Ragged Dick in the Nineties: An Active Learning Student Project

Abstract

<p>Horatio Alger, Jr.'s Ragged Dick is the most popular text in my syllabus for English 356 "American Texts: 1860-1920." Ours is a metropolitan university with a large population of working-class and low-income, disabled and minority, first-generation college students.</p> <p>Alger's affable hero, his struggle toward "fame and fortune," and the detailed depiction of urban life has resonance for students for whom just getting to college has been a struggle, as well as piquancy: their life experience suggests that "moral capitalism" no longer operates, if indeed it ever did, but they know they must act as if it did if they are to have any chance at all of getting ahead.</p>