Mark the Match Boy (Annotated)

Mark the Match Boy; or, Richard Hunter's Ward belongs to Horatio Alger's "Ragged Dick" cycle, extending its moral geography of postbellum New York. The novel follows a poor street vendor whose precarious life selling matches becomes the occasion for lessons in honesty, perseverance, literacy, and social mobility. Alger's prose is plain, episodic, and didactic, yet enlivened by brisk dialogue, city...