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri. Their gentlemen narrators sought to record for public consumption the way of life in these wild proto-states, the dialect of their people, and the unique humor of the rugged frontiersman. Widely read outside of New England (still under the thumb of the literary giants in Boston), the Spirit of the Times was a success due in large part to the anti-romantic, realistic writings of the southwest.
The authors who penned these tales were not professional "men of letters" (like New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau) but doctors and lawyers deeply engaged in the lives of the communities about which they wrote. Men like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, Kittrell J. Warren, and George Washington Harris lived and worked, for the most part, in the communities that appear in their stories, and the narrators they created were similar to themselves. Intimate outsiders, the authors and their narrators were too educated to truly fit into the worlds they wrote about, but ideally situated to describe them.
Reading what they describe is always a curious experience and occasionally rather hard to take since much of what must have been considered humorous in the 19th century is rather appalling now. The description of the casual abuse of slaves and animals and the brutal violence of everyday relationships would scarcely be tolerated in today's strangely moral publishing world, unless their depiction was accompanied by a multitude of disclaimers and a healthy moral at the close. But these authors give it to us raw; while evil is often punished and good rewarded, it seems more accidental than anything else. Universal justice is by no means to be relied upon. As Richard Boyd Hauck argues in A Cheerful Nihilism (1971) readers will find in the protagonists of this literary tradition a nihilism that renders them incapable of making meaning in an absurd world. Though they are often adept at pulling a confidence trick, these protagonists lack the ability to create and maintain confidence, both in themselves and in the world around them.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
William Dean Howells' The Leatherwood God
Set in the Ohio country, far from the city card-sharps and street swindlers, William Dean Howells' 1916 The Leatherwood God takes up the problem of a different kind of con man, the "false prophet." Published in the wake of what's sometimes called the Third Great Awakening and set in the middle of the Second, it's not surprising that The Leatherwood God is all about the dangers of religious revivals. The Third Great Awakening, characterized by its postmillenial emphasis on reform, gave us Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Salvation Army, and the Oneida Perfectionists (believe it or not, the silverware company got its start as a religious commune practicing communal marriage). All this came in addition to the religions formed or reformed by the Second Great Awakening (1800-1830ish): the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Church of Christ, and the Millerites. The popularity of such religious movements cannot have gone unnoticed by any curious observer with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
So Howells' novel places us right at the nexus of nineteenth-century religious excitement and anxiety. The possibility of the second coming of Christ, the reformation of the earth, and the perfection of mankind stood balanced against the risk posed by charismatic but many times itinerant preachers whose characters and interests were often unverifiable and sometimes directly counter to those of the communities in which they worked. The Leatherwood God takes up the true story of a preacher of precisely this kind, Joseph C. Dylks, who appeared in the small community of Salesville, Ohio in 1828.
Howells' Dylks is certainly modeled on the original (right down to his reported tendency to snort like a horse), but he is presented with a degree of sympathy that is a bit surprising in a text on this subject. Howells' novel doesn't just give us the appearance and rise of Dylks, the so-called Leatherwood God; it grants him an interiority not often given to con men in literature. As I have said before, the con man is a master of surfaces; we seldom see his depths. But with Dylks, we hear a lot about a con man's desire to believe in God and in himself, about his cowardice and nagging self-doubt, about the significant physical abuse he suffers at the hands of "unbelievers" after he fails to produce a promised miracle, and about his possibly suicidal plunge into a river while leading his followers to God's city (soon to be realized somewhere in the neighborhood of Philadelphia). Instead of the grin of the successful con man, we have the constant fear and desperation of the chronic liar.
Dylks is an object for pity, yes, but he is also a danger, and Howells does not consider his career as a false prophet a harmless one. We are given to understand that Dylks' "Little Flock" of followers survives him and continues in faith despite his ignominious death, a reflection of the enduring commitment of the followers of the real Dylks. The power wielded by such false prophets is enormous and highly problematic in a nation reliant upon a protestant ethics of hard work. The wry and atheistic Squire Braile describes the appeal of the Leatherwood God, and in doing so maps out the vulnerability of the American religious consciousness: "You see ... life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the longing to know whether we'll live again, and the hope that we'll live happy ... we want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in him, and he'll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that's all." Like the quack selling cure-alls or the swindler with the get-rich-quick scheme, the false prophet promises an enormous reward in return for a mere show of confidence. It is a pity he cannot deliver.
