Tom Butler-Bowdon - 50 Success Classics: Winning Wisdom for Work & Life From 50 Landmark Books

Tamara Lucas, for your vital feedback and inspiration, as always.

Noah & Beatrice Lucas, for your valuable encouragement, and Howard and Maurice Taylor, for the computer.

Marion Butler-Bowdon, for being such a great model of success.

Nicholas Brealey, for your commitment to the 50 Classics titles and for the insights that have made this a better book.

Terri Welch, for your enthusiastic and effective marketing efforts in the US.

Sally Lansdell, for editing the book into shape with many useful suggestions.

Victoria Bullock, for your intelligent promotion of the book in the UK.

Zo Munro, for assisting in the success of this and the previous book.

Ken Leeder, for cover design work that properly expresses the content.

But Dick was too sensible not to know that there was something more
than money needed to win a respectable position in the world. He felt
that he was very ignorant. Of reading and writing he knew only the
rudiments, and that, with a slight acquaintance with arithmetic, was all
he did know of books. Dick knew he must study hard, and he dreaded
it. He looked upon learning as attended with greater difficulties than it
really possesses. But Dick had good pluck. He meant to learn,
nevertheless, and resolved to buy a book with his first spare earnings.

I hope, my lad, Mr Whitney said, you will prosper and rise in the
world. You know in this free country poverty is no bar to a mans
advancement.

In a nutshell

Whatever you do, you will be more successful if you do it with
honesty, fairness, and to the best of your ability.

In a similar vein

Andrew Carnegie The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (p. 56)
Russell H. Conwell Acres of Diamonds (p. 86)
Benjamin Franklin The Way to Wealth (p. 108)
Orison Swett Marden Pushing to the Front (p. 204)
Samuel Smiles Self-Help (50SHC)

The New York City of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place for many of its inhabitants. Areas such as Five Points (the setting for the movie Gangs of New York) were dangerous and filthy, filled with abandoned or neglected children. Many slept outside at night, and most wore badly fitting, ragged clothes. During the day they hawked matches, sold newspapers, shined shoes, or picked pockets in order to get money to eat. The authorities did little to alleviate the situation, and in one celebrated incident a street urchin found naked was represented in a court case by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Horatio Alger, the chronicler of this world to a public who may have preferred not to know that it existed, was not himself a New Yorker, having been brought up in middle-class comfort in Massachusetts with a private school education followed by Harvard (see Rychard Finks Introduction to the 1962 edition).

Though he had had some writing published, Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks was his first bestseller, setting the template for scores of poor-boy-makes-good novels that had a massive influence on young Americans (Groucho Marx and Ernest Hemingway were among those said to have devoured Algers work). Here we will look at the outline of the story and Algers significant place in the success literature.

At a time when Central Park was still a rough tract of land lined with workers huts, there was a bootblack known as Ragged Dick. With his mother dead and his father gone to sea, Dick spends his days shining boots for businessmen, his evenings (if he has some spare coins) watching cheap plays at the Old Bowery theater, and his nights in doorways wrapped up in newspapers. If hes flush he will stay at the Newsboys Lodging House for 6 cents a night and buy a meal at a caf.

After an unexpected windfall, Dick rents a squalid room that to him seems impossibly luxurious. In return for tutelage, he lets another boy, the once well-cared-for and well-read Henry Fosdick, share his room. This two-person self-improvement society is perfect for both. Dick gets an edoocation and Fosdick a place out of the cold. Though they must live through a series of adventures, the boys find a way to succeed.

The tale is a page-turner, and the reader delights in Dicks joy at such simple things as a new suit of clothes, opening a bank account, and eating a piece of steak. As Alger makes clear, Dick, who by the end of the short book has become Dick Hunter Esq., is very likeable. He has pluck and wit to balance his earnest strivings to be spectable and, despite first-hand experience of the best rogues and swindlers the city has to offer, is a perennial optimist.

Following are some of Horatio Algers lessons of success as learned by the young Dick.

Dicks big break comes on a ferry crossing into Brooklyn. He sees a child fall over the side into the water and wastes no time before jumping in, somehow managing to pull the child to safety. The panicked father, who could not swim, is amazed to have his child alive and promises Dick any reward. Later, the man offers Dick a job in a counting house at $10 a week, many times his current earnings. A great stroke of luck? Not really, for Dicks selflessness was the cause of this good fortune, and his diligence in self-education every night meant that he could be hired without the slightest whiff of charity.

Luck happens to those who greatly increase the chances of its occurrence.

Life seems to require that, even if we dont like what we are doing, we must do it to the best of our ability before we can move on to the next thing. Ragged Dick is only a bootblack, but he uses his profession to save money, meet a higher class of people, and generally better himself.

Dick meets the son of a wealthy man and shows him around the city for a day. Later, the boys father tells Dick that in this country poverty is no bar to achievement and relates his own rise from apprentice printer to successful businessman. He notes that there was one thing he took away from the printing office which I value more than money. When Dick asks what this was, the man replies:

A taste for reading and study. During my leisure hours I improved myself by study, and acquired a large part of the knowledge which I now possess. Indeed, it was one of my books that first put me on the track of the invention, which I afterwards made. So you see, my lad, that my studious habits paid me in money, as well as in another way.

When Dick receives an unexpected sum of $5, he opens a bank account. The amount that builds gives him a great source of security and pride, as he no longer has to live hand-to-mouth. While delighted that he is now a capitalist, he is quick to help a friend in need. Fosdick, the boy with whom he shares his lodgings, wants to get an office job instead of shining shoes, so Dick purchases a suit of proper clothes for him. On another occasion he helps out a buddy whose mother is ill.