Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [777]
Moody’s meetings were themselves fabulous middle-class entertainments. Immense crowds, often ten thousand or more, jammed and overflowed his arenas, aided by the streetcar companies, which built special tracks to their doors. The hymnbook and photograph vendors, the common singing, the mixing with pious strangers: these afforded a social outlet sorely needed by those required to abjure wicked commercial pleasures.
Such guilt-free get-togethers were particularly attractive to recently arrived, country-bred, evangelically oriented young men who had perhaps secured an office job but whose status and social networks still seemed fragile and insecure. One such newcomer was Horatio Alger, a recently secularized man of the cloth. Born in 1832 in Revere, Massachusetts, Alger went to Harvard, tried unsuccessfully to make a living as a professional writer for the Boston weeklies, then finally, and somewhat reluctantly, entered Cambridge Theological School to prepare himself for the ministry. Alger spent the war years preaching. On the side, he wrote patriotic verse and a juvenile novel, Frank’s Campaign, “to show how boys can be of most effectual service in assisting to put down the Rebellion.” In 1864 he settled down as a Unitarian pastor in Brewster, Massachusetts, but his ministry ended abruptly two years later, after an investigation by church authorities determined that the pastor had been engaging in “unnatural crimes” with young boys in the parish. Alger, admitting he had been “imprudent,” left town on the next train.
Moving to New York, Alger rented a room in a cheap hotel on St. Mark’s Place and set about making a career as a writer, though at first his articles and novels garnered good reviews but disappointing sales. In the meantime he had begun to study the habits of New York’s “street Arabs” and to aid the work of the Newsboys’ Lodging House. A project inaugurated by Charles Loring Brace’s Children’s Aid Society, it provided dormitory space at Fulton and Nassau where newsboys and bootblacks could lodge for a nickel a night. Alger’s experiences provided him with material that, once fictionalized, proved the making of him as a writer.
In 1867 the Boston editor of a children’s magazine, Student and Schoolmate, began bringing out monthly installments of Alger’s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York. Dick, the bootblack hero, is ragged indeed, but a youth of enterprise and ambition. By chance (and luck plays as much a part as pluck in Alger’s novels) Dick is hired by a wealthy merchant to guide his rural nephew, Frank, around the city. Dick initiates the country lad into the ways and wiles of the city. He takes Frank (and the reader) on an extensive tour of Manhattan, alerting Frank to urban perils: “A feller has to look sharp in this city, or he’ll lose his eye-teeth before he knows it.” At the same time, Frank introduces Dick to refined speech and dress and awakens his latent desire to rise in the world. Dick announces his intention to “try to grow up ’spectable.” To ready himself for a job “in an office or counting room,” he takes up lodgings, opens a savings account, and gets some new clothes. At this point, his past looms up in the person of Micky Maguire, an Irish Five Points tough, who accuses Dick of “putting on airs” and picks a fight. When Maguire (a boy of “impetuous” Irish nature) strikes out “wildly,” Dick (a model of “quiet strength and coolness”) fells the bully with “adroit” and “measured” blows. From here on Dick never