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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
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From the publication of Ragged Dick in 1867 through to the 1930s, Horatio Alger's tales of young boys overcoming adversity were part of the mainstream of American culture. The phrase "a Horatio Alger story" remains synonymous with the American ideal of struggling against adversity and finally achieving success, financial and otherwise—but especially financial. As Michael Moore says in Dude, Where's My Country?, "Alger was one of the most popular American writers of the late 1800s...Alger's stories featured characters from impoverished backgrounds who, through pluck and determination and hard work, were able to make huge successes of themselves in this land of boundless opportunity. The message was that 'anyone can make it in America, and make it big.'" Ironically, however, it is typically chance and good luck that is most instrumental in bringing success to the typical Horatio Alger hero, hardworking and deserving though he may be. And often the ideal of egalitarianism features just as prominently as that of rugged individualism. In all these respects, The Erie Train Boy (1890) is typical of the genre. For a number of reasons, however, it is among the most interesting of Alger's many novels. Fred Fenton is the Erie train boy, a young lad selling sundries on the trains traveling north from New York and through this work supporting his mother and siblings as the family struggles to survive in a New York tenement house. The story eventually unfolds in a more or less mechanical fashion, but along the way we are shown a world of confidence men and pickpockets, of cheap boarding houses and railway hotels, and of a good deal of the grit of life in late nineteenth-century America. We are given sensation—from Fenton rescuing a young woman whose dress has caught fire from the footlights in the midst of a performance, to a saga of stolen bonds secreted near a Quebec village, to an episode of thievery at Niagara Falls, and finally to a scheming uncle and a parcel of land in Colorado. We are given as well a great deal of detail about the social and economic life of the times; Alger pays attention to wages and prices perhaps more than any other writer of the period. All in all, The Erie Train Boy is among the most far-reaching and most interesting of Horatio Alger novels. The different editions of Alger's novels reflected as much as they shaped American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later editions of the novels were often shortened. This made them more of a "quick read," but in many cases the material selected for excision was ideologically charged; descriptions explicitly or implicitly critical of the privileged classes were disproportionately likely to be cut. In this respect, too, The Erie Train Boy is an interesting example of the genre; later editions cut a considerable amount of material from the original. In addition to providing the text itself, this Broadview reissue endeavors to make something of its cultural history available for readers. The copy text is that of the early edition published by M.A. Donahue & Company, collated against the A.L Burt Company edition from the 1890s; both of these include the complete Alger text. The text has also been collated, however, against the edition published by the Whitman Publishing Co. circa 1920—an edition that was considerably abridged, though no acknowledgment of this was made in the volume itself—and an appendix provides full information on the changes made for this later edition. Readers will thus be able to trace the ways in which the text was altered through abridgement. Also included as an appendix to the volume are cover illustrations and advertisements from all three editions.
--This text refers to an alternate
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining story about adventures in America 100 years ago,
By
This review is from: The Erie Train Boy (Paperback)
Horatio Alger was one of America's most popular authors. He was born in 1832 and died in 1899. Over 250 million copies of his books were published. Horatio lived in poor parts of New York City and thus was able to write in detail about how the poor lived. His Rags-To-Riches stories excited the imaginations of the youth of the day. It is sad to see that books written for teenagers over a hundred years ago are now stored in the adult section of the library. The vocabulary is much richer than youth books being published today. When looking for Alger stories always try to get an unabridged version. But be warned, some of the Horatio Alger stories are not as good as this one. For example "A Rolling Stone" is very racist. The hero in the "The Erie Train Boy" is Fred Fenton, a hard working 17 year old boy. We first meet him on a train where he sells travelers food, magazines, and books. He is struggling to provide for his widowed mother and his younger brother. Early in the story they almost get kicked out of their apartment because they don't have enough money to pay the rent. It is such a contrast to see how times have changed. For example their rent back then was $10 a month, and they had very few possessions. Fred has a number of adventures in New York City. He also does some traveling, first going over to Niagara Falls, and then later up into Canada. At Niagara Falls Fred is suspected of being a thief, but is able to prove his innocence and help find the real crock. Later in the story he ends up working for a wealthy man and is entrusted with a mission to go into Canada to recover some stolen bonds. This is a fun book. It is very well written. My children kept asking me to read the book. If you want an entertaining story about life in America over a hundred years ago, this is a great book to buy.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Erie Train Boy,
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