So Howells' novel places us right at the nexus of nineteenth-century religious excitement and anxiety. The possibility of the second coming of Christ, the reformation of the earth, and the perfection of mankind stood balanced against the risk posed by charismatic but many times itinerant preachers whose characters and interests were often unverifiable and sometimes directly counter to those of the communities in which they worked. The Leatherwood God takes up the true story of a preacher of precisely this kind, Joseph C. Dylks, who appeared in the small community of Salesville, Ohio in 1828.
Howells' Dylks is certainly modeled on the original (right down to his reported tendency to snort like a horse), but he is presented with a degree of sympathy that is a bit surprising in a text on this subject. Howells' novel doesn't just give us the appearance and rise of Dylks, the so-called Leatherwood God; it grants him an interiority not often given to con men in literature. As I have said before, the con man is a master of surfaces; we seldom see his depths. But with Dylks, we hear a lot about a con man's desire to believe in God and in himself, about his cowardice and nagging self-doubt, about the significant physical abuse he suffers at the hands of "unbelievers" after he fails to produce a promised miracle, and about his possibly suicidal plunge into a river while leading his followers to God's city (soon to be realized somewhere in the neighborhood of Philadelphia). Instead of the grin of the successful con man, we have the constant fear and desperation of the chronic liar.
Dylks is an object for pity, yes, but he is also a danger, and Howells does not consider his career as a false prophet a harmless one. We are given to understand that Dylks' "Little Flock" of followers survives him and continues in faith despite his ignominious death, a reflection of the enduring commitment of the followers of the real Dylks. The power wielded by such false prophets is enormous and highly problematic in a nation reliant upon a protestant ethics of hard work. The wry and atheistic Squire Braile describes the appeal of the Leatherwood God, and in doing so maps out the vulnerability of the American religious consciousness: "You see ... life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the longing to know whether we'll live again, and the hope that we'll live happy ... we want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in him, and he'll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that's all." Like the quack selling cure-alls or the swindler with the get-rich-quick scheme, the false prophet promises an enormous reward in return for a mere show of confidence. It is a pity he cannot deliver.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry
Modern Chivalry Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Reagan, His Servant is a rather odd book to have crept onto my list of con man texts, and I'm a bit at a loss as to what it's doing there. The lengthy work, published in four pieces between 1792 and 1819, is a sort of American take on Don Quixote, a kind of prose Hudribras for the new nation, complete with a vehement repudiation of Irish intelligence and the wisdom of the American electorate. The work is entirely episodic, following the adventures of Captain Farrago and his long-legged bog-trotter (servant, I gather) Teague O'Reagan (a common name for an Irish person, like Pat would be today).
Those adventures consist entirely of the Captain's valiant efforts in prevent Teague's social elevation. Everywhere the two travel, someone tries to elect the illiterate, lazy, drunk, and profligate Teague to public office, and each time the Captain must rescue the poor lovable fellow from elevation to a position he does not genuinely desire and cannot fulfill. For indeed, the Captain always knows best. When at last Teague is appointed as a tax collector, he is so unsuited to the position that he finds himself tarred, feathered, and set up as a man-bird curiosity for the scientific community. This is, of course, really what Teague has been all along, a sort of racist curiosity for the amusement of Brackenridge's readers, few of whom, I imagine, were Irish.
Of course, it's not just Teague who is being critiqued here, but the American people, who are so bent on the elevation of the lowly that they will elect only the most boorish of men to public office. These people share Benjamin Franklin's rosy view of the capacities of the working class, trusting that Teague's lack of book learning is an asset rather than a deficiency. Brackenridge, of course, disagrees; though he was staunchly democratic, Brackenridge recognized the problems inherent in a system that gives so much power to the people, who are, more often than not, selfish and ignorant even when they are also well-meaning.
Viewing this text in terms of the con, the only real connection comes circuitously by way of the picaresque. Teague is something of a picaro, a roving character falling in and out of trouble as often as you turn the page, and that is something that he shares with the con man, though he is a bit too stupid to qualify otherwise. (Of course, he's a bit stupid for a picaro as well. Tom Jones he is not.) The episodic nature of the work is also typical of con man texts, and the lovable amorality of Teague might have served as the starting point for one in a different life.
