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Horatio's hero is always a prince in disguise, playing the part of a fiddler, a bootblack, a hired boy, but with at tractive, cheerful and resolute features under the dirt. His mother, always a widow, is tormented by the village squire, who plays the joint role of Penelope's suitors. The hero meets a stranger and rescues his child from drowning (or from a mad dog or a runaway horse). The stranger turns out to be a rich merchant, who gives the boy new clothes, then sends him on a mission, a sort of knightly quest. On his triumphant return, the merchant adopts him as a son or ward, discomfits the wicked suitor and settles a little fortune on the hero. Moralists used to complain that this fortune was gained by pure luck. On the contrary, it was gained by the hero's discovery of the place and parentage that were his by right.
Punishing Papa. Alger, who was never freed from emotional bondage to his own father, found a sort of compensation in telling this one story over & over. In each of his novels he punished his father three times. He killed him before the story opened by making the hero an orphan; he gave Horatio Sr.'s worst traits to the villainous squire; and finally he provided the hero with a new father to cherish him.
Struggling Upward, which gives its name to the present volume, is the absolute dead mean and average of all the Alger books. It contains his stock characters, settings and incidents, leading to his stock conclusion. "You need be under no anxiety about Luke and his prospects," says the rich merchant to the hero's widowed mother. "I shall make over to him $10,000 at once, constituting myself his guardian, and will see that he is well started in business."
Ragged Dick, the second of the four novels now reprinted, was the first of Alger's books (1868) to reach a wide public. It is a moral but lively story dealing with the rise to respectability of a homeless bootblack.
Phil, the Fiddler is a memorial to a successful crusade that Alger led against the padrone system, by which hundreds of little street musicians, brought to Manhattan from Italy, were kept as virtual slaves. The story deals with one boy who escaped and was adopted by a rich doctor.
Jed, the Poorhouse Boy also was written with a purpose—to help the paupers —and its early chapters bear a secondhand resemblance to Oliver Twist.