Ragged Dick, Alger's first novel, was his most popular. It is about a fourteen-year-old homeless boy trying to make a living on the streets of 1860s New York. Alan Trachtenberg points out that Horatio Alger Jr. had tremendous sympathy for boys and discovered a calling for himself in the composition of boys and books. "He learned to consult the boy in himself", Trachtenberg writes, "to transmute and recast himself-his genteel culture, his liberal patrician sympathy for underdogs, his shaky economic status as an author, and not least, his dangerous erotic attraction to boys-into his juvenile fiction." He observes that it is impossible to know whether Alger lived the life of a secret homosexual, "[b]ut there are hints that the male companionship he describes as a refuge from the streets-the cozy domestic arrangements between Dick and Fosdick, for example-may also be an erotic relationship." Trachtenberg observes that nothing prurient occurs in Ragged Dick but believes the few instances in Alger's work of two boys touching or a man and a boy touching might arouse erotic wishes in readers prepared to entertain such fantasies." Such images, Trachtenberg believes, may imply "a positive view of homoeroticism as an alternative way of life, of living by sympathy rather than aggression." Trachtenberg concludes, "in Ragged Dick we see Alger plotting domestic romance, complete with a surrogate marriage of two homeless boys, as the setting for his formulaic metamorphosis of an outcast street boy into a self-respecting citizen." .......... Watersgreen House is an independent international book publisher with editorial staff in the UK and USA. One of our aims at Watersgreen House is to showcase same-sex affection in works by important gay and bisexual authors in ways which were not possible at the time the books were originally published. watersgreen.wixsite.com/watersgreenhouse
