The Young Circus Rider, Or, the Mystery of Robert Rudd

by Horatio Alger Jr.

First published in 1883 by Porter & Coates, Philadelphia.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1883

About the author

Horatio Alger, Jr. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, most famous for his novels following the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels about boys who succeed under the tutelage of older mentors were hugely popular in their day.

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, Alger entered Harvard University at the age of sixteen. Following graduation, he briefly worked in education before touring Europe for almost a year. He then entered the Harvard Divinity School, and, in 1864, took a position at a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts. Two years later, he resigned following allegations he had sexual relations with two teenage boys.[1] He retired from the ministry and moved to New York City where he formed an association with the Newsboys Lodging House and other agencies offering aid to impoverished children. His sympathy for the working boys of the city, coupled with the moral values learned at home, were the basis of his many juvenile rags to riches novels illustrating how down-and-out boys might be able to achieve the American Dream of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination, and concern for others. This widely held view involves Alger's characters achieving extreme wealth and the subsequent remediation of their "old ghosts." Alger is noted as a significant figure in the history of American cultural and social ideals. He died in 1899.

The first full-length Alger biography was commissioned in 1927 and published in 1928, and along with many others that borrowed from it later proved to be heavily fictionalized parodies perpetuating hoaxes and made up anecdotes that "would resemble the tell-all scandal biographies of the time."[2] Other biographies followed, sometimes citing the 1928 hoax as fact. In the last decades of the twentieth century a few more reliable biographies were published that attempt to correct the errors and fictionalizations of the past.

Reviews

[Johanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun adventure, slightly different from the usual Horatio Alger genre.

[Hal Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the pleasures of an Alger book is the way its fetishistic attention to detail casts light on the minutiae of nineteenth-century life. The reader of The Cash Boy, for example, will learn how transactions were conducted in a department store in the days before cash registers and price tags -- not something I had ever even known I didn't know before.

Unfortunately, Alger knows nothing about, and cares nothing about the circus. Whereas the sleeping quarters of various homeless bootblacks have in other, similar books been painted in detail, Robert Rudd's circus life, let alone his amazing routine, remain indistinct and unspecified. When Rudd starts juggling, which appears to primarily mean that he performed magic tricks, Alger can only say: "It is unnecessary to enumerate his tricks, or to describe the interest which the young company manifested." Compare this lack of specificity with the detail Alger lavishes on a circus-free scene:

Robert Rudd had been in New York more than once, and be therefore had no difficulty in finding out the fine hotel on Broadway known as the St. Nicholas.

He entered it, and, walking up to the desk, inquired, "Is Mr. John Fitzgerald staying here?"

"Yes," answered the clerk. "Do you wish to see him ?"

"If you please."

"Then write your name on a card and I will send it up."

Robert did so.

"See if No. 135 is in," said the clerk, calling a hall boy, and handing him the card.

In five minutes the hall boy came back, saying : "Mr. Fitzgerald wants the young gentleman to
come up."

Robert followed him to a room on the third floor and knocked at the door.

This agonizing slowness is worse than usual ("Robert did so" gets its own paragraph???) but much more characteristic of Alger. Had that level of detail crept into the circus tent, the book would have been much more interesting.

Also, Rudd's inheritance plot, complete with multiple layers of implausible coincidence and unearned escapes, is unforgivably creaky even for Alger.