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Children's Literature 33 (2005) 20-40



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Endless Frontiers and Emancipation from History:

Horatio Alger's Reconstruction of Place and Time in Ragged Dick

[The capitalist] is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake. . . . Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external forces and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.
—Karl Marx, Capital 1:739

Conventional wisdom suggests that capitalism operates at its optimal level when people invest in the never-arriving future. In fact, many of Marx's own reservations about such an economic system are based on this particular issue of time. In the epigraph, for example, he registers an appropriate disconnect between "extending" capital and "preserving" it (739). Capitalism, he argues, attempts to resolve this tension by implying that any enjoyment of the present is inextricably linked to the prospect of future accumulation. Whenever individuals are negatively affected by economic slumps, they may sense the paradox of time that Marx's passage mentions. Theoretically, the stock market is healthiest when investors continue to speculate and invest instead of withdrawing their stocks at the present value. If the market is ailing, we are told, it is because of low consumer confidence. When people take their money out of the market, they do so fearing the stock prices will only go down further; the less confident investors are in future recovery, the more the economy suffers.

It was during the postbellum era that America truly began to understand the intricacies and contradictions of capitalist progression. Having emerged from a civil war that cost over 600,000 American lives, the country—the South included—cast its lot with industry. While families [End Page 20] such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies amassed wealth at unprecedented rates, people began to wonder what kind of rough beast capitalism really was. Uncertainty about the economic order only became more pronounced when the later decades of the nineteenth century experienced a series of financial panics of significant size. As the depressions of 1873–79, 1882–85, and 1893–97 would attest, America's economic progression was riddled with tremendous doubt.

Yet certainly not everyone in the latter half of the nineteenth century was as skeptical about capitalism's movement into the future. Serialized in 1867—the same year Marx's Capital was published—Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick paints a more affirmative picture. In depicting Dick Hunter's rise to respectability and economic self-sufficiency, the best-selling novel for adolescent boys becomes a larger meditation on the conflict between the present and the future. Should Dick live only for the present moment and fritter away any money he has on simple amusements, he would forfeit his aspirations of capital accumulation and bourgeois respectability. Yet because of his hard work, good luck, and amiable personality, that threat is never seriously entertained. Therefore the seamy side of capitalism—the frequent insurmountability of present hardship—is never given full voice. Instead, the novel operates as an ideological device, denying the reader a view of what might happen should capitalism not live up to its full potential.

The intent of this study is to examine Alger's treatment of time, and how time in turn affects concepts of space. Appearing almost ex nihilo on the streets of New York, Dick Hunter is the quintessential postbellum "American Adam," a term R. W. B. Lewis made famous in his 1955 book of that name. Furthermore, Ragged Dick makes capitalism coterminous with Lewis's mythical American: existing almost ahistorically, the two move forward into a future that seemingly has no end. Alger then creates a spatial corollary to the novel's temporal boundlessness. As Marxist critic David...

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