As a work on the con man, Modern Chivalry is certainly lacking, but as a critique of turn-of-the-century American values, it is genuinely entertaining, if, as I mentioned before, just a wee bit racist.
Those adventures consist entirely of the Captain's valiant efforts in prevent Teague's social elevation. Everywhere the two travel, someone tries to elect the illiterate, lazy, drunk, and profligate Teague to public office, and each time the Captain must rescue the poor lovable fellow from elevation to a position he does not genuinely desire and cannot fulfill. For indeed, the Captain always knows best. When at last Teague is appointed as a tax collector, he is so unsuited to the position that he finds himself tarred, feathered, and set up as a man-bird curiosity for the scientific community. This is, of course, really what Teague has been all along, a sort of racist curiosity for the amusement of Brackenridge's readers, few of whom, I imagine, were Irish.
Of course, it's not just Teague who is being critiqued here, but the American people, who are so bent on the elevation of the lowly that they will elect only the most boorish of men to public office. These people share Benjamin Franklin's rosy view of the capacities of the working class, trusting that Teague's lack of book learning is an asset rather than a deficiency. Brackenridge, of course, disagrees; though he was staunchly democratic, Brackenridge recognized the problems inherent in a system that gives so much power to the people, who are, more often than not, selfish and ignorant even when they are also well-meaning.
Viewing this text in terms of the con, the only real connection comes circuitously by way of the picaresque. Teague is something of a picaro, a roving character falling in and out of trouble as often as you turn the page, and that is something that he shares with the con man, though he is a bit too stupid to qualify otherwise. (Of course, he's a bit stupid for a picaro as well. Tom Jones he is not.) The episodic nature of the work is also typical of con man texts, and the lovable amorality of Teague might have served as the starting point for one in a different life.
As a work on the con man, Modern Chivalry is certainly lacking, but as a critique of turn-of-the-century American values, it is genuinely entertaining, if, as I mentioned before, just a wee bit racist.
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
Ragged Dick, and indeed all of Alger's rags-to-respectability works, would not have been possible without the help of Benjamin Franklin, or rather, without the help of his famous Autobiography. Now, I have to confess right off the bat to being rather disappointed in the Franklin's attempt at life writing. The introduction warned that it was choppy (having been written over the course of a couple decades, 1771-1790), incomplete (only covering Franklin's life up to 1759), and uneven (written first as a personal work for his son, then slowly morphing into a document for publication), but I confess I was still unprepared for the cobbled-together feeling of the thing. Still, it is a terribly important work, and therefore worth reading, and I'm sure some of his other writings are more enjoyable.
But why you ask is it important to Ragged Dick, and indeed to all of Alger's rag-tag bunch of orphans and drunkard's sons? Because of Franklin's careful construction of the self-improving self, the boot-strapping American achiever. What Franklin gives us in the Autobiography is a portrait of the quintessential American: practical, inventive, ambitious, successful, hard-working. It does not matter where you come from, Franklin tells us; all that matters is what you do.
And what you do makes you who you are. Franklin's course of self-improvement involves scheduling your time into bracketed periods for particular tasks (for instance: 5-8 am "Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day's business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast.") and developing 13 identified moral virtues one at a time all the while charting your progress on a grid. In this way a man may become organized, successful, and virtuous. I'm telling you, Stephen Covey has nothing on Benjamin Franklin.
But what does all of this have to do with the con man? The confidence man is the counter-narrative here; he is what happens when otherwise gifted individuals ignore the exhortations of their parents, their mentors, their community, and their nation and instead choose the easy way to wealth. And yet the narrative of the con man is also Franklin's, for what is the Autobiography but a skilled self-presentation, a symphony on surfaces. When Franklin finds Humility a particularly sticky virtue to acquire he celebrates that he has at least attained the appearance of it.
And can't one pursue a life of crime in much the same way that one pursues a life of virtue? Franklin's plan of personal development inspired boys' advice books by the hundreds as well as Alger's works, but it's also clear that he also inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the young Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald is clearly taking a swipe at Franklin's course in the virtues when he has his hero follow a similar plan, with results that are more bootleg than bootstrap. Here we see the con man and Franklin's ideal American collide, blurring all the lines in between and touching on that theme familiar to readers of con man literature: the statesman and the con man have everything in common.
