Ragged Dick and Mark the Match Boy Book

These are two young adult novels published in the late 1860s, and though they are as simple and as didactic as one might expect from novels of that era, there's nothing else like them for opening a window on the life of street children in nineteenth century New York.

In the first novel, Ragged Dick, the main character, takes a country friend on a tour down Broadway, passing by Barnum's American Museum, A.T. Stewart's Marble Palace Department Store, the Cooper Institute and other noteworthy sites, pointing out their features all along. As literature its dreck, but for a historian who wants to see what New York at the time felt like it can't be beat. The second book likewise takes the reader through the Children's Lodging House, the Bowery Theater, and the Fulton ferry, besides giving one a description of the life of bootblacks, match boys, apple girls, Bowery B'hoys and other assorted street creatures. It works as great reportage, if not always as stellar writing.

Actually, most of the writing isn't bad (unlike most pulp writers, Alger was a Harvard-boy after all), and the characters are all sympathetic and occasionally even funny, so if someone asked me what New York in this era felt like, this is the first place I'd send them.