But why you ask is it important to Ragged Dick, and indeed to all of Alger's rag-tag bunch of orphans and drunkard's sons? Because of Franklin's careful construction of the self-improving self, the boot-strapping American achiever. What Franklin gives us in the Autobiography is a portrait of the quintessential American: practical, inventive, ambitious, successful, hard-working. It does not matter where you come from, Franklin tells us; all that matters is what you do.
And what you do makes you who you are. Franklin's course of self-improvement involves scheduling your time into bracketed periods for particular tasks (for instance: 5-8 am "Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness! Contrive day's business, and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study, and breakfast.") and developing 13 identified moral virtues one at a time all the while charting your progress on a grid. In this way a man may become organized, successful, and virtuous. I'm telling you, Stephen Covey has nothing on Benjamin Franklin.
But what does all of this have to do with the con man? The confidence man is the counter-narrative here; he is what happens when otherwise gifted individuals ignore the exhortations of their parents, their mentors, their community, and their nation and instead choose the easy way to wealth. And yet the narrative of the con man is also Franklin's, for what is the Autobiography but a skilled self-presentation, a symphony on surfaces. When Franklin finds Humility a particularly sticky virtue to acquire he celebrates that he has at least attained the appearance of it.
And can't one pursue a life of crime in much the same way that one pursues a life of virtue? Franklin's plan of personal development inspired boys' advice books by the hundreds as well as Alger's works, but it's also clear that he also inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the young Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald is clearly taking a swipe at Franklin's course in the virtues when he has his hero follow a similar plan, with results that are more bootleg than bootstrap. Here we see the con man and Franklin's ideal American collide, blurring all the lines in between and touching on that theme familiar to readers of con man literature: the statesman and the con man have everything in common.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick
{ Long absences equal lots of reading. }
Today marked my first encounter with the great Horatio Alger, Jr., through the kind offices of one Ragged Dick. Despite Alger's rather considerable body of work I had somehow managed to miss him in my studies, a feat somewhat like dodging an elephant. After all, over the course of his decades-long writing career, Alger published an impressive 110 books, most aimed at improving the moral character of young boys. The fact that the vast majority of these were really basically the same book just with different names or that they were written by a man whose own moral character was somewhat marred by accusations (probably justified) of some early episodes of pedophilia, shouldn't diminish our view of his accomplishment too much. After all, I have yet to get even one book published, and I don't have the excuse of being distracted by the altar boys.
Published in 1868, Ragged Dick was Alger's first real success; it can be (and often is, since most of us can't be bothered to read the whole of his work) taken as a fair representation of the rags to riches model on which Alger built most of his novels: young boy, poor but honest, bootstraps his way to respectability with the help of benevolent strangers and a little good luck. This was precisely what the secondary literature had led me to expect; what I hadn't expected was Alger's considerable skill as a writer. Ragged Dick is FUN. The dialogue is brisk and lively; the characters have some genuine charm. And the story itself is sweet. I get the impression that scholars are supposed to be unmoved by the sort of gentle sentimentalism Alger employs, but I have to confess that I kind of like it.
I was delighted to find that not only is Ragged Dick an enjoyable read, it also provides a couple great con-man moments to add to the pot. Dick encounters a real live con artist on the streets Manhattan performing what Alger calls the "drop game," a famous swindle in which a con man pretends to find a wallet thick with bills lying in the street. Appealing to his mark, the con man desires that he would find the owner and return the wallet; the con man would do it himself only he must this instant board a train/boat/plane and cannot wait. Of course, a considerable reward should be expected for the return of such a valuable wallet, but the con man can find no bills in the wallet sufficiently small to pay himself the portion of the reward he can rightfully expect. Perhaps the mark could give him that amount from his own pocket, since he is sure of recovering the full reward from the original owner? Money in hand, the con man makes good his escape; it is only upon closer examination that the mark discovers the wallet is a dummy, packed with worthless paper. This con is such a classic Poe mentions it as one of the representative diddles in his essay on the subject. Dick is, of course, far too street wise to fall for such an old trick.
But a tearful country bumpkin is not so lucky in another episode. In the confidence trick played here, the mark, preferably an out-of-towner, is convinced to exchange his cash for a check of greater value on a dummy bank. The con man plays on the mark's ignorance of local banks, his greed, and often on his charity, since the mark can be told that the switch is necessary because the cash is desperately needed and the banks are not yet open. Once again Dick's street savvy defeats the con. Recognizing the con man from the bumpkin's description, Dick convinces him to hand over the money by pretending to have inside information regarding police movements.
For Alger, the con man is not quite the harmless figure of fun that he plays in some of the other literature; nor is he a terribly brilliant character, being outwitted on two accounts by a 14 year old bootblack. Rather, he represents the dangerous alternate course for poor but somewhat clever boys, one which Alger wishes to discourage them from taking. Alger emphasizes patience and hard work as the keys to respectability, even Dick's work as a bootblack is preferable to a life of scheming and swindling. It is Dick's strict honesty that prevents him from becoming a confidence man, and it is that same quality that Alger's reader's were to emulate.
Today marked my first encounter with the great Horatio Alger, Jr., through the kind offices of one Ragged Dick. Despite Alger's rather considerable body of work I had somehow managed to miss him in my studies, a feat somewhat like dodging an elephant. After all, over the course of his decades-long writing career, Alger published an impressive 110 books, most aimed at improving the moral character of young boys. The fact that the vast majority of these were really basically the same book just with different names or that they were written by a man whose own moral character was somewhat marred by accusations (probably justified) of some early episodes of pedophilia, shouldn't diminish our view of his accomplishment too much. After all, I have yet to get even one book published, and I don't have the excuse of being distracted by the altar boys.
Published in 1868, Ragged Dick was Alger's first real success; it can be (and often is, since most of us can't be bothered to read the whole of his work) taken as a fair representation of the rags to riches model on which Alger built most of his novels: young boy, poor but honest, bootstraps his way to respectability with the help of benevolent strangers and a little good luck. This was precisely what the secondary literature had led me to expect; what I hadn't expected was Alger's considerable skill as a writer. Ragged Dick is FUN. The dialogue is brisk and lively; the characters have some genuine charm. And the story itself is sweet. I get the impression that scholars are supposed to be unmoved by the sort of gentle sentimentalism Alger employs, but I have to confess that I kind of like it.
I was delighted to find that not only is Ragged Dick an enjoyable read, it also provides a couple great con-man moments to add to the pot. Dick encounters a real live con artist on the streets Manhattan performing what Alger calls the "drop game," a famous swindle in which a con man pretends to find a wallet thick with bills lying in the street. Appealing to his mark, the con man desires that he would find the owner and return the wallet; the con man would do it himself only he must this instant board a train/boat/plane and cannot wait. Of course, a considerable reward should be expected for the return of such a valuable wallet, but the con man can find no bills in the wallet sufficiently small to pay himself the portion of the reward he can rightfully expect. Perhaps the mark could give him that amount from his own pocket, since he is sure of recovering the full reward from the original owner? Money in hand, the con man makes good his escape; it is only upon closer examination that the mark discovers the wallet is a dummy, packed with worthless paper. This con is such a classic Poe mentions it as one of the representative diddles in his essay on the subject. Dick is, of course, far too street wise to fall for such an old trick.
But a tearful country bumpkin is not so lucky in another episode. In the confidence trick played here, the mark, preferably an out-of-towner, is convinced to exchange his cash for a check of greater value on a dummy bank. The con man plays on the mark's ignorance of local banks, his greed, and often on his charity, since the mark can be told that the switch is necessary because the cash is desperately needed and the banks are not yet open. Once again Dick's street savvy defeats the con. Recognizing the con man from the bumpkin's description, Dick convinces him to hand over the money by pretending to have inside information regarding police movements.
For Alger, the con man is not quite the harmless figure of fun that he plays in some of the other literature; nor is he a terribly brilliant character, being outwitted on two accounts by a 14 year old bootblack. Rather, he represents the dangerous alternate course for poor but somewhat clever boys, one which Alger wishes to discourage them from taking. Alger emphasizes patience and hard work as the keys to respectability, even Dick's work as a bootblack is preferable to a life of scheming and swindling. It is Dick's strict honesty that prevents him from becoming a confidence man, and it is that same quality that Alger's reader's were to emulate